Like a bad B-movie monster that just won’t die, a Toronto businessman’s plan to erect the gargantuan eyesore of a 24-metre-high statue on the pristine, pink coastal rocks of Green Cove, Cape Breton continues to have a pulse.
Yes, the ghost of Mother Canada apparently still stalks Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
As SaltWire’s Andrea Gunn reported this week, the Never Forgotten National Memorial (NFNM) foundation recently mailed out more than 1,000 cheesy Valentine’s packages — including stickers, cheap chocolates and a Beatles’ P.S. I Love You CD-R — to supporters across Canada and overseas, urging them to pressure elected officials to force Parks Canada back to the bargaining table.
Parks Canada dropped out of the project in February 2016, saying too many outstanding issues remained to meet a mid-2017 completion date.
More tellingly, pulling the plug came mere months after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals defeated former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives in the fall 2015 federal election. The Tories, including current leadership hopeful Peter MacKay, had been big supporters of Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani’s dream to build a towering, Vimy Ridge-inspired Mother Canada statue — arms outstretched towards Europe — at Green Cove beside the Cabot Trail.
The memorial was, and is, being promoted as a way to honour Canada’s war dead, wherever they may lie.
Under the Harper regime, Parks Canada — despite its mandate to protect Canada’s natural heritage — had been NFNM’s active partner and in 2013 donated $100,000 of public funds toward the proposed $25-million project.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a memorial to Canada’s war dead who never came home. But Trigiani’s obsession to plant his giant statue on a pristine patch of land where it’s clearly not wanted — at the very least, not by a sizable number of folks — frankly seems an odd way to honour anyone.
But the plan, touted as being almost exclusively privately funded, provoked a backlash.
Dozens of former Parks Canada staff, angry their agency’s core mandate was being ignored, geologists fearful the project would destroy an important natural rock formation, along with thousands of Canadian citizens across the country, including the group Friends of Green Cove, criticized the project as completely inappropriate for that location.
To be sure, there were local supporters who saw the project as a boon for tourism to the area. The controversy split the community. People openly critical of the proposed memorial were reportedly jeered and shouted down at local meetings.
Meanwhile, an independent study found Green Cove of unique cultural and ecological significance to the Mi’kmaq.
Days before the project was derailed, officials with Toronto-based landscape architecture company LANDinc said the massive Mother Canada statue was not feasible at Green Cove. LANDinc had been initially hired to work on the memorial but apparently pulled out in 2012 over differences with Trigiani.
“Once he (Trigiani) had an image in his head, he didn’t want to move from it,” Patrick Morello, a partner with LANDinc, told CBC News in early February 2016.
So, here we are, four years later, and it seems Trigiani, who’s also NFNM’s president and CEO, remains as stubborn as ever.
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a memorial to Canada’s war dead who never came home.
But Trigiani’s obsession to plant his giant statue on a pristine patch of land where it’s clearly not wanted — at the very least, not by a sizable number of folks — frankly seems an odd way to honour anyone.
Instead of again ramping up public resentment and resistance by insisting on a big statue at Green Cove, the NFNM foundation would be smarter to try to find a location and design more widely acceptable.
