Tuesday’s decision by City council to rename the Grandin neighbourhood The Gardens will reverberate for years in our community – especially for the next several months in the run-up to our next municipal election.
Some of the tension that showed around the council table and in the public gallery Tuesday is a matter of timing. Had council been in a position to act immediately following the announcement of the discovery of possible human remains at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the spring of 2021, this would likely never have been the fraught issue it is today.
But, unlike the school boards in Edmonton, Calgary and here in St. Albert, who were able to quickly and easily change their Grandin-named schools while Canada’s flag was still at half-mast over the Kamloops discovery, the City had no process to rename a street, let alone an entire subdivision, and had to spend more than two years creating the process we just went through, brought into motion last fall and culminating in Tuesday’s vote.
Interestingly, the Town of St. Albert was able to easily rename the former McKenney Avenue in honour of Sir Winston Churchill in 1965, transferring the McKenney name to its current location. To be fair, though, that was in an era where public expectations around consultation were different and public sentiment around the late British wartime leader was nearly unanimously positive.
Less so now – given the controversy elsewhere about Churchill-named assets, it could well be the next name before council under its new renaming policy.
The outpouring of opposition leading up to and at Tuesday’s decision has largely been focused on that policy and the renaming process – specifically, that the City’s consultation presented renaming as more of a foregone conclusion than an option.
Many speakers at Tuesday’s council meeting pointed to all the good done by Bishop Grandin in his long life of service – a sentiment echoed by several councillors in their remarks. But they also noted that his good deeds and intentions were overshadowed by the impact of the residential school system he fostered.
In a similar way, the valid arguments for renaming Grandin are overshadowed in the minds of many by the flaws in the process it took to get there. The fact that just 50 people can start the ball rolling to rename any municipal asset, compared to thousands required to force a public vote on an issue under the Municipal Government Act, was highlighted as one of those flaws.
Others called attention to the drawn-out nature of the renaming saga (nearly four years from the first calls to re-name Grandin to this week’s vote), and more noted the discounting of any call to keep the name throughout the process.
Good governance requires not just that a process leading to change is fair, but that it is seen to be fair by as many people as possible – and especially by those most affected by the change. In this case, that’s the more than 200 local residents who will be forced to go through the rigmarole of changing their address in dozens of different ways, from land titles to bank statements. It will be inconvenient and jarring to them, especially those who have lived their entire life there.
There are also more residents and businesses whose place names, derived from the now-renamed neighbourhood of Grandin, who will likely face pressure to follow suit with name changes (and will bear a much greater cost to do so).
We suspect this is what led Mayor Cathy Heron to apologize for the drawn-out process in her remarks shortly before calling for the vote – and we think she was right to do so.
Tuesday might mark the end of the Grandin debate – or perhaps not, if legal action follows – but regardless, it shouldn’t be the end of the renaming debate. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, as the saying goes, and the flaws in the City’s renaming policy are now clearer.
The disappearance of the name Grandin and the rise of The Gardens doesn’t have to be the only outcome here. An improved process for the next time a renaming request comes forward would also be a worthy legacy.
