Churchill statue is Jason Kenney's way of declaring what we must celebrate, warts be damned

So Calgary has a lasting monument to Sir Winston Churchill, that revered wartime statesman and guardian of Western democracy. While he's a controversial figure, it would take a sustained campaign to reverse this decision and erase Churchill from his place of pride on the civic landscape.

In fact, the tribute has stood proudly in Calgary since 1970. It's in the northwest community of Brentwood. We're talking about Sir Winston Churchill High School.

For some Churchill fans, that's not enough. One of them, Premier Jason Kenney, has announced that an eight-foot bronze statue of the former British prime minister will be erected next spring on the lawn of downtown's McDougall Centre, home to the premier's southern Alberta offices. 

It's fully financed through more than $300,000 in donations by the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary, a group led by Mark Milke, a top policy aide to Kenney in the last election and a former staffer in his pro-oil war room, the Canadian Energy Centre.

A Churchill statue? How retro

In announcing the statue, Kenney incorrectly stated that "Calgary is one of the only cities in Canada not to have a Sir Winston Churchill statue." Bronze tributes to the brandy-swilling bulldog may stand in Edmonton, Halifax and Toronto, and public busts in Quebec City and St. John's, but statueless Calgary has company with Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, anglophile Victoria and several other of our dominion's urban centres.

Of course, myriad Canadian cities have a school or street or park bearing Churchill's name, most established in the decades after his death, the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. As much as it would be an overt choice for any government, local or provincial, to replace any of those memorializations, it's an overt choice to establish a new one now — particularly in 2022.

Society approaches history differently now than we did when the Churchill Drives and parks and busts rose last century. Alongside the important contributions of such pivotal figures, we also consider their flaws and prejudices. 

So, yes Winston Churchill led Britain through the Nazi onslaught and he helped lead the Allies to defeat the imperial ambitions of Adolf Hitler, one of history's most menacing figures. He was a soaring rhetorician and parliamentarian, two qualities Alberta's outgoing premier certainly reveres.

It won't take a prescriptive revamp of Alberta's social studies curriculum to ensure that students know who Churchill was.

"At the same time, there's also no question he was a racist and a white supremacist, and that's not merely speaking through hindsight," University of Calgary historian John Ferris told the Calgary Eyeopener on Friday. "In the 1930s, senior Conservative politicians also thought Churchill was unusually racist by the standards of their time."

In 1937, Churchill said he didn't believe Indigenous peoples of the United States or Australia were wronged "by the fact that stronger race, a higher-grade race… has come in and taken their place." Because of such statements, his statue in Edmonton was defaced with red paint last year, and in London protestors added "was a racist" to Churchill's monument in Parliament Square in 2020.

Days after Kenney's government celebrated Alberta's Indian and Pakistani communities by marking the 75th anniversary of their home countries' independence, he likely rankled more than a few of them by pledging to venerate the colonialist leader who opposed Mahatma Gandhi and his cause, and whose government has been blamed for not preventing the 1943 Bengal famine that killed millions on the subcontinent.

"To glorify that kind of person today, I don't think it gives any good message," says Asjad Bukhari, a founder of the Pakistani Canadian Cultural Association of Alberta. People in South Asian communities will not feel comfort seeing this statue downtown, especially attached to a government building, he says.

Bukhari remembers talking to his father, who lived through the partition of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s, about Churchill's legacy; he was told that compared to Hitler, Churchill was certainly a better option, or a "lesser evil."

Contemporary leaders aren't in the habit of erecting monuments to lesser evils, but Kenney doesn't see this opportunity that way. While he's acknowledged Churchill is not without his flaws, he has more emphatically deplored activism that's aimed at vandalizing or erasing the legacy of now-controversial icons like Churchill or founding Canadian prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald, even offering that Alberta would gladly take the Macdonald statue activists toppled in Montreal. 

If there's a current running through how society is evolving to consider statues and monuments and history, Kenney wants to drop a giant bronze boulder into that stream in hopes of slowing its flow. His staff's Twitter account was eager this week to lash out at critics of the statue, calling them "nattering nabobs" who are either "vandals of history or ignorant to it."

Duly erected leaders

It's not clear Kenney would so readily embrace a statue of Canada's leader during the Second World War, Mackenzie King, given what's now known about his government's views towards Jewish refugees.

Or perhaps this conservative premier would be reluctant to so lionize a Liberal prime minister. And perhaps he realizes that a conservative dedicating a statue for a fellow conservative would give, say, a future NDP premier ready licence to choose government land for a statue of the father of medicare, Tommy Douglas, despite all his flaws. Winners get to write history, after all.

There's one statue currently at McDougall Centre, and it already pays tribute to Second World War heroism: the Airman Memorial.

Perhaps there's room at or near the Calgary school already bearing Churchill's name for his namesake society to install its statue; but to do that, Kenney and Milke would need to get buy-in from the school board or city hall, and they'd no doubt have to weigh the entire historical record.

It's more convenient for Kenney to do it on his own government's literal turf, to buff Churchill's legacy and his own.