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Renaming it is equally hollow. Is it meant to be a political statement that slavery is bad mkay? This isn't Missouri, that's not a controversial idea in Canadian society and the person whom Dundas is named after is not someone who is a relevant modern political figure. If the goal is to erase the name of every problematic individual (or any a*hole for that matter), we're going to be very busy and end up with a lot of Maple Streets and Blueberry Lanes.

Those looking to be professionally offended won't stop here.
 
I would be okay with naming any street after Bill Davis, but not Doug Ford. Even if both were Progressive Conservative Premiers.
 
afransen said:
Renaming it is equally hollow. Is it meant to be a political statement that slavery is bad mkay? This isn't Missouri, that's not a controversial idea in Canadian society and the person whom Dundas is named after is not someone who is a relevant modern political figure. If the goal is to erase the name of every problematic individual (or any a*hole for that matter), we're going to be very busy and end up with a lot of Maple Streets and Blueberry Lanes.

Those looking to be professionally offended won't stop here.
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Maybe not - even the French had been doing this sort of thing:


Like I have said, this sort of thing is nothing new - it is part of making history. The only real issue here the level of disruption and cost - not because of some special worth. Quite frankly, we should be giving more prominence to our own locals (like how about giving Fredrick Banting something more prominent) instead of some buddy of our colonial overlord (who ironically had a street of far less prominence). How about a street for say Vera Peters, a local doctor that challenged conventional wisdom around breast cancer and help changed lives for millions of women? We should be naming our most prominent streets and public spaces after our own individuals of merit, instead of tucking them out to some no name cul-de-sac out in the burbs - if that.

AoD
 
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zang said:
A lot past stuff named in honour of others is often politically motivated or cronyism anyway. So often though, if it’s tied to someone with a terrible past, it’s jumped on by the anti-“cancel culture” crowd with the fervour of a rabid mastiff on a gerbil.
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Ok, and 'line of the day' goes to @zang!

LOL
 
zang said:
Yeah, and funny how so many are willing to believe a reddit post, over words of an actual historian (also linked to in the same thread):

www.opendemocracy.net

Henry Dundas, empire and genocide

Suggesting that ‘the uncrowned King of Scotland’ worked to end slavery, rather to entrench it, is irresponsible revisionism and bad history.
www.opendemocracy.net www.opendemocracy.net

About the author, btw:
Click to expand...
Yeah I saw that, and it's an article that doesn't cite its sources either. Nothing in that article points to Dundas purposefully prolonging slavery, and instead it self-indulges on semantics.

Northern Light said:
But I am concerned that this is an action that produces no tangible gain for those truly disenfranchised in our society; be that for reasons of prejudice (current, or past) or other reasons of injustice or unfairness.
I'm concerned this is 6M not achieving some measure of justice, I'm more concerned that this could be 260M by the time we've expunged every questionable name.
Lest you feel my fear is misplaced............I quote from the article you cite above:

View attachment 331101

That certainly sounds like a call to continue down this road as far as the eye can see.

****

As someone with a degree in history, I've never understood the obsession of others with the same.
History is not where we live. The present is where we live, the future is where we're going.

Knowledge of history is important to inform the best plans and actions in the present, to deliver a better future.
But it is not alive. Yes, we have legacy institutions/names/buildings...........but these have already evolved to have other purposes and meanings.
To most Dundas station is/was that awfully tiled subway station, the Eaton Centre; and Ryerson University.

It didn't hold any other meaning here, if it ever did.
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The quote from the article above betrays its slant- that it had a presupposition settled beforehand, and that the evidence arranged is beaten and bent into shape to push those claims.

For these types of people, symbolism >>> actual equality. That they so aggressively support these measures typically indicates that they don't really care about equality, they care about symbolism and the social currency that it generates.

Like you said, those 6 million dollars could be spent on housing for the precariously housed, or actual PPE and supportive measures for the thousands of black and disadvantaged workers across this city. Renaming Dundas Street *might* make a privileged professor feel a little bit more superior to the ignorant fools around her, but it won't help a personal care worker who has to travel on a bus everyday to her clients, as I have witnessed.

Again in the end, this is a political parlor trick in its most basic sense. Normal people make do, Dundas has no meaning to them.
 
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AlvinofDiaspar said:
Honestly I don't care that much either way - and I find the gesture somewhat hollow and provides an easy out. I find those who are ardently pro (and con) renaming more similar to each other than anything else. Make no mistake though, we rename things all the time and we hardly bat an eye (just think Toronto used to be called York).

Anyways, this is the city that gave us "Avenue Road", so bad naming is par the course.

AoD
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I like Avenue Rd. There is one in London UK as well.
 
UrbanFervour said:
I like Avenue Rd. There is one in London UK as well.
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It rolls off the tongue well, and I guess it was probably a British import.

That being said, 'Avenue' also refers to the rows of trees lining a path, so it's not all self-referential. Perhaps it was at some point descriptive?
 
I think "Dundas" as a place name that means something locally, to Torontonians and that very few people knew it had anything to do with a 200-year old corpse until about 5 minutes ago.

If Toronto is going to cancel all its Anglo street names (there will have to be more... King, Queen, Church, University, Victoria, Elizabeth, Frederick, George - to name only a few potentially "problematic" names) the replacements should be chosen by local First Nations in consultation with the City. Anything else is just further projection of a colonialist narrative on their traditional land / geography.
 
afransen said:
Renaming it is equally hollow. Is it meant to be a political statement that slavery is bad mkay? This isn't Missouri, that's not a controversial idea in Canadian society and the person whom Dundas is named after is not someone who is a relevant modern political figure. If the goal is to erase the name of every problematic individual (or any a*hole for that matter), we're going to be very busy and end up with a lot of Maple Streets and Blueberry Lanes.

Those looking to be professionally offended won't stop here.
Click to expand...
The slippery slope whataboutism is just that.

Sooner or later, others may change too. But it doesn't change the fact that enough people wanted *Dundas* changed in this moment. Obviously enough that City Council took it seriously. Any idea that (democratically, I might add) comes to the fore and is taken up seriously at council has political and social validity. You may not like it, but calling people "professionally offended" shows a preexistent anti-progress bias.

Learning and growth are the name of the game here. Evolve.
 
Perhaps one day in the future when society has realized the criminality of first-past-the-post voting, roads named after the long-dead Justin Trudeau will be renamed and his statues torn down because of his complicity in prolonging first-past-the-post voting.
 
zang said:
The slippery slope whataboutism is just that.

Sooner or later, others may change too. But it doesn't change the fact that enough people wanted *Dundas* changed in this moment. Obviously enough that City Council took it seriously. Any idea that (democratically, I might add) comes to the fore and is taken up seriously at council has political and social validity. You may not like it, but calling people "professionally offended" shows a preexistent anti-progress bias.

Learning and growth are the name of the game here. Evolve.
Click to expand...

To be fair though, it was 14,000 people in a city of 3 million: 0.005% is not a democratic majority.
 
jje1000 said:
Perhaps one day in the future when society has realized the criminality of first-past-the-post voting, roads named after the long-dead Justin Trudeau will be renamed and his statues torn down because of his complicity in prolonging first-past-the-post voting.
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We'll all be cancelled for eating factory farmed meat and driving petroleum-fuelled cars.
 
jje1000 said:
Yeah I saw that, and it's an article that doesn't cite its sources either.
Click to expand...

Compared to the sources cited by the reddit poster?! But it's also not a scholarly article. It is however, by a history professor with a specialty in African slavery. Unless said reddit poster comes out with something equally credible, and goes beyond simply paraphrasing Wikipedia, I think we can defer to authority here.

jje1000 said:
Nothing in that article points to Dundas purposefully prolonging slavery, and instead it self-indulges on semantics.
Click to expand...
Nothing that you read, apparently:

"Meanwhile, in Grenada, Dundas’s forces brutally suppressed an abolitionist uprising that lasted for eighteen months from 1795-96, led by enslaved people and a free man of colour named Julien Fédon."

"Abolitionists certainly did not see Dundas as one of them; in 1806 abolitionist Charles James Fox described Dundas as the man “who took a lead in constantly opposing our attempts at a total and immediate abolition” even though he knew the trade “to be adverse to policy, humanity, and justice.”
 
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