Toronto treibt hartnäckig eine rätselhafte Namensänderung für den Yonge-Dundas Square voran

It’s my councilor Chris Moise who is the main force behind “Sankofa”. He has been very belligerent in calling anybody who opposes this a racist and has said multiple times at council meetings that none of this would be an issue if the square wasn’t “named after a Caucasian man.”

I was talking with a friend recently about the divergent paths of Toronto and Montréal, and we both agreed that Montréal had firmer sense of identity and confidence in itself whereas Toronto has sort of vague aims of being a “global city”. It seems sort of incomprehensible to me that Toronto would have such a fragile and self-flagellating instinct to name maybe its most important public space after something that has zero relevance to its culture or history. Ten years ago it would have been completely unthinkable to rename Dundas Street, and yet here we are.

I do wonder if this will just be something we look back in vague embarrassment about ten years from now, a relic of a period of generalized western hysteria. But whatever change happens it is probably likely to stick out of inertia and the politics of it. It’s not some massive cost but the renaming is really money that is desperately needed elsewhere.

The reality is that as unpopular X or Y might be, when it comes to city politics it’s the people who obsessively care about things that move the needle. So we’re going to get Sankofa Square, and Dundas Street will eventually be renamed, and then further down the line it will be Wellington or Wellesley or Bathurst or Dufferin or King or Queen that gets renamed next. And people will mumble or grumble about it but the committed ideologues won’t care. It’s sort of alarming to me how easy it has been for them to outwardly lie about Ryerson and Dundas to achieve their goals, without getting even marginal pushback on it.