Daniel Francis

Reading the National Narrative

Edifice Complex

Mar 19, 2015

Sometimes events in the nation's capital can take a while to penetrate the consciousness of those of us living on the margins so I was a little slow to pick up on the controversy in Ottawa about the Harper government's imposition of a giant new monument dedicated to "the victims of communism."

The project has many strikes against it: the location of the monument, its design, its rationale. But of course it has one big thing going for it; it conforms to the government's political agenda.

Over on Active History, historian Gregor Kranjc has ably dissected the arguments.