Media and local residents lambaste Stephen Harper for offering financial support to erect a 10-storey statue overlooking the shore of a national park

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A plan to erect a 10-storey statue in a national park on one of Canada’s most scenic shorelines has prompted outrage and sparked a growing political row as the country heads towards a general election this fall.

The statue of Mother Canada – a cloaked female figure with her arms outstretched towards the Atlantic Ocean – is intended to honour the country’s soldiers who died overseas.

But growing anger over the plan has made it a new focus of opposition to the increasingly unpopular government of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper.

The proposed monument is an awkwardly remodelled, vastly upscaled version of an earlier statue, known as Canada Bereft, which adorns the memorial to the country’s first world war dead near Vimy, France.

The design has been widely lambasted both for its design and its proposed location in Cape Breton Highlands national park. In an editorial this week, the Globe and Mail newspaper described it as “offensively tasteless” and a “hubristically arrogant act of arrogant unoriginality”.

“The bigger-is-better approach to art is best left to Stalinist tyrants, theme park entrepreneurs and insecure municipalities hoping to waylay bored drive-by tourists,” the paper wrote.

The project is the brainchild of Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani, who was inspired after a chance visit to a Canadian war cemetery in Italy and set up the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation to realise the plan.



The initiative gained early and enthusiastic support from the Harper government, which has donated the necessary public land and $100,000 from its parks budget to help erect the colossus on a rocky spit along the Cabot Trail, eastern Canada’s most popular scenic drive. The foundation hopes to raise $25m to complete the project, in part by selling corporate sponsorships that will be prominently acknowledged on the site.

Growing criticism in the nation’s media has helped swing opinion against the grandiose scheme, but opponents fear the fate of rocky, windswept Green Cove is already sealed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Green Cove in Cape Breton Highlands national park in Canada. Photograph: Marko Stavric Photography/Getty Images

“We’re pleased with the momentum,” said Sean Howard, spokesman for Friends of Green Cove. “What we don’t know is how much time we have. Our worst fear is that they’re going to send the bulldozers in before the federal election this fall.”

“But until Green Cove becomes concrete cove,” Howard added, “we’re going to keep fighting.”

Trigiani’s Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation and the government hope to have the colossus up by 2017, the sesquicentennial of Canadian Confederation and also the centennial of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

In addition to the statue, the monument will include such amenities as the Commemorative Ring of True Patriot Love, the True North Commemorative Square and the With Glowing Hearts National Sanctuary – all named after the English lyrics of O Canada, the national anthem.

Howard accuses the monument of a “kitsch glorification of war”, but local opponents are also angered by the speed with which the project is to be executed.

“You have to have a very strange process to get through such a strange product,” Howard said. “It’s hair-raising how fast they want to do it.”

“A significant majority of those who are engaged with the issue believe that the statue either shouldn’t be built anywhere or for sure shouldn’t be plopped down in a beautiful national park,” Howard said.

A spokesman for Parks Canada declined to answer questions about the monument, describing it as “privately funded” and referring inquiries to the Never Forgotten Foundation. Trigiani, president of the foundation, declined a request to be interviewed.

With criticism of the monument going national, the most articulate opponent remains Cape Breton resident Valerie Bird, 93, who served as an auxilliary with the royal air force in the Middle East during the second world war. “It is vulgar and ostentatious,” she said. “It certainly doesn’t belong in a national park, and I don’t think its going to do a darn thing for veterans.”

“I think the idea of this horrible thing offends veterans,” she added. “I find it difficult to find words. This is a monstrosity.”