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A memorial’s cost wouldn’t prevent Stalin, Xi or any of the Kims from building it. But then, Stalin loved throwing money at big useless projects. China’s Xi unveiled a $16-million gold and jade statue of Mao just two years ago. As for Kim Il-Sung, by the time his body finally lay under a Worker’s Party flag, a glass case and the roof of a $100-million renovated mausoleum, North Koreans were so poor that many lived off and died on tree bark. The country that couldn’t afford rice could afford electricity even less — still, the bronzed Kims stayed lit. (One must never leave the Sun of the Communist Future in the dark.) While famine fears loom over them this summer, North Koreans donated copper to a “loyalty fund” that turned out to be a statue fund.

Ostentatious monuments have mostly fallen out of fashion in the non-communist world, and certainly in Canada. So it’s bizarre that the government would back the deployment of this brutalist geometry, which could cost Canadians $3 million dollars and devour public real estate worth up to $30 million. This type of spending is typically the habit of governments that enjoy driving tanks through public squares, not governments that like to talk about balancing budgets.

Then there’s the name. It escapes the attention of no one capable of telling one word apart from another word that the Memorial to the Victims of Communism isn’t called the Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism, nor for the Victims of Violent Despotism, nor for the Victims of Very Bad Governance. Canada may be taking on the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the dictatorship end of the phrase isn’t its primary concern. Now, Europe has plenty of uncontroversial memorials named for the victims of fascism, but they’re generally found in places that actually were victimized by fascism.