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The university senate predictably folded like a $3 suitcase. It struck a special committee to go through the motions, which played its role as scripted, rejecting the statue plan altogether. Frightened puppets of the cowardice and dishonesty of the plaintiff groups, they also required the removal of the Macdonald statue.

The petition of the initial opponents of the plan claimed that “It is politically insensitive, (if not offensive) to celebrate and memorialize all Canadian prime ministers in the form of bronze statues on land that traditionally belongs to the … Anishnaube and Haudenausaunee peoples (in a) large-scale public art installation that will … transform the cultural landscape of the Waterloo campus. … It flies in the face of what contemporary universities are about.”

This piercing tocsin was the product of petitioner Jonathan Finn, a Laurier professor, and the sentiment has prevailed. If it is inappropriate to put statues of all the leaders in the history of the only trans-continental, bicultural, parliamentary confederation in history, at a university named after one of the greatest of those leaders, it must be equally so to have statues of many of them around the Parliament buildings of Canada and some of the provinces also. One of Canada’s greatest virtues and strengths is that it has had the benefit of many of the best British and French traditions and has, partly for that reason, attracted people from everywhere and welcomed them comparatively generously.