HALIFAX—The committee tasked with deciding the fate of a statue commemorating the city’s controversial founder is starting public consultation next month.

The Task Force on the Commemoration of Edward Cornwallis and the Recognition and Commemoration of Indigenous History held its third meeting in public Monday night at the Mi’kmaw Native Friendship Centre on Gottingen St.

The task force — struck to address concerns over the statue of Edward Cornwallis in a south-end Halifax park — last met publicly in January and has since held three more meetings behind closed doors. Overviews for each of those meetings, held in February, March and April, are posted online.

“Things are going very well,” task force co-chair Monica MacDonald said after Monday’s meeting.

“We’re having excellent discussions and there’s a lot of good will and consensus around the table already.”

Co-chair Chief Rod Googoo said that while the committee has heard criticism for moving too slowly, there has been progress.

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“We’re quite confident that we’ll meet our mandate when our term is up,” Googoo said.

Cornwallis, the city’s so-called founder, was sent to Nova Scotia to be governor in 1749 and settled what would become Halifax — known to Mi’kmaq as K’jipuktuk, meaning Great Harbour. That year, Cornwallis issued a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaw men, women and children in response to a raid on a sawmill in what would become Dartmouth.

The statue in Cornwallis Park was put up in the mid-1900s. Over the last few decades, public debate over the suitability of commemorating Cornwallis has slowly intensified.

In summer 2017, tensions culminated in a protest that saw the statue temporarily draped in a black tarp by order of Mayor Mike Savage. A few months later, council voted to work with the Assembly of Nova Scotia Mi’kmaq Chiefs (ANSMC) to strike a committee to examine the commemoration of Cornwallis and of Indigenous history in the region.

An issue with one of the appointed committee members delayed that process, and in January 2018 the ANSMC pulled out, citing delays and demanding that the statue be torn down immediately.

On Jan. 30, 2018, council voted to remove the statue temporarily, placing it in storage, and to try to rekindle the committee.

The statue was removed on a the next day. Dozens of people gathered to watch as the bronze statue was lifted off its granite pedestal and taken away on the bed of a truck. The statue has been in municipal storage ever since.

The task force was originally struck as a committee of council, but council voted to turn it into an external task force in December, meaning it doesn’t have to follow the rules of municipal committees and it’s now an equal partnership between Halifax and the ANSMC.

The task force holds three types of meetings: public presentation-style sessions like the one Monday night, private meetings like those held over the past three months, and soon, public consultation sessions.

MacDonald said there will be two phases of public engagement, with the first coming in June.

The task force will be looking for ideas from the public about what they’d like to see happen to the statue, along with Cornwallis’s name on the park and street, and how Indigenous history should be commemorated.

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The second phase will come this fall, with a collaborative process working on those ideas.

On Monday night, the task force heard presentations from municipal staffers to give the members a framework for those ideas.

Gayle MacLean, civic address co-ordinator, told the task force about the municipality’s asset-naming and street-naming policies, where half of new street names come from a list of names submitted by the public.

“You can imagine, as a British colonial town, a lot of our assets are named for British gentlemen and it doesn’t really reflect the multicultural nature of our municipality,” MacLean said.

“Part of this policy and part of our education piece and letting people know about this policy is really to encourage diversity, particularly to reflect all of the different people that live in the municipality.”

Kellie McIvor, cultural asset manager, talked to the task force about the municipality’s collection of public art, totalling 250 pieces, and the way it commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion at Fort Needham Park.

McIvor told the task force about the deaccession process, where municipal cultural assets are permanently removed from the collection. Removing an asset from public view, as was done with the statue, doesn’t constitute deaccession, since it’s still in the care and control of the municipality.

Cheryl Copage-Gehue, the municipality’s Indigenous community engagement advisor, talked about the legacy room at Halifax City Hall and how the municipality has been able to commemorate Indigenous culture at city hall.

And heritage planner Seamus McGreal told the task force about the planned Barrington South Heritage district, which encompasses Cornwallis Park where the statue stood.

McGreal said that while the heritage district would seek to maintain the grid of paths in the park, renaming the park itself isn’t considered a “significant” change and would not be a problem.

These presentations were designed to guide the task force in its recommendations — both around Cornwallis and Indigenous culture.

“We’re certainly not limited to these types of things, but they’re great to give us some ideas of where we can go forward because the recognition and commemoration of Indigenous history is a big part of what we’re going to do,” MacDonald said.

She said more details on the public consultation sessions in June will be released soon.

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