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Now, to be fair, the prime minister doesn’t seem to have uttered a single word about the thing. But the narrative can easily survive such minor details. The minister responsible for Parks Canada, Leona Aglukkaq, has called it a “wonderful initiative.” Parks Canada has chipped in $100,000. And, well, there you have it. This “Dollywood-level grotesquerie,” this “kitsch glorification of war,” this “brutal megalith” reflective of a “bigger-is-better approach to art (that) is best left to Stalinist tyrants,” as some commentators have called it, is at its root a Harperian monstrosity. Not all of the commentary has been like that, but a lot of it has; and outside of Cape Breton, it’s been nearly uniformly and quite spectacularly negative.

I’m not a fan of the project as a whole. I share many of the aesthetic and philosophical objections my colleague Colby Cosh raised in a terrific and hilarious column in these pages last week: this statue-woman is all out of scale with the one at Vimy that it evokes — and so large, Cosh plausibly suggests, that even the United States — land of Mount Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty — would not nowadays tolerate it.

Features like the “Commemorative Ring of True Patriot Love” and “With Glowing Hearts National Sanctuary” are cringeworthy, as is talk of a gift shop and restaurants. Even if this were a plausible economic development project for struggling Cape Breton, economic development isn’t a terrific justification for honouring the fallen.