The memorial is being financed with money from a fund of up to 25 million Canadian dollars that the government established in 2018 as it settled class-action lawsuits brought by members of the military and the Mounties as well as other public servants who were harassed, discriminated against or fired because of their sexual orientation.

The program was almost as bizarre as it was hurtful. It emerged in the 1950s out of general Cold War paranoia. The Mounties set up a special unit on the theory that gay men and lesbians might be blackmailed by the Soviet Union into turning over government secrets. Officers conducted surveillance of gay bars across Canada and used threats and intimidation to get the names of gay men and lesbians in government. The police force even worked with a psychologist in a failed, almost farcical attempt to build a homosexuality detector known as “the fruit machine.”

There is no recorded case of any government employees, Mounties or military members having turned over anything to the Soviets out of fear that their sexual orientation would be exposed.

I went to the future site of the memorial with Michelle Douglas. She is now the executive director of the LGBT Purge Fund, but she is perhaps better known as the woman who fought back and ended the purge.