The word on the street

The city is set to rename one of its main thoroughfares. But some question if it should move forward

Dundas Street snakes erratically across Toronto for 23 kilometres, starting at Kingston Road in the east, past family diners and global retailers, humble homes and graceful mansions, over the DVP and under Hwy 427 to Mississauga. It moors downtown Toronto, passing through Chinatown, and behind the curved twin towers of city hall, where two years ago, council voted to rename the thoroughfare.

Renaming it was a controversial decision, stoked by fiery international debate over the role played in upholding the slave trade by Henry Dundas, the influential 18th-century Scottish politician for whom the street is named.

Toronto’s mayoral byelection has nudged the issue back on stage, with some candidates saying they’ll rescind or review the decision, even as a city committee prepares to publicize a shortlist of new street names this summer.

The controversy over Dundas has raised concerns not just over who we choose to honour in our streets and our monuments, but how those decisions get made and who gets to make them.

It’s part of a cultural reckoning taking place in cities around the globe.

Critics of the name-change point to a disputed historical record about Dundas and the lack of broad community consultation underpinning the decision.

For some, the focus is on the cost and inconvenience — Dundas is home to more than 97,000 residents and 4,500 businesses, 60 with Dundas in the name. The latest estimate for the name change is $8.6 million, a high price to pay, say opponents, as Toronto struggles to maintain its roads, libraries, pools, programs and services.

Chanelle Ramsubick, co-owner of Ode, a boutique hostel on Dundas Street West, agrees with the intention behind renaming Dundas but says she can’t support the price.

“In a perfect world, if we could rename the street at minimal cost, I would be 100 per cent behind it,” says Ramsubick. “But given the proposed cost, instead of spending millions on the renaming, this money would be better spent actually investing in Black businesses and communities.”

Those who support the name change argue that focusing on cost misses the point — and Dundas’s history is troubling enough. They see renaming as an opportunity to redress the hurt caused by an official tribute to someone complicit in the slave trade and to finally honour those who for too long have been excluded from commemoration, and the process of deciding who to commemorate.

“Black and Indigenous and racialized people have been inconvenienced for centuries,” says Rick Monture, a member of the Mohawk nation, Turtle clan, from Six Nations of the Grand River Territory, and an associate professor at the McMaster Indigenous Research Institute.

The expense, he points out, represents a fraction of the city’s annual operating budget, a cost and inconvenience that cannot be compared to the atrocities of the slave trade that Dundas upheld in his lifetime.

“So this is a small price to pay, really, if that’s the way people want to go on this issue, to rename it … to spend that money.”

For Melanie Newton, co-chair of the city’s community advisory committee on renaming Dundas, and an associate professor of history at the University of Toronto, the answer is clear.

“Renaming the street makes a statement about whose lives we actually value, whose ancestors we value.”

How did it start?

It’s fair to say that until the summer of 2020, few people in Toronto knew who Dundas Street was named after.

A campaign against a prominent statue of Dundas in Edinburgh had been building in Scotland since about 2015, led by a Black professor. That campaign was brought to Toronto in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police. The murder was caught on video and led to worldwide protests against anti-Black racism.

Toronto resident and artist Andrew Lochhead was aware of the Dundas controversy in Scotland and started a petition that summer calling on Toronto city council to rename Dundas Street.

The petition quickly garnered 14,000 signatures and was presented to city council in June 2020.

“Everyone had seen the horrific video of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police,” says Lochhead.

“The Dundas petition offered people a way to be together, to be in solidarity, at a time when being in the streets was not always an option for everyone, given the global health crisis,” he says.

“Renaming Dundas felt and feels like a novel and tangible first step.”

It’s too late to go back to the days when few people knew or cared about who Dundas was named after, Lochhead believes.

“This is one of the ways that power reproduces itself uncritically — forgetting the origins of our place names or the stories behind the monuments we create. That’s the trick of power — that it becomes invisible, it becomes normalized, and part of the background of a larger built environment.”

The protests that summer helped push Toronto Metropolitan University to change its namesake from Egerton Ryerson, who was instrumental in the design of Canada’s Indian Residential school system.

TMU president Mohamed Lachemi says the renaming has been a success, unifying the university community while aligning it with the institution’s long held values and aspirations.

“For many members of our community, there was a sense of redress and a restored sense of confidence in the responsiveness of our institution to members of our community,” says Lachemi, adding that people adapted quickly to the name change.

As part of its research into whether to rename Dundas, Toronto city staff reviewed more than 400 other cases, mostly in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K.

Reactions varied widely. In some cases, decisions against renaming were made based on cost or because the identity of the person the asset was named after had largely been forgotten.

The review found that statues of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, whose government founded the Indian Residential Schools, were toppled or removed in Montreal, Regina, Charlottetown, and Hamilton. Victoria spent $30,000 to remove a Macdonald statue in front of city hall in 2018 as a gesture toward reconciliation.

Mississauga council voted unanimously in January 2022 to stop studying whether to rename the Dundas Street in their municipality. The motion, moved by Coun. Carolyn Parrish, cited potential costs and disruption, the difficulty in determining the motives of historical figures and lack of public support for the proposal to rename the street.

Who was Henry Dundas?

Henry Dundas was born into an influential Scottish family in 1742 and became one of the most powerful politicians of his era. A friend and trusted lieutenant to British prime minister William Pitt, Dundas served as home secretary, secretary at war and lord of the admiralty and became the first Viscount Melville.

According to city staff, Dundas Street was named in 1793 by John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, who was appointed by Dundas. Simcoe also introduced legislation that year prohibiting the importation of slaves into Upper Canada.

Dundas is on the public record speaking against the slave trade.

But on an early April day in 1792, he stood in the British House of Commons to encourage fellow members to support a motion to “gradually” abolish the slave trade, which was then supplying tens of thousands of Africans each year to British Caribbean islands where they were routinely worked to death on sugar plantations. He succeeded.

Historians have long been parsing his motives.

A foundational source of information behind the city’s decision to rename Dundas Street was an academic paper by Stephen Mullen, which appeared in 2021 in the peer-reviewed Scottish Historical Review, called “Henry Dundas: A ‘great delayer’ of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.”

Mullen is a research associate in history at the University of Glasgow. He argued that Dundas added the word “gradual” to the motion to abolish the slave trade because he wanted to delay abolition as long as possible, to benefit his slaveowning friends and supporters on sugar plantations in British colonies.

Mullen also argued that Dundas prevented the passage of another abolition bill in 1796 by requiring Scottish MPs, whom he controlled, to vote against it.

Newton, an expert in Caribbean and Atlantic world history, says Mullen is right about the meaning and purpose of Dundas’s “gradual” abolition. The idea, she says, was to appease the public while giving slave traders a window of many years to ramp up the trade. The goal was to establish a slave population in the Caribbean large enough to reproduce a new generation of slaves without having to travel to Africa.

“We hear the term ‘gradual abolition’ now and think, oh, that’s an abolitionist position. It was

not. It was the position supported by slave owners and slave traders,” says Newton.

“It doesn’t mean that there aren’t other people involved,” says Newton. “In his position as minister of war and colonies, (Dundas) really pursued, with a quite incredible degree of singlemindedness, an expansionist, pro-slavery policy in the Americas.”

Dundas supporters argue that when he added the word “gradual” to the motion for abolition of the slave trade, he rendered it palatable to a larger number of MPs, thereby securing its success in the House of Commons in 1792.

It later died in the House of Lords. Writing in the journal Scottish Affairs, in May 2022, Angela McCarthy, a professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago, New Zealand, was critical of Mullen’s research. She argued that Dundas cannot solely be held accountable for the delay — there were numerous forces at work that made abolition unlikely, including fear that the ideals and violence of the French Revolution would take root in Britain.

McCarthy’s view is shared by Adam Hochschild, author of “Bury the Chains, Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves,” a book about the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.

“I don’t think Dundas’s adding the word ‘gradually’ or anything else he did had a particularly nefarious impact, because there were two obstacles to abolition,” Hochschild says in an interview. He cited a hostile House of Lords and Britain’s endless war with France in that period. “Wars are never good for progressive social movements.”

As a result of the campaign against Dundas, a new plaque was affixed to the statue in Edinburgh that was erected in his honour after his death.

The revised plaque reads in part: “Dedicated to the memory of the more than half a million Africans whose enslavement was a consequence of Henry Dundas’s actions.”

Sir Thomas Devine, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh and a leading expert in Scottish history, empire and slavery, says that laying the failure of the abolition of the British slave trade at the foot of a single person is ahistorical — the failure was due to reasons that were layered, nuanced and complex.

“Essentially, he’s been called a mass murderer,” says Devine. “On a public plaque in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. My single concern is that this is a conflict with historical truth as we know it. It’s a national dishonour.”

Descendants of Henry Dundas believe their ancestor has been unfairly charged. They are agitating to have the plaque in Edinburgh removed.

“This is not about racism, it’s about standing up for our family history to be accurately stated,” says Jennifer Dundas, a former CBC reporter, retired Alberta Crown prosecutor, and distant Dundas relative, who has spent two years researching the issue and protesting the changes made in Edinburgh and Toronto.

To Lochhead, the author of the Toronto petition, the academic argument has become a distraction. Dundas was, at the very least, a committed colonialist and imperialist.

The fact that few people in Toronto even knew who Dundas was before the petition doesn’t matter, Lochhead says. We know now.

“I think often history gets used as a distracting tactic in order to make people throw up their hands and say, well, this is complicated, this is just an argument among scholars, why should I care, or why should I pay attention,” says Lochhead.

“I think it’s very important to note that that is not the point. The point we should be focused on is the harm, that these are continued celebrations of white supremacy.”

A question of process

The city has also faced criticism of the consultation process that underpinned the decision to rename Dundas. The process raised the question of what the right approach should be when consulting on an issue that affects everyone but acutely affects certain minority groups.

From the outset, the city indicated it wanted to place Black and Indigenous communities at the centre of the consultations, but as part of a larger plan to reach out widely to experts and the broader public.

After receiving advice from QuakeLab, a company with extensive experience working with equity-deserving communities, consultations were held with 25 Black and Indigenous community leaders, representatives from Business Improvement Areas and Black business owners and entrepreneurs across Toronto.

QuakeLab founder and CEO Sharon Nyangweso says the city’s intention was to run a broad consultation and that the city was “very nervous” about agreeing to her recommendation to focus the discussion on 25 representatives.

“I run an equity justice inclusion firm and that is the lens with which we approach our work. Oftentimes that might not make the most sense to folks who are not using that lens,” says Nyangweso.

“When you are talking about equity, justice, inclusion and the course-correction of historical injustices, you cannot go to majority rule because that is what got us into this place in the first place,” she adds.

“If we were to put the question of ‘Should this be done?’ to the entire population, we would be essentially replicating the very same systems that put us in this moment to begin with.”

Lochhead supports the decision to centre Black and Indigenous voices.

“Those opinions ought to weight much more heavily,” he says.

He points to scholarly research in the U.S. that has established a correlation between monuments to Confederate generals and racially motivated hate crimes.

Wesley Crichlow, one of the experts consulted by the city on the renaming issue, agrees with the path the consultations took. He believes “colonizers” should not be part of the renaming discussion at all.

“Colonizers make the colonized doubt themselves and it forces you into this place of having to constantly prove yourself to the oppressor. The oppressor, the colonizer, they never have to prove themselves. They are always right: this is what we call plantation politics,” says Crichlow, a critical race decoloniality intersectional theorist at the Ontario Tech University.

He believes a national decolonizing monuments and renaming committee should be struck to come up with guidelines for the practice.

Times are changing

Naming civic assets has always been an inherently political process, says Steven High, a professor at Concordia University and president of the Canadian Historical Association.

He points to Montreal, where he lives, as an example.

“After the Quiet Revolution, the government really instituted a process of renaming many, many, streets and parks that were once English place names, to French place names. So I think it does reflect sort of wider debates about whose country this is.”

In 2019, Montreal’s Amherst Street was renamed Atateken Street, a Mohawk word meaning brothers and sisters.

The stated reason was that Amherst was a British general who advocated using blankets contaminated with smallpox to infect people in Indigenous communities, in an effort to quell rebellions.

Amherst also negotiated the capitulation of Montreal and New France in 1760.

“In some ways I think what we’re seeing is some belated demographic changes amongst professional historians. We’re seeing the first real wave of Indigenous and Black historians into the professoriate. That changes the conversation,” says High.

“A wider diversity leads to new kinds of questions, new kinds of methods.

“I think we’re having important conversations. And they’re not easy conversations, but I think they are long overdue.”

Members of racialized groups do not see themselves reflected in the built environment around them, notes Lauren Beck, an associate professor at Mount Allison University, and author of the recently published “Canada’s Place Names and How to Change Them.”

On average, about 85 per cent of places named after people in Canada are named after men, white men in particular.

She says both the past and the present have to be considered when naming civic assets, and the impact of names on our neighbours.

“If you keep Dundas around, does that make the Black population feel disrespected somehow? Does it retraumatize certain members of the Black population? I think these are important questions if we all come from a community where we care about our neighbours. We need to care about everybody’s different experience of place names.”

The current list of proposed new names, chosen by a community advisory committee with strong representation from the city’s Black and Indigenous communities, is based on celebrating the stories of Black Torontonians, according to the city.

There may be Black people who won’t care if Dundas is renamed, Nyangweso, of QuakeLab says, but she believes renaming Dundas will have a profound impact.

“I do think there is pride in being recognized. We not only exist, but we are here and we are important and we are part of the collective history.”