Churchill statue is Jason Kenney’s way of declaring what we must celebrate, warts be damned

So Calgary has a lasting monument to Sir Winston Churchill, that revered wartime statesman and guardian of Western democracy. While he’s a controversial figure, it would take a sustained campaign to reverse this decision and erase Churchill from his place of pride on the civic landscape.

In fact, the tribute has stood proudly in Calgary since 1970. It’s in the northwest community of Brentwood. We’re talking about Sir Winston Churchill High School.

For some Churchill fans, that’s not enough. One of them, Premier Jason Kenney, has announced that an eight-foot bronze statue of the former British prime minister will be erected next spring on the lawn of downtown’s McDougall Centre, home to the premier’s southern Alberta offices. 

It’s fully financed through more than $300,000 in donations by the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary, a group led by Mark Milke, a top policy aide to Kenney in the last election and a former staffer in his pro-oil war room, the Canadian Energy Centre.

A Churchill statue? How retro

In announcing the statue, Kenney incorrectly stated that “Calgary is one of the only cities in Canada not to have a Sir Winston Churchill statue.” Bronze tributes to the brandy-swilling bulldog may stand in Edmonton, Halifax and Toronto, and public busts in Quebec City and St. John’s, but statueless Calgary has company with Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, anglophile Victoria and several other of our dominion’s urban centres.

Of course, myriad Canadian cities have a school or street or park bearing Churchill’s name, most established in the decades after his death, the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. As much as it would be an overt choice for any government, local or provincial, to replace any of those memorializations, it’s an overt choice to establish a new one now — particularly in 2022.

Society approaches history differently now than we did when the Churchill Drives and parks and busts rose last century. Alongside the important contributions of such pivotal figures, we also consider their flaws and prejudices. 

So, yes Winston Churchill led Britain through the Nazi onslaught and he helped lead the Allies to defeat the imperial ambitions of Adolf Hitler, one of history’s most menacing figures. He was a soaring rhetorician and parliamentarian, two qualities Alberta’s outgoing premier certainly reveres.

It won’t take a…