To erase Sankofa before it erases Dundas, there is a petition

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It took leftists one city council meeting to erase 200 years of Toronto history with the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square.

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It might take longer to restore it. But some are working on it.

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If you don’t like the name Sankofa Square and want this city council decision to be reversed, there is only one thing that you can do about it. Sign a petition to reverse the weird and sneaky decision to change the name of Yonge-Dundas Square to a term that comes from Africa with woke theme about moving from the past to the future.

The petition is up on change.org.

“It should hit 10,000 (signatures) sometime next week,” said Daniel Tate, the man behind the effort to try to convince Mayor Olivia Chow and council to abandon the Sankofa branding.

Tate, who works in the live entertainment business and knows how to fill a room, has a goal of reaching 100,000 signatures, which he hopes to present to the mayor.

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Does the public care about this? Do they like that city council, at the last minute, erased two centuries of history and snuck in a name no one in the public had ever heard of?

“The residents of Toronto were shocked and stunned at your closed-door, late-night decision to rename a beloved landmark of our city without massive and robust public consultation,” says a letter to council.

“How could this council so recklessly, and with such careless abandon, rename a public landmark that has generated trillions of beautiful memories for generations of Torontonians? … Dundas is not about some guy whose history is murky and debated from 200 years ago. It’s about how a name was reclaimed by a city over time.”

Most people never even knew there was a Dundas at all. But what they did know is Yonge and Dundas was part of their life growing up in Toronto.

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Turns out there was a Henry Dundas from Scotland who, like Sir John A. Macdonald from Scotland, is now being cancelled on fuzzy history taken out of context.

The petition is not “a defence of Henry Dundas” but “a defence of preserving the complicated nature of history as it intersects with the identity of our city. No human being, even our greatest heroes, passed through this life without blemish.”

But if you are going to replace the Dundas name, a simple Google search would have shown the new name, “Sankofa,” has it’s own issues.

“It’s a Ghanaian word originating with the Akan people” that “has no historical or cultural significance to Toronto” but is an attempt to purposefully alienate every Torontonian’s connection to our city’s roots and to remake Toronto in an image manufactured by activists” as well as a “direct attack on the history of one of the most iconic areas of our city.”

But as Tate in the petition points out, “it’s important to note that the Akan peoples were themselves avid slave traders” and “when slavery declined in the West due to abolition in the 19th century, it actually increased among the Akan.”

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Oops.

But this blunder could cost taxpayers millions.

They are going to rename the square, two subway stations and who knows what other names will need to go as the dominoes fall. The move to cancel Dundas Street itself has been around for a few years and was always a politically correct attempt to suggest somehow that Toronto had a racist past that needed to be cleansed. Of course, it’s all nonsense but it became farcical when the left-leaning cabal chose a name from Africa that actually has roots in slavery to replace the name of Henry Dundas, who was an abolitionist.

“We encourage people to learn about history, not to obfuscate it,” says the petition, which demands “our politicians be more responsible with taxpayer money” while reminding “the original petition to change the name had 14,000 signatures.”

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Tate is hoping his petition will “blow that out of the water.” He’s still 5,000 signatures behind that and 91,000 away from achieving his goal.

If he can get there, there can be a real conversation involving the community on what to do next. Change it back to Yonge-Dundas Square or start a process for a new name – whether it be in memory of Gordon Lightfoot or Gord Downie or both by calling it Gord Square, or in honour of great Torontonians like Pinball Clemons, Donovan Bailey or iconic Canadians like Terry Fox or Chris Hadfield or after an Indigenous chief or even go the corporate route and sell the name to a business interest which will help pay for all of this unnecessary madness and assist the city with other expenses.

Tate says he just wants whatever is decided to be decided transparently and democratically.

“I really hope (the mayor and council) re-evaluate their position and offer an olive branch to citizens at-large,” said Tate. “Names engender nostalgia, warmth, energy. You can’t just erase that. It’s an assault on our communal lived experience.

“If we’re going to undertake a most important step of renaming a national landmark intersection and transit stations, we must do so in consult with people of all stripes.”

It all starts with your signature!

jwarmington@postmedia.com

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