Is renaming Dundas Street and Yonge-Dundas Square really the best use of our limited resources?
If this city had unlimited resources and no big problems to solve, Id be off today. Thered be no column to write, certainly not one about the proposal to rename Dundas Street and Yonge-Dundas Square. Exactly. But lets start a year ago, in the summer of 2020, when Toronto city council received a petition with 14,000 signatures calling for Dundas to be removed as a street and square namesake for his role in delaying the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  That quote is from the first sentence in the city report released Monday. Over the next 24 pages, what follows is a master class in good intentions skittering down a slippery slope. The historians can debate where Dundas ranks on the monster scale. But as the report notes, this renaming gambit is not a one and done: at least 60 other street names are problematic. Again, I revert to resources and what organizational scientists refer to as the principles of problem prioritization. If rechristening a street or landmark was as logistically ho-hum as a celebrity picking a new stage name, there is no debate. But as the city report notes, Dundas Street is home to over 97,000 residents and 4,500 businesses. The cost to rename  and this does not include what businesses will pay to rebrand in signage and marketing materials  is estimated to be between $5.1 million and $6.3 million. I dont know a single person who thinks of Dundas as anything more than a location and a word. Its not as if tourists have been flocking to our famous downtown gathering place called the Stalin-Mussolini Square. Then Id get the urgency to rename. The monster scale is clear. By todays progressive standards, Im quite certain the historians could unearth evidence he too was problematic in either thoughts or deeds. We deserve better than lip service or, in this case, sign service. British Columbia is in the midst of a record-shattering heat wave that would give Satan a panic attack. I guarantee you, nobody in the Pacific Northwest now gives a flying puck about street names or what obscure historic figures did or did not do two centuries ago. Theyre too busy trying not to melt. Its all about the here and now. Its all about common sense and the big picture of the present. Right or wrong, we dont. A considerably higher percentage live cheque-to-cheque, and thats when there are cheques. Give them good jobs, housing, opportunities, hope, the tools to build a better life. You cant level the playing field by making mountains out of molehills with a lag time of 200 years. People deserve support now  not squishy virtue-signalling to the past. And a bloated bureaucracy that is essentially having a woke debate about Dundas in a vacuum is failing the very constituents that keep getting sucked into the margins. I suppose cancelling people from yesteryear is the easier path. Again, Im not challenging the good intentions here. If this city did not have bigger problems, todays column would be about the Kardashians or Britney or UFOs. But we do have big problems and Im afraid Dundas does not make the Top 50. I drove my parents to their second vaccine appointment this weekend and the 401 was borderline third world. It was like driving on the moon. If you are a single parent with three part-time jobs in the gig economy, living on Genghis Khan Boulevard is the least of your worries. Thats an abstraction. Its the daily hardships that are concrete. Since the past itself is now problematic, maybe we should just pull down every statue and monument to our colonial past and give every street an alphanumerical name. Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...  No one alive today is perfect. And those who are long gone get more imperfect by the year. We should not minimize the pain of past injustices caused by those who lived in a different time. But to fixate on old names is to postpone who we might be.