In today’s episode, Stephanie shares;
- Her initiative in the City of Ottawa to have 20% of municipal landmarks (arenas, libraries, parks, streets, pools) named after women by 2025
- How anyone can effect change in their area, even if they live in a small town.
- Why it is important to diversifying the names of landmarks, parks, libraries, etc to include womxn.
Despite the fact that women have been the main consumers of municipal infrastructure, they are often not commemorated at the municipal level and Stephanie is working hard in her area to make this change. Press the play button on the podcast player above to listen now, or continue reading for the full transcription.
Good morning. My name is Stephanie Plante. I currently live in Ottawa, Ontario. It is Boxing Day 2020 and here we go. So I grew up in Tecumseh, Ontario. It’s a small town just outside of Windsor right near the border with the states. I grew up, and this is long before 911, going to Detroit all the time. We would go shopping, we’d go to baseball and hockey games, I grew up cheering on the Detroit Pistons and I still love them to this day. My mom is Swiss and my dad is French Canadian originally from Quebec, and he moved to Windsor to work in, at the time what were their very plentiful factories. But just as important as this bicultural and binational childhood is the fact that I grew up in a town named after a Shawnee chief. Everyone from southwestern Ontario knows Chief Tecumseh, they know his military exploits and how he shaped the geographical landscape of Ontario, Ohio, and Michigan. He’s a folk hero, much like Wayne Gretzky is to Brantford, Ontario, or Celine Dion is to Quebec, or Ryan Reynolds is to Vancouver.
Fast forward to 2004, I was hired via an internship program at the University of Windsor to work for my local Member of Parliament, this was a very big deal for me at the time. I had never had any sort of office jobs, and I certainly didn’t have any connections to work for someone as important as the Member of Parliament. So I did everything in my power to make a good impression and it must have worked because after one summer, he asked me to work in his Ottawa office. So I packed up my things and I excitedly moved up to our nation’s capital. If you’ve never been here, Ottawa is a very government town, people speak and think in very government bureaucratic ways. It’s not uncommon for you to say go to a dinner party, and have someone say, “Oh, I’m working on this deck about the horizontal management framework strategy and the whole of government approach”. Now, you would never say that in Tecumseh, but it’s not uncommon to hear those kinds of things here, and you get used to it after a while. But I definitely have to sort of change my language when I go home. But it was in Ottawa, that my child’s father and I were married in 2007 and our son was born in 2010. They say having a child is like having your heart walk around outside your body, and that is so very true. Like a lot of moms, I’m completely ensorcelled with my child. But with this love, and this energy also comes with a big realization to me, that I have to do something to make his world a better place, and not just the material, immediate world and fuss over things like organic food and what he’s watching online, but make the world that he walks around in, the streets, the buildings that he sees every single day, they need to reflect the Canada that I grew up in, and not just the pioneers whose names and faces grace, a lot of the auto landscape. So if you walk down the street right now you’re going to hit Wilfred Laurier Avenue, you’re going to see John A. McDonald Park, you know, these men are very important, but they’re not the only people who have shaped Canada’s history.
In 2015, my son and I left what can only be described as an abusive relationship. At that point, his dad was drinking very heavily, he was hiding money, and having multiple affairs and not being very discreet about it. It was a very, very difficult time in my life. And you also probably remember that 2016 was just rough for everyone and has been since Donald Trump was elected, Me Too happened, George Floyd was killed, Tamir Rice, there was a 2017 Mosque shooting in Quebec. We had Idle No More, Wet’suwet’en, etc. It seemed like the world around me was just sort of imploding and I had no control and very, very limited resources to affect any kind of change. And like many single moms, I am a big user of the City of Ottawa municipal amenities, arenas, libraries, concert halls, parks, etc. And it dawned on me that when my son would ask where we are going or what kind of adventure we were embarking on that day, I was mainly telling him about the names of buildings that were named after men. Anyone who lives in Ottawa knows the Walter Baker Center, the Jack Purcell pool, the Glencairn pool, the François Dupuis Rec Center, etc. Worse is that corporate naming is starting to become more and more prevalent with big builders and big box stores, such as the Richcraft Center and the Canadian Tire arena, taking over the topography of Ottawa. And I also noticed that not one rink, arena, library, or concert hall was named after an Indigenous, Inuit, or Metis person, which to me, for our nation’s capital, is completely unacceptable. Just yesterday, my son and I were going to a dog park, which was near Trim Road and Portobello Street in a neighborhood called Orleans. I mean, no shade to anybody who likes fungi, but surely we can dedicate major thoroughfares to the accomplishments of women and not mushrooms.
There’s a great project going on in Geneva, Switzerland called 100Elles (Cent Elles), which translates to 100 Hers in Geneva. Cent Elles started as only 7% of the city streets were named after women, and this project has already flipped 19 streets to be named or renamed after local women. I love going on their website and reading the biographies of the proposed name changes. You have super famous women who lived in Geneva like Audrey Lorde, Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler. But you also have women who were not famous at all, but they did very important things for the city of Geneva, such as the first woman to open a home daycare, the first woman to open a local restaurant, the first woman to graduate with a PhD. They even have a woman who in the 1800s opened the first Co Op brothel, which gave sex workers at the time salaries and healthcare benefits. I mean, think about how revolutionary that must have been at the time and would still be today. And what I really like about the Cent Elles initiative is first, it seeks to redress something that is very visual, which is the inequality of the names given to men versus women in our public spaces. Surely, women have equally contributed to the history and the importance of our cities. Second, it doesn’t limit the names to big deal women only, many of whom like ? Mary Wollstonecraft had very rich and famous husbands. If you’re a single mom like me, you’re more likely to be able to identify with the women who opened the first daycare or who had an ethos behind a work Co-op than say Wayne Gretzky or Mike Meyers, both of whom have public spaces named after them in Ottawa.
So my big project is that I want to have 20 parks in Ottawa, named or renamed after women by 2025. I’ve already successfully flipped one local park in my neighborhood to be renamed after Annie Pootoogook. Annie Pootoogook was an extremely famous Inuit artist who died in Ottawa in 2016, under very mysterious circumstances. But she did live here, she made a large part of her career here, and her legacy lives on in local galleries, and inspiring local intimate students. And let me tell you, that project took a lot of time. I recorded over 70 hours, that was just on the administrative side of things, filling out forms, getting recommendation letters, doing interviews, liaising with city officials, my counselor, my MP, my MPP, etc, it was a lot of work. So in order to achieve this goal, I’ve had to sort of branch out. And this winter, which will be the winter of 2021 full pandemic, I’ll be working with the Black Student Group at the University of Ottawa to have a park renamed after the first Black female jurist in Canada. What I really like about this idea, which I have to admit, I did mirror after the Cent Elles initiative, but rejigged it for our nation’s capital, is that first of all, I get to work with a lot of people in our community and those are my people. You know, you get to know who the leaders are of community associations, you get to know who is manning the homeless shelters, and the safe injection sites, and all of those city amenities that people actually use. And the other thing is that I get to meet with other groups. You know, I did not know, for example, that there was a Black Law Student Association, I didn’t know that we didn’t have a park, or any sort of city amenity named after a Black jurist, and I think that’s so equally important that we draw attention to that.
So I have a website, and it’s called project20.ca, it is a work in progress. If you go on it right now, today, you won’t see much of anything. But again, the goal is to get names of famous women, hopefully bipoc women and get their names plastered on a municipal amenity. Again, this is a lot of work. But my goal is to do this by 2025. And one thing I love about having a municipal structure named after you is you can also put a municipal plaque and you can have a description of the person, what they did in their life, and why this is important. We know that John A. McDonald is important. We know that Wilfred Laurier is important. But it’s also important to recognize the lesser known people who have made our city equally as fabulous. And also what we have learned in this pandemic is it’s not people like Jeff Bezos and Justin Bieber, who really saved us and who ensured that we had meals on the table. It is our frontline workers and the more attention we can pay to the people who have dedicated their lives to the service of others in smaller but significant ways, the more we bring the importance of those roles into the forefront. I’ve dabbled a lot in community activism in my day. I’ve tried taking on developers to advocate for more inclusive housing, I’ve tried to get things like snow removal to be better in my neighborhood, and I think I finally found something at my age, which is now 41, commemorative naming, that I’m super passionate about, and I could talk your ear off all day,
I started looking into how they do commemorative naming and other cities, how groups advocate for removals of statues, or how people like John A. McDonald or Baron Strathcona, got parks and streets and universities named after them in the first place. We have a huge hotel here, it’s beautiful, it’s called the Chateau Laurier, and obviously, that’s named after Wilfred Laurier. But, you know, it’s time that we pass the torch, and we put the spotlight on women, and especially lesser known women who have equally created a space that makes the city vibrant and great. So while we can’t change the past, we can have a better future. And my future includes one where the streets, the pools, the arenas, the concert halls, have names that reflect the diversity of this wonderful city. You know, if I can know who Chief Tecumseh is, and I’ve known who he is since the day I was born, other people should know who he is, and they should know who Annie Pootoogook is, and I look forward to one day living in a city that better reflects the diversity of the people who also call Ottawa home. You know, we all want little girls to see themselves representative in our public spaces, not just as elected officials or CEOs, but in the naming of our city’s infrastructure, and I am super proud and super happy to be part of that initiative. So check it out project20.ca, again, it is bare bones at this point, but as this project progresses, you’ll hopefully be able to read about some very significant women who have changed Ottawa’s history, you’ll hopefully be able to name and relate to some Indigenous, Metis, or Inuit women who also call Ottawa home. And thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to talk your ear off about commemorative naming and why it’s important. Thank you and happy holidays and Happy New Year.
Would you like to connect with Stephanie online? You can find her on Twitter @specialballot and on instagram at @sixuntrois
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