Harper's 'Offensively tasteless' Mother Canada statue=outrag

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'Offensively tasteless' Mother Canada statue plan sparks outrage against PM

[ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/j ... hen-harper ]

Media and local residents lambaste Stephen Harper for offering financial support to erect a 10-storey statue overlooking the shore of a national park

John Barber in Toronto Friday 26 June 2015 11.30 BST Last modified on Friday 26 June 2015 20.25 BST

A plan to erect a 10-storey statue in a national park on one of Canada’s most scenic shorelines has prompted outrage and sparked a growing political row as the country heads towards a general election this fall.

The statue of Mother Canada [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/canada ] – a cloaked female figure with her arms outstretched towards the Atlantic Ocean – is intended to honour the country’s soldiers who died overseas.

But growing anger over the plan has made it a new focus of opposition to the increasingly unpopular government of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. [ http://www.theguardian.com/world/stephen-harper ]

The proposed monument is an awkwardly remodelled, vastly upscaled version of an earlier statue, known as Canada Bereft, [ http://diplomatonline.com/mag/2014/09/v ... 2014_0126/ ] which adorns the memorial to the country’s first world war dead near Vimy, France.

The design has been widely lambasted both for its design and its proposed location in Cape Breton Highlands national park. In an editorial this week, the Globe and Mail newspaper described it as “offensively tasteless” and a “hubristically arrogant act of arrogant unoriginality”. [ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/try-it-n ... d=25083043 ]

“The bigger-is-better approach to art is best left to Stalinist tyrants, theme park entrepreneurs and insecure municipalities hoping to waylay bored drive-by tourists,” the paper wrote.

The project is the brainchild of Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani, who was inspired after a chance visit to a Canadian war cemetery in Italy and set up the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation to realise the plan. [ http://www.nfnm.ca/#slide1 ]

The initiative gained early and enthusiastic support from the Harper government, which has donated the necessary public land and $100,000 from its parks budget to help erect the colossus on a rocky spit along the Cabot Trail, eastern Canada’s most popular scenic drive. The foundation hopes to raise $25m to complete the project, in part by selling corporate sponsorships that will be prominently acknowledged on the site.

Growing criticism in the nation’s media has helped swing opinion against the grandiose scheme, but opponents fear the fate of rocky, windswept Green Cove is already sealed.

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[ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/j ... hen-harper ]