EDMONTON — I see in the newspapers that all the stuff named “Dundas” in Ontario is in some trouble. The Hamilton suburb of Dundas and the thoroughfare called Dundas Street are the major targets, but there must be a hundred institutions and businesses that bear the stain of association with Henry Dundas (1742-1811), a political horse-trader who controlled large parts of the British Empire in the days of Pitt the Younger.
Dundas is remembered as the silver-tongued litigator who won the case of Knight v. Wedderburn (1777), which established that slavery would not be recognized or enforced in Scots law. But he was also a Tory parliamentary manager who helped to delay the abolition of slavery in the empire by 15 years, condemning thousands of individuals to await emancipation or die awaiting it.
Thousands more have shopped, worked, lived and died on Dundas Street, and in the town of Dundas, without having the slightest idea of any of these facts. I may be adding to the unhappiness of humankind by mentioning them to those who never had any idea until now that they ought to be offended. The legacy of Henry Dundas came to renewed notice in Canada when his absurdly enormous monument in Edinburgh was vandalized by protesters there. It would be at least a little funny if Canadians condemned his memory as a “decolonizing” gesture because … the British were doing it.
One thing, however, is clear. Named streets are the devil’s handiwork. In Prairie cities, we live mostly in a Cartesian heaven where all is clean, pure integer. My home address has nothing so ugly as a proper noun in it, much less the name of some historic villain. The whole sequence of bits is, if you include a suite number, a near-perfect three-dimensional specification of my spatial co-ordinates. A visitor (or an armed drone) could find me, starting from anywhere else in the city, without any map.
Indeed, he would never even really need to know in which direction he was facing. In Edmonton, a drunk only has to go a maximum of one block to establish whether he is headed toward his quarters or away from them. I prefer not to consider whether this might explain other things about the city, or for that matter about my biography.
I have often advanced the idea that this represents a superior way of life, solely in the spirit of friendly civic chauvinism and leg-pulling. (It is possible that irrelevant but unpleasant pre-smartphone memories of trying to get around in unfamiliar cities were a contributing factor.) But having spent the last few months watching how Victorian Ontario’s public health apparatus handles a disease epidemic, and contrasting that with the relatively decent performance of the progressive-era cities of the plain, I am not sure it is entirely a joke.
No doubt some people find our right-angled, nameless streets and avenues charmless, compared with growing up at the intersection of Imperialist Martinet and Gormless Politician. Before 2020 I would have agreed unconditionally, even enthusiastically. But now it seems there might be fringe benefits to existing in a high-modernist environment that never had to weld together a panoply of ancient fiefdoms to get anything accomplished or built.
National Post
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