Canadian War Museum raises concerns over impact of Afghanistan monument

By Floriane Bonneville

Afghanistan mission veterans will have to wait longer for a monument commemorating the conflict after the Canadian War Museum recently balked at plans to place the memorial just west of its LeBreton Flats location.

Some veterans say they don’t understand why the site near the Ottawa River — owned by the National Capital Commission — was chosen in the first place if the Canadian War Museum could block construction of the monument anyway.

Earlier this month, at a meeting of the NCC’s board of directors, museum officials — along with Raymond Moriyama, the architect of the military heritage centre — raised concerns about the aesthetic impact and other drawbacks of placing the proposed monument so close to the museum.

Moriyama told NCC board members that the planned placement of the memorial next to his architectural creation would be a huge mistake. He said a vertical monument would be “impacting the essence of the design” of the museum, which is primarily horizontal.

Moriyama added that he conceptualized the building so that it would appear to rise out of the water — a natural feature that he said would be obscured by the planned Afghanistan commemoration.

“If a monument were to be placed along its western edge, this powerful connection to the Ottawa River’s edge would be visually and experientially interrupted,” Moriyama wrote in a letter to the NCC.

But one of Canada’s leading advocates for veterans, Sean Bruyea, said the governmental bodies responsible for erecting the monument are treating it as a “bureaucratic game and not as a sacred duty to honour the fallen and the living.”

Veterans of the conflict in Afghanistan have been waiting for three years for a monument commemorating their sacrifice in Canada’s longest war. Newly appointed Veterans Affairs Minister Seamus O’Reagan said recently that the memorial could still be another three years away.

Conservative Veterans Affairs critic Steven Blaney said it’s a nation’s duty to honour those who lost and risked their lives during Canada’s mission to Afghanistan.

“The mission ended in 2014 and we are confronted with additional delays of 45 to 52 months before constructing the memorial,” Blaney said in response to the controversy. “Those prolonged delays are unacceptable and the Liberals must stop going back and forth and finally take action.”

The memorial project was initiated in May 2014 by Julian Fantino, another former Conservative veterans minister. The $5-million project was expected to be unveiled for the 150th anniversary of Confederation this year.

But after the Liberals came to power in 2015, the future of the memorial became less clear.  

Now the project is back in the hands of the Department of Canadian Heritage for what NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson has called “sober reflection” in light of the opposition of the museum to the latest site proposal.  

The NCC is responsible for finding a site that fulfills a host of requirements, from harmony with the surroundings to the approval of stakeholders or organizations affected by the placement — including the war museum.

Yasmine Mingay, the museum’s director of public affairs, said museum officials are not opposed to the idea of a memorial commemorating the Afghanistan conflict, but that for architectural and other reasons they are concerned about placing the memorial on the proposed site between the museum and the river.

Mingay added that the museum’s memorial hall is a place where veterans are welcome to come to in order to remember, but that it was designed to commemorate all conflicts rather than one in particular.

“People would think that (the proposed monument) is part of the museum,” she said. And to commemorate one war rather than another is not the mandate of the museum, she added.  

Discussions about the planned memorial with Ottawa-area Algonquin communities, which had been planned for this fall, was also delayed as a result of the NCC’s deferral of the matter.

The NCC board had previously approved a site at Richmond Landing, but Veterans Affairs Canada asked that the shoreline spot well to the east of the museum be reconsidered because of concerns that the location wasn’t visible from the nearest roads and was too difficult to access.

That’s when the site close to the west side museum was proposed, an idea supported by a national veterans affairs advisory group.

The NCC has stated that if the location near the war museum fails to win approval, the Richmond Land site would be considered again despite earlier concerns about its suitability.

Apart from the site at Richmond Landing and the one west of the museum, two other Centretown sites closer to Parliament Hill had been identified earlier in the process as possible memorial sites.

Pelletier said an initial study of the four sites had been conducted to ensure the memorial’s compatibility with each area. The study had examined potential drawbacks for each of the sites:

• The Lawn of the Canadian Phalanx in front of the Supreme Court is on non-federally owned land, so its use would have had to be negotiated with the City of Ottawa. There is also noise and traffic in the area. There is also a limited space for gatherings, and there is existing underground infrastructure that could cause delays in construction.
• A site outside the Cartier Square Drill Hall, between Ottawa City Hall and the Rideau Canal, also raised noise and traffic issues. Underground infrastructure also posed a potential problem, including possible complications due to emanations from a sewage odour control facility also planned for the area.
• The site west of the Canadian War Museum has significant soil contamination, which could delay completion of the project. The site is subject to foreground height control, which would limit the vertical profile of the monument. The site is close to a secondary site for Ottawa Bluesfest, and the memorial could potentially interfere with underground structures.
• Richmond Landing, apart from its relative remoteness from passersby, has high noise levels and it is also a contaminated site.