Ever wanted to make your mark on this town? To make some kind of lasting impression? To honor a person, place or event close to your heart? Well, staff at HRM Civic Addressing have been hoping that their NameHRM policy will help you do just that. However, not many people have been taking them up on the offer.
Started in September 2010, NameHRM is a commemorative naming policy that encourages Halifax citizens to suggest names for newly developed streets, parks, park features, commercial vessels and ferries in the municipality. These names can be associated with a person, historical event, geographic feature or tradition.
“In the past, the ways streets got named is, if you build the street, you get to pick the name.” says Gayle MacLean, HRM's civic addressing coordinator. “It was about the developer looking at an area and saying we want this all to be tree names or all birds—they often will choose names that they feel are attractive to potential clients. What it has created, particularly in the suburban areas, is generic street names that don’t reflect local history, geography or anything related to that community.”
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| Edward Cornwallis:The founder of Halifax formally declared war on the Mi’kmaq people in 1749. He has a street and had a junior high named after him. |
(And, as OpenFile has seen recently, sometimes, classist and racist attitudes can change a street's name, too.)
In an attempt to address this shortcoming, MacLean and her colleagues at HRM adopted a commemorative naming policy that requires developers to pick fifty percent of the names for their new developments from a list of names suggested by HRM citizens.
But there is a caveat. If the list of suggested names has less than five names on it, then the developer doesn’t have to choose from it. So far, the suggested names have been few and far between. Since the introduction of this policy in 2010, HRM Civic Addressing has only received 32 applications.
I conducted an un-scientific survey of Haligonians to gauge interest in contributing to this initiative and aside from a few jokey suggestions (porn star names came up once or twice, the general consensus was disinterest and apprehension.
“I just wouldn’t see it as an opportunity to meaningfully contribute to my city,” says local activist Catherine Abreu. “I think that I’d be more interested in attempting to rename something that’s already been named after a mass murderer.”
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| Muriel Duckworth: Nova Scotian peace activist Muriel Duckworth died in 2009 at the age of 100. |
Abreu’s sentiment is shared by Mi’kmaq Elder, Dr. Daniel Paul. “I’m not too excited about the project,” he says. “I wish they had opened it up to rename some of the streets they have in Halifax named after people who were not exactly heroic in the colonial days and put some good modern names on them that reflect the greatness of more modern people. Muriel Duckworth, for instance. I’d like to see a street named after her.”
UPDATE: Since the posting of this article, Gayle MacLean from HRM Civic Addressing has let OpenFile know that Muriel Duckworth's name will be presented to council this March. Maclean says staff are recommending that her name be added to the commemorative names list.
The Commemorative Naming project doesn’t really allow for renaming, only naming new developments and developments, or ones that have an “administrative name”—a name based on a location, like Terence Bay Playground.
This comes as a disappointment to Paul, who was a strong proponent of the renaming of Halifax Junior High School from its previous name Cornwallis Junior High. He feels that before we start naming new developments, we should address problematic names that already exist. He points to the Gorham controversy of the late nineties—where part of a road between Rocky Lake Road and Cobequid Road was named for Capt. John Gorham, an English bounty hunter—as evidence that Nova Scotia still hasn’t shaken the habit of commemorating the wrong people.
On the point of renaming, Maclean says, “Technically, our position around Cornwallis is that it is a commemorative name, whether it was commemorated correctly is not our place to comment. We do have a review committee made up of staff here at HRM, including an archivist, and we do a certain amount of research to assure that we’re not creating a potential Cornwallis issue.”
