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Article by Rebel News staff

Tonight, on The Ezra Levant Show, the CBC cheers for another street name to be changed — even though the people who live on it object. 

Indian Road in Kingston, Ontario, has been Indian Road for a very long time. The people who live on it love it. They said so. Repeatedly. To their councillors, to reporters, to anyone who would listen. They are proud of the name. Some of them have indigenous heritage themselves and feel no shame whatsoever in the word "Indian." In fact, residents argued over the past year that forcing a change was paternalistic — their word.

It didn't matter. Kingston city council voted 8 to 5 on Tuesday night to rename the street Aki Road, after the Ojibway word for land or earth. The adjacent Indian Road Park will become Old Amino Park. Two brand new names that almost no one in Kingston had ever heard before Tuesday.

A local man who actually canvassed the street — who went door to door and listened — was blunt about what he found. Residents are angry. They feel unheard. They are building resentment. He called the outcome a step in the wrong direction.

He also directly disputed a claim, floated at a council meeting the year before, that the majority of people on the street wanted a new name. He said that the claim was far from the truth.

So why did it happen?

One of the advocates for the change, the executive director of the Kingston Native Centre, explained the rationale plainly during the council meeting: “Changing a road name won’t change history, but I think it’s a clear signal to Indigenous folks that not only the city cares, but council does."

That is the entire argument. Not that the name was hateful. Not that residents demanded it. Not that it would improve anyone's life in any measurable way. The argument is that it sends a signal. That it proves someone cares. And if the people who actually live on the street have to update their mailing address, their driver's licences, their business cards — well, that's just the price of the signal.

The CBC, predictably, has been enthusiastic about this outcome. They have been building toward it for some time, framing opposition to the change as retrograde and quietly cheering the activists pushing for it. The taxpayer-funded broadcaster knows whose side it's on.

This pattern is not unique to Kingston. Across British Columbia, municipalities have been renaming streets and landmarks at a steady clip. In Toronto, Yonge-Dundas Square was rechristened Sankofa Square — after a Ghanaian concept — because Henry Dundas was deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about abolishing slavery, despite the fact that he was a reformist who did eventually support abolition. The irony that the Sankofa people of West Africa were themselves deeply involved in the slave trade was, of course, not discussed.

Sir John A. Macdonald was stripped from the ten-dollar bill. His statues have been toppled. Queen Victoria was pulled down outside the Manitoba legislature. A Champlain statue is reportedly next in Quebec. Each removal is framed as progress, as healing, as reconciliation. But the people being asked to accept these changes — the residents of Indian Road, the Kingstonians who voted against this at every opportunity — don't feel reconciled. They feel overruled.

There is a Washington Post poll worth recalling here. The Post — not a conservative outlet by any measure — surveyed Native Americans on the Washington Redskins name controversy. Nine in ten said they were not offended by it. Nine in ten. And yet the team was renamed anyway, to the Washington Commanders, a name that inspires no one and belongs to nothing.

The people who demanded these changes were not, by and large, the people the changes were supposedly made for. They were activists, grant-funded organizations, and media outlets looking for a cause. The actual communities in question — whether indigenous residents of a Kingston street or Native Americans surveyed by a major American newspaper — were mostly fine with the names as they were.

The question that never gets asked is a simple one: if you genuinely cared about improving the lives of indigenous Canadians, wouldn't you start with the Indian Act? It is still called the Indian Act. It has been called the Indian Act since 1876. It establishes different rights and restrictions based entirely on race. It has done more harm to indigenous communities than any street name in any city in this country.

But reforming the Indian Act is hard. It requires legislative effort, political will, and decades of follow-through. Changing a road sign is easy. It costs almost nothing — except to the residents who live there, who have to fight their own city council to be heard, and who lose anyway.

It is about the performance of caring, done at someone else's expense.

GUEST: Peter McIlvenna on Rupert Lowe's rape gang inquiry report.