Ottawa Citizen, Canada
May 3, 2011 Tuesday
Final Edition
Whitton’s controversial past under microscope again
Former mayor an anti-Semite, say Jewish groups opposed to city plan to
name archives building after her
BY: Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
The controversial views of former Ottawa mayor Charlotte Whitton will
once again be front and centre this week as Jewish groups oppose city
council’s proposal to name the new archives building after the woman
who some say was an anti-Semite who lobbied to keep Jewish orphans out
of Canada during the Second World War.
Council’s finance and economic development committee will consider
today a proposal to name the new facility “Charlotte Whitton Archives
and Library Building.” The council chambers at the old City Hall on
Sussex Drive was named after Whitton, but as that complex is now owned
by the federal government, the current council is considering
transferring the name to the new archives.
The Canadian Jewish Congress says that would be “more than objectionable.
“There’s a process here, and the reason the process is in place is to
ensure that everyone has a level of comfort renaming this building,”
argues Bernie Farber, chief executive of the CJC. “And now it is quite
clear what Charlotte Whitton’s history was, and now they can correct
the mistake they made in the past.”
According to the 1982 book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is
Too Many, Whitton lobbied against a proposal to allow eastern European
orphans, most of whom were Jewish, into Canada in the late 1930s, even
though other groups were in favour. As secretary of the Canadian
Welfare Council, the authors said that Whitton was an “influential
voice” in Ottawa.
Fraidie Martz’s book, Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War
Orphans in Canada, says Whitton espoused a “scientific” racism that
viewed groups such as Jews and Armenians as “undesirable” immigrants.
Farber acknowledges that anti-Semitism “was rife” in Europe as well as
North America during those times.
“But to actively lobby against ensuring that Jewish orphan refugees
that could have been saved not come to this country, that is pure,
active anti-Semitism,” he says. “That is acting out on your hatred.
That’s what she did, and she was in a position do to so.”
Whitton was the first female mayor of a major Canadian city and served
as Ottawa’s top elected official from 1951 to 1956, and again from
1960 to 1964. She has a long list of honours attached to her name,
including Officer of the Order of Canada, which she received in 1967.
Her accomplishments are well-documented in the council committee’s
report, except for one thing: her controversial role in keeping Jewish
children out of Canada.
“Politicians can only be as good as the reports that are given to them
in order to make a decision,” Farber says. “If this is the report
that’s given to them, I can see why this would be seen as a pro forma
kind of move.”
Dave Mullington’s biography of Whitton -Charlotte: The Last
Suffragette -mentions the incident in passing when discussing
Whitton’s efforts to bring British children to Canada during the
Second World War.
“Charlotte, who had earlier opposed the acceptance of European child
refugees, most of whom were Jewish and whose evacuation was supported
by the Canadian National Committee on Refugees under Cairine Wilson,
now welcomed British youngsters,” Mullington wrote. (Wilson was
Canada’s first female Senator.)
However, he pointed out in a letter to the Citizen last year that the
women of Toronto’s B’nai Brith organization named her their Woman of
the Year in 1964. In that same letter, Mullington also says that
Whitton’s lobbying efforts against the Jewish orphans “appears to be
greatly exaggerating her efforts.”
That was the same year that Whitton refused a $500,000 gift from
Ottawa’s grocery magnate, Bert Loeb, for a cancer centre at the Civic
Hospital. Whitton said the city could not afford the upkeep of the
addition; she was the only one on city council who thought so. Critics
said that Whitton couldn’t bear the idea of a Jewish name on the
Ottawa hospital. (Loeb gave the money to a grateful Carleton
University instead.)
Yet she was a supporter of Lorry Greenberg, Ottawa’s first Jewish mayor.
“She’s a woman of contradictions,” Mayor Jim Watson says. “That’s the
difficult situation. Even within the Jewish community, there are
divisions. People who served with her … claim she is not
anti-Semitic, and there are those in the Jewish community who do feel
that way.”
When the former council chamber was named after Whitton in the 1970s,
Whitton’s role in lobbying against the admittance of Jewish orphans
hadn’t yet come to light. Still, Watson says that naming the new
archives after her “is not condoning her controversial and
unacceptable views.”
The mayor says he has “thought long and hard about it. I do see that
there is a divisive and contradictory opinion on whether she was
anti-Semitic. My hope is that council will look at her overall
contributions, the good and the bad, and recognize that she’s possibly
the most well-known, most often quoted, most remembered mayor of our
city.”
A number of public delegates are expected to speak against the
proposal at committee today, including Vera Gara, past chair of the
Ottawa Jewish Federation’s Holocaust remembrance committee and a
Holocaust survivor.
From: A. Papazian