Victoria councillors Ben Isitt, Jeremy Loveday and Sarah Potts, and Mayor Lisa Helps, are proposing changing the two-block stretch of Trutch Street to Truth Street. Councillors are expected to discuss the proposed name change Thursday. Isitt said the idea of a name change has been around for the past decade and many community members have expressed an interest in removing Trutch’s name from the city street. “He lived on this Island for a relatively short period of time. His contribution in public life had a devastating impact on Indigenous people, and so it makes no sense to me that the City of Victoria would choose to honour a municipal asset after this individual, he said.
The question now is: Should his name be yanked off a street sign in Fairfield? And, more broadly, what about the practice of yanking names in general, whether from street signs or buildings or cities or mountains? We have been down this road (as it were) before. Three years ago, Victoria council discussed Trutch Street but did not change the name in the same way that UVic had done with a student residence bearing the Trutch name. Now the matter is coming up again. Both Vancouver and Victoria city councils will look at renaming their respective Trutch Streets. In the capital’s case, it would affect a two-block road lined, mostly, by stately single-family homes.
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Thoughtful leadership would take the moment to pause, and to give a fair public hearing to the matter. Thoughtful leadership would seek to understand what is driving the conflict, and would seek to find a remedy to it, a solution that better meets the needs of everyone. Unfortunately, as is often the case, thoughtful leadership is in short supply. The city has said that it consulted. That the Fairfield Gonzales Community Association held public events and that the results of those events were in support of the Richardson Street plan. It was a veneer of consultation that lacked the substance needed to move the project forward without conflict.