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Protesters tore down statues of Britain’s Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, Reuters reported, quoted by BTA.
The agency notes that this happened at a time when anger in Canada is intensifying after the discovery of the remains of children in nameless graves in the area of schools where indigenous students were once educated.
The statues of the two British queens were removed yesterday – on the eve of the national holiday, Canada Day.
First, a monument to Queen Victoria was torn down in front of the Manitoba state parliament building, whose capital is Winnipeg. The crowd greeted the statue’s fall to the ground, and then people began dancing around it and kicking it. Some demonstrators painted their palms red and then wiped them on the monument and its pedestal so that there were bloody prints.
A nearby statue of Queen Elizabeth II was also removed from its pedestal.
Elizabeth II is now Canada’s head of state, and Queen Victoria was on the throne from 1837 to 1901, when Canada was part of the British Empire.
Protests over the tragic fate of indigenous children also took place yesterday in Canada’s most populous city, Toronto, and thousands marched in the federal capital, Ottawa. Vigils and rallies were organized in many other places.
Traditionally, Canada celebrates its national holiday with lavish celebrations. This year, however, many cities have canceled these events because of the nameless scandal that forced Canadians to face their colonial history. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada Day will now be a day of reflection.
Nearly 1,000 unnamed graves have been found in former boarding houses in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. Most of these schools were run by the Catholic Church and were funded by the government. For 165 years – until the 1990s – schools forcibly separated indigenous children from their families. In these schools, children were malnourished and physically and sexually abused. In 2015, a special commission set up by the Canadian authorities called the incident a “cultural genocide.”
The British government condemns any action that desecrates a monument to the Queen, said a spokesman for Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
Demonstrators toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Winnipeg this afternoon during rallies honouring the children discovered in unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools over the past month. pic.twitter.com/Zx0aqPGcOW
— APTN News (@APTNNews) July 2, 2021
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