Fox remains a hero worthy of all the tributes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 01/08/2022 (1231 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Listen closely: you won’t hear a bad word spoken about Terry Fox. On the day Manitoba sets aside to honour Mr. Fox, nary a slight will be spoken of the holiday’s namesake.

The legacy of this homegrown hero remains unsullied, a level of admiration that is a substantial achievement in an age when many of our long-lionized heroes are torn down — sometimes literally, in the case of statues.

A modern inclination to reconsider the lives of noteworthy people has led to public rejection of many public figures whose actions have been found offensive to current sensibilities. In Manitoba, two statues of British royalty that were traditionally honoured by many were torn down last summer by protesters rallying against the atrocities of colonialism.

There have also been calls to rename Bishop Grandin Boulevard, out of concern for that historical figure’s affiliation with residential schools. A Winnipeg school division is reviewing the name of Ryerson School, named after an individual who helped develop residential schools.

Nellie McClung, long admired for her advancement of women’s rights, has come under increased scrutiny for her anti-Semitic writing and promotion of forced sterilization for impoverished women, although a statue of her at the Manitoba legislature remains intact.

Meanwhile, in a province where even the 2022 celebration of Canada Day was controversial because this country’s colonial past, no one cast aspersion on Mr. Fox, the hero who embodied determination and courage when he dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic Ocean in 1980 and covered 5,373 kilometres of his planned cross-country run before his cancer returned and ended his quest after 143 days. He died on June 28, 1981, aged 22.

His unblemished legacy is widely celebrated throughout Canada, with his likeness on stamps and coins, and his name on 14 schools, 15 roads and highways and 12 parks and trails.

Manitoba showed its admiration in 2015 by becoming the first province to institute an annual Terry Fox Day holiday. But apart from that honour, this province’s visible pride in for Fox has been muted, considering his strong link to Winnipeg.

Mr. Fox was born in Winnipeg in 1958 and his parents, Betty and Rolland, were lifelong Winnipeggers before moving to British Columbia in 1966.

There have been regular suggestions that this city could do more to celebrate its ties to the kid from Transcona. There is a bust of Mr. Fox in Assiniboine Park, but recognition here is rather modest compared to in Valemount, B.C., which named a mountain after him, and the province of Ontario, which erected a three-metre tall statue of Fox as the centrepiece of a park along the Trans-Canada Highway near Thunder Bay.

The most obvious way to pay tribute to the Fox family’s roots in Winnipeg would be to rename Wayoata School, which he attended for three years and which is still in use. Such a name change was proposed to the River East Transcona School Division board in 2005, but was stymied by resistance among board trustees, who erroneously argued they didn’t want to change the name because doing so might show disrespect to local Indigenous people (local media checked with Indigenous authorities and none were familiar with the word “Wayoata”).

An observer given to cynicism might suggest Manitoba finds it easier to remove monuments to historic figures with questionable pasts than to erect appropriate tributes to worthy heroes.

Terry Fox deserves better. In the city that was his birthplace, an apt start would be to finally change the name of the school where his educational journey began.