Never Forgotten National Memorial facts for kids
The Mother Canada monument, officially the Never Forgotten National Memorial, was a project planned for Cape Breton Highlands National Park as a memorial to Canadian soldiers who fought and died overseas. It was meant as a trans-Atlantic complement to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.
The $25 million project was to include a 24-metre statue of a bereft mother, her hands outstretched towards Europe and the Canada Bereft monument at the Vimy Memorial in France. It would also have included an interpretive centre, a restaurant, and a souvenir shop among other things. It was to be funded through donations collected by the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation headed by Toronto businessman Tony Patrick Trigiani. The project had been conceived by Trigiani after he visited a Canadian World War I cemetery in Europe.
Opinion on the Monument was divided. Supporting petitions from Cape Breton (New Waterford, Dominion, Glace Bay, Iona, Sydney, Ingonish), as well as from Hants County, Grand Prairie, Alberta, central Ontario and a Trans Canada petition were presented to Parliament by the local MP, the Honourable Mark Eyking on January 28, 2016 at 10:15am. A citizens' action group, Friends of Green Cove, opposed the project, launching a letter and information campaign focused mostly on the location within the National Park. The Green Cove location chosen for the project is a pink granite outcrop along the iconic Cabot Trail, one of the few places where the sea is accessible to the public, and, unlike the Vimy Memorial, has absolutely no military significance. Trigiani has maintained his refusal to even consider other locations.
One of the most frequent justifications for the location is absolutely false. Major-General Lewis MacKenzie (Ret.) said in an interview "This area was one of the last sightings of Canada as hundreds of thousands of troops left Sydney and Halifax". Seeing any part of the Cape Breton Highlands while sailing from Halifax to Europe is an impossibility because a ship must be less than 84 kilometers offshore for the Cape Breton Highlands to appear above the horizon. Lt. Col. Ferguson Mobbs (Ret.) of the Bradford Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion in Ontario commented that the statue "will stand on what was the easternmost point of Canada in 1914, before Newfoundland joined confederation, in a direct line with Vimy Ridge". Mobbs apparently doesn't know that even the Fortress of Louisbourg (45° 53′ 32.57″ N, 59° 59′ 10.36″ W) is farther east than Green Cove. (Note the coordinates of this proposed monument at the top of this Wiki page.) The easternmost point in Cape Breton is a small outcrop (45° 57' 4.9644" N 59° 47' 18.4596" W) between the bays of Anse aux Cannes and Kelpy Cove on the eastern shore of southern part of Cape Breton Island, a short drive northeast of Louisbourg.
The project was approved by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which donated $100,000 to the memorial foundation without any public input or discussion. It was cancelled by Parks Canada in February 2016 following the 2015 federal election that brought a Liberal government to power, in response to opposition by those who wished to preserve the Green Cove site in its natural state, and by others who believed the proposed monument to be in poor taste, such as The Globe and Mail which, in an editorial, described it as "hubristic, ugly and just plain wrong".
