City of Saskatoon takes next step in changing name of John A. Macdonald Road

Saskatoon’s John A. Macdonald Road is one step closer to getting a name change.

At Wednesday’s city council meeting, council unanimously approved a request to change the name of John A. Macdonald Road to miyo-wâhkôhtowin Road — which is Cree for “good relationships.”

City council proposed changing the name more than two years ago.

The proposal was made just weeks after Saskatoon Tribal Council Chief Mark Arcand made a public call to have the street renamed to acknowledge the ongoing harm of the Indian residential school system and the role John A. Macdonald — Canada’s first prime minister — played in that part of history.

The final step in the process to officially change the name will be for city administration to create a bylaw and have that approved by council at next month’s meeting.

At Wednesday’s meeting, five people spoke voicing both sides of the conversation — whether it was appropriate to change the name or not.

Susan Gingell was one of those people who spoke passionately in support of the name change. She feels this will be used as an invitation into good relationships with the people and the land.

“I know that this name (John A. Macdonald Road) is hurtful to residential school survivors and the people suffering from intergenerational trauma,” Gingell stated.

“I think some resistance to the name change is inevitable. I hope that over time the benefits of responding to the invitation to better relationship will bring people into agreement. They will see the benefits with all the relations here on Treaty 6 territory.”

While some people living in that area will be impacted by a name change as they have to change their address, documents and identification, Gingell suggests the current issue with the name is larger than the impacted community.

“I believe that this is larger than that particular community. I think the voices of those people need to be heard. This is about better relationships for all of the people who live in this city,” she explained.

“Will they need to learn how to say the name and spell the name? Yes, they will. But like I said (when speaking), Indigenous people had to learn to speak a whole new language and they weren’t invited into it – they were required to speak the language of their colonizers. We’re asking for one word here.”

Mary Fedun, who lives not far from John A. Macdonald Road, spoke out against changing the name. She slammed the city and the community consultation process over the past two years to get to this point.

“The process has been horrible,” she said. “Personally, I want to say I can’t believe it. I do believe the decision was made long before two years ago. What we saw in the middle of summer then and now means nothing.

“The process I think is so flawed because they have no intention of going to setting up like they did with buses. We had all sorts of public engagement for libraries. Lots of people hate it (and) lots of people think it’s terrific, (but) at least we had them. And here we are at council after a summer where a lot of people have a lot of different things going.”

According to Fedun, she takes a bus several times a week down John A. Macdonald Road and says she hasn’t heard one conversation about somebody wanting this name change.

“I listen in (to conversations) and I’ve never heard anybody say, ‘Did you hear what council is doing?’ Most of the time the response is, ‘I think it’s awful what they’re doing,’ ” she said. “I don’t hear anybody (in that area) saying this is a good thing. There are other ways of dealing with things to make them teachable tools.”

She felt the city shouldn’t be hiding from Canadian history.

A motion was also passed at the meeting Wednesday that would have administration report on a process in order to cover all associated costs for home-based businesses impacted by the name change.