By Michael Regenstreif
It made headlines recently when it was announced that Charlotte Whitton, the mayor of Ottawa from 1951 to 1956 and 1960 to 1964, had been nominated for official recognition as a Canadian of “national historic significance.”
Nominations are submitted to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board, which investigates and recommends to the minister of the environment which nominees they consider worthy of recognition. The minister then accepts or rejects the board’s recommendation. To date, 648 Canadians have been so recognized.
Whitton’s name was put forward by the Ottawa Committee of the Famous 5 Foundation, an organization that encourages women to participate in politics and public service, because she was the first woman to serve as mayor of a major Canadian city.
Whitton’s nomination became news when it emerged that several major Jewish organizations oppose Whitton’s designation on the basis of her antisemitism and have asked Environment Minister Jim Prentice to reject it.
Long before she became mayor, Whitton was one of Canada’s most prominent social workers as director of the Canadian Council on Child Welfare for more than 20 years and was instrumental in keeping Jewish refugee orphans out of Canada during the Second World War, thus sealing the fate of many in the Holocaust.
Whitton’s role in that shameful chapter of Canadian history is well documented in None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, and in Open Your Hearts: The Story of the Jewish War Orphans in Canada by my cousin Fraidie Martz. (The Jewish war orphans Martz wrote about in her book were only allowed into Canada beginning in 1947.)
In an op-ed published August 18 in the Ottawa Citizen, Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and Mitchell Bellman, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, argue that Whitton’s actions, motivated by antisemitism, doomed hundreds of Jewish children to die in the Holocaust. That, they say, should make her ineligible for the historic designation. I agree.
Farber and Bellman also point to an incident that took place in 1964, when Whitton was mayor of Ottawa and refused to allow a half-million dollar donation (worth more than $3.5 million in 2010 dollars) from Jewish philanthropist Bertram Loeb to the Civic Hospital to build and equip a research facility.
In an editorial published March 3, 1964, the Ottawa Citizen attacked Whitton for her decision.
“Why did Miss Whitton do it? This is the question that must be puzzling many Ottawans today,” wrote the Citizen.
In a Globe and Mail obituary published when Loeb died in 2006, it was written that some “suspected that Ms. Whitton cringed at the thought of seeing a Jewish name on a city facility.”
Having now read the through the 1964 Ottawa Citizen coverage of the Whitton-Loeb story, that explanation makes sense to me.
Dave Mullington, the author of a forthcoming biography of Whitton, responded to Farber and Bellman with an op-ed in the Citizen refuting allegations of Whitton’s antisemitism with a short list of several interactions Whitton had with Jews or Jewish organizations, which, he wrote, “certainly show that she was not as bigoted as some would have us believe.”
Mullington’s defence of Whitton is ironic in light of a December 3, 1982 article he wrote as a Citizen reporter on assignment at Temple Israel for a presentation Abella and Troper made on Whitton and her role in ensuring that Canada not be a haven for Jewish children during the Holocaust.
Mullington reported, in great detail, on Abella and Troper’s research and unquestioningly quotes the authors as saying Whitton was “an outright racist.”
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