New tribute to a complex leader: Calgary society prepares to unveil Winston Churchill monument

A towering Second World War figure with a contentious history is about to make a reappearance in Calgary. 

On June 6, a nearly three-metre-tall bronze statue of Britain's wartime prime minister Winston Churchill will be unveiled on the grounds of a historic Calgary building that houses Alberta government offices.

The province spent $60,000 to prepare the McDougall Centre site but the bulk of costs are being paid by the Sir Winston Churchill Society of Calgary, whose members spent years fundraising for the monument.

One of its members is Jason Kenney, who as Alberta's premier in 2022 announced the statue's location on provincial government property.

"I think it's a good connection to [Churchill's] role as a champion of parliamentary democracy," Kenney said in an interview earlier this month.

The society paid $300,000 for the design, sculpting, casting and installation of the bronze sculpture, and they're hoping to raise another $150,000 for maintenance and protection.

In late April, a crane lowered a 4,173-kilogram white granite base onto the statue's future home, then dangled the statue, shrouded in a green tarp, into place. 

Churchill, who died in 1965, was a soldier, war correspondent and Nobel Prize winner for literature. He is best known for his time as British prime minister during the Second World War, securing Britons' support for the effort and working with other Allied leaders to defeat Hitler's Nazi regime.

But his critics point to the leader's record of racist comments and statements that he believed non-white people were inferior.

Kenney says Churchill is relevant today because the issues he wrestled with persist.

"When you see the rise of people like [Russian president] Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian regimes threatening peace and security, I think it's important to remember the lessons of Churchill in the 1930s and '40s, which is never to appease evil and aggression, but to call it out for what it is," Kenney said.

In 1929, Churchill came to Alberta as part of a lecture tour of North America. He visited Edmonton, Banff, Lake Louise, and Calgary, as well as oilfields south of the city in Turner Valley. During that tour, he gave a speech at Calgary's Palliser Hotel, painted seven works of art, and received an off-white Stetson hat.

Heather Coleman, chair of the Churchill society's statue project, says she hopes Calgarians think about the wartime leader's principles and resolve when they see the installation.

"When I think of things like Jan. 6 in the States, and the fact that we almost didn't have a peaceful transition of power in our largest democracy, I think those are lessons we should be holding dear more than ever," she said in an interview.