EXCLUSIVE PHOTO: In a dimly-lit area, off-limits to most members of the public at the City of Victoria, a padlocked cabinet hangs on an unfinished wall.
Within the cabinet is stored a portrait of the City’s namesake: Her Majesty Queen Victoria, whose 63-year reign between 1837 and 1901 saw the founding of Fort Victoria, the creation of the Dominion of Canada, and the dawn of the 20th Century.
“Queen’s Picture,” a plain sign attached to the cabinet reads. “See Archives for access,” with a City of Victoria logo visible in the bottom left corner.
City Hall’s relationship with Canada’s monarchy has been a complicated one in recent years. Mayor Lisa Helps and four members of council declined to swear allegiance to Queen Victoria’s great-granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II while being sworn into office in 2014. (Note: a previous version of this editorial incorrectly stated grand-daughter).
“No other local government in the Capital Region swears an oath of allegiance to the Queen, so it was nothing odd. It was picked up and turned into a big deal for no reason,” Helps would tell CFAX 1070 years later, maintaining that she was not anti-monarchy.
Nevertheless, the future of the portrait in the cabinet depicted in the exclusive photograph above is uncertain.
“The crate to which you are referring in the attached photo contains a painting of Queen Victoria that was placed in storage last year,” City of Victoria Head of Engagement Bill Eisenhauer said when reached for comment regarding the exclusive photo obtained by CFAX 1070.
“The City is still determining where the painting may be hung in the future,” Eisenhauer said, noting the official portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II remains hanging in council chambers.
The quiet removal of the portrait of Queen Victoria by the City of Victoria last year is one of a number of moves over recent years to remove symbols of Victoria’s colonial past from public display. While the removal of the portrait of Queen Victoria went largely unnoticed by members of the public due to covid-19, previous removals of colonial symbols of the City’s history have attracted significantly more attention.
Significantly More Attention
In 2018, Victoria made national headlines for announcing the removal of the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside City Hall with less than one week's notice, leaving little time for public debate.
(Above: Sir John A. Macdonald statue outside Victoria City Hall, Aug 10, 2018, the night before removal)
The timing was deliberate, as a member of the City Family would later explain. Anticipating a long, acrimonious debate over whether the statue should be removed, the choice was made instead to “rip-off the bandaid” as Janice Simcoe told CFAX-1070 later in August 2018 and remove the statue before public opposition had time to coalesce.
With the controversial step of removing the statue accomplished, the expectation was that a process could then occur during which the statue would be “recontextualized,” to better reflect the darker elements of Canada’s history, including the role of Sir John A. Macdonald regarding Canada’s Indian Residential School program, which has been the subject of renewed public scrutiny following the announcement of preliminary findings of more than 200 unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May, 2021.
Not unlike the portrait of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald currently resides in a crate at a City of Victoria facility.
The presence of statuary depicting other colonial figures has also been debated at the Victoria council table. In October 2020, Councillor Ben Isitt posed questions to staff regarding a potential process to remove the statue in Victoria’s inner harbour of Captain James Cook. After citing what Isitt called the “offensive” nature of a likeness of James Cook to some community groups, Isitt was advised by staff that this particular work of art was not in the City of Victoria’s collection, and instead was on land controlled by the Greater Victoria Harbour Authority (Click for Audio). This effectively ended the debate.
Nevertheless, Captain James Cook’s days atop the pedestal in the inner harbour were still numbered…