Canada’s “Victims of Communism” memorial failed to produce any names of victims.
Details. The memorial was officially opened in Ottawa in December 2024. It was promoted as a monument that would eventually display the names of hundreds of alleged victims of communism, with organisers presenting it as a definitive historical accounting rather than a contested political narrative.
► A subsequent government review found that over half of the proposed names were linked to Nazi collaborators or fascist organisations, particularly from Eastern Europe. The issue became public when it emerged that at least one Nazi collaborator’s name had been engraved onto the wall and was only removed after public criticism.
► Following these findings and mounting scrutiny, organisers ultimately decided that the memorial wall would contain no individual names at all, abandoning the project’s original purpose and leaving the monument devoid of the content it was meant to present.
Context. The memorial cost roughly $7.5 million in public funds, including federal contributions. This spending comes as Canadian living standards have suffered one of the sharpest declines in the past 40 years, with falling real incomes, stagnant wages and rising housing costs.
► Declining living standards make such propaganda politically necessary. The monument seeks to confuse and disorient workers by falsifying the historical role of socialism, principally the USSR, in materially uplifting living standards through mass literacy, universal healthcare, labour protections, reduced working hours, and large-scale affordable public housing achieved through socialist planning.
► These achievements forced capitalist states in the West to respond. To preserve legitimacy and contain class struggle, ruling classes introduced welfare states and social programmes, partially replicating gains achieved under socialism while retaining capitalist property relations. With the defeat of the Soviet Union and the weakening of the labour movement, these concessions have been steadily rolled back as profitability declines.
► This ideological offensive is not confined to Canada. Earlier this year, France unveiled its own “Victims of Communism” monument, reproducing a familiar revisionist pattern centred on the discredited “100 million dead” figure popularised by The Black Book of Communism.