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Never Forgotten National Memorial

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Never Forgotten National Memorial

The Mother Canada monument, officially the Never Forgotten National Memorial, was a project planned for Cape Breton Highlands National Park as a memorial to Canadian soldiers who had fought and died overseas. It was meant as a trans-Atlantic complement to the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

The $25 million project was to include a 24-metre statue of a bereft mother, her hands outstretched towards Europe and the Canada Bereft monument at the Vimy Memorial in France. It was to be funded through donations collected by the Never Forgotten National Memorial Foundation headed by Toronto businessman Tony Trigiani. The project had been conceived by Trigiani after he visited a Canadian World War I cemetery in Europe.

Approved by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which donated $100,000 to the memorial foundation, it was cancelled by Parks Canada in February 2016 following the 2015 federal election that brought a Liberal government to power, following opposition by Cape Bretoners and environmentalists who wished to preserve the Green Cove site in its natural state, and by others who believed it to be in poor taste, such as the Globe and Mail which, in an editorial, described the proposed monument as "hubristic, ugly and just plain wrong".

References

Never Forgotten National Memorial Wikipedia