Change Kitchener's name back to Berlin?

[jeffster]

Say what???

Hoping for some clarity too.

As for the cities name, I think it should be left alone. I think by trying to force the issue, you could end up opening a Pandora's box, which means a poor outcome. From a provincial, national and international point of view, there is little value to changing the name. If you decide to have a referendum on changing the name, and the "No" side wins, you're going to end up with a lot of problems here. Once people have it set in their minds that the name has to change, regardless of consequences, a "No" outcome while using a democratic process is going to be ugly. If the outcome was "Yes", then deciding on a name has its own issues.

It is sad that we lost the name "Berlin", but at that point in our history, Germany had a poor reputation, and being named after a major German city had some serious consequences. By renaming the city to Kitchener, the city did get a boost in just about every way. At the time of the vote, there were other options, some of them good, some of them, well, Adanac, for example, was poor. But Lord Kitchener was considered a hero. In todays world, he'd be a creep and wouldn't be a hero anywhere.

Our city, though, has a reputation of being very progressive. The city has good policies of trying to help all people, not matter their background, be it religious, financial, ethnic, colour, nationality, etc. People need to remember this is what "Kitchener" means now. It's something the city does much better than many cities around the world. It's who "we" are, not what "Lord Kitchener" was.

At the same time, if we start going through names of everything, we're going to find that we'd need to change a lot of things. If anything, it can be a good history lesson for us.