Will you sign the petition? KEEP Dundas Street and Dundas-Yonge Square!
Henry Dundas is the British Home Secretary after whom Dundas Street and Dundas-Yonge Square in Toronto is named.
Dundas was influential in ending the slave trade in Canada and Great Britain. Toronto City Council now wants to rename Dundas-Yonge Square and also Dundas Street.
Renaming Dundas Street may cost nearly $13 million.
History Matters: To Toronto City Council
- After the Atlantic provinces refused to honour Britain’s promises to provide black Loyalists with land and equal rights as reward for their service, in 1791, Dundas ordered Atlantic governors to provide the black Loyalists with additional land to compensate for the delay.
- Dundas commissioned an abolitionist, John Graves Simcoe, to be Upper Canada’s first lieutenant-governor. The result was that in 1793, the province passed the first anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire.
- That 1793 bill also immediately freed any foreign slave who arrived in Upper Canada. The result was that more than 40,000 freedom-seekers fled to the province over the next seven decades on the Underground Railway.
- Members of the Dundas family helped resettle black Americans who fled to Upper Canada in the 19th century.
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