We’ve been here before. The community-supported proposal to name the lane between Bayview Avenue and Donegall Drive as Agnes Macphail Lane ran into opposition from City staff, but the drive is being revitalized, hopefully with councillor support.
Over a year ago, the Leaside Residents Association, supported by the Bayview Leaside Business Improvement Area and the Agnes Macphail Recognition Committee, proposed that the City move to name the lane immediately behind Bayview Avenue, extending north from Millwood Road to just south of Parkhurst Boulevard as Agnes Macphail Lane. The lane is currently unnamed, and therefore lacks identity, a situation which could become more of an issue over time, especially now that laneway homes are permitted.
Who was Agnes Macphail?
Agnes Campbell Macphail (1890-1954) was once described as “the most important woman in public life that Canada has produced in the 20th century.” Macphail’s portrait was pictured on the Canada 150 commemorative $10 bill. In 1921, she became the first woman Member of Parliament elected to the Canadian House of Commons, serving to 1940. As an elected federal representative (1921-40), Macphail fought for prison reform, disarmament, and “equal pay for equal work” for women. In 1943, she became the first woman elected and sworn to sit in the Ontario Legislative Assembly, representing York East (which included Leaside), and she was reelected in 1948.
Agnes Macphail’s former home, the Modernist duplex at 720 Millwood Rd. (also known as 2 Donegall Dr.) designated in 2012 as a property of cultural heritage value under the Ontario Heritage Act, backs onto the lane at its south end. Admittedly, there are other naming commemorations of Agnes Macphail in Toronto (Agnes Macphail Public School (in Scarborough) and Agnes Macphail Square, Macphail Avenue (in East York), but unlike the Leaside lane they don’t have a physical link to where she lived, her home and her neighbourhood.
The first lane naming attempt
According to City staff, the proposal met the required level of neighbour support under the Street Naming protocol (which involved a lot of door-knocking on Donegall, Millwood and Bayview by LRA board member Helen Koyama) but did not meet the equity and diversity requirements under the “Commemorative Framework.” This document, approved by City Council in 2022, requires that proposals to commemoratively name or rename a street or city property must demonstrate how they meet the City’s Guiding Principles for Commemoration. These principles “seek to address the historic imbalance of who or what has been recognized in the City’s public spaces by prioritizing proposed commemorations that share the stories of underrepresented groups.”
The six guiding principles for commemoration include: “Prioritize commemorations significant to Indigenous Peoples, Black communities and equity-deserving groups” (of which the latter category includes women). Agnes Macphail should be categorized as “equity deserving” in today’s human rights nomenclature, but especially in the context of Canada in the first half of the 20th century. Her work seeking social justice was groundbreaking and certainly congruent with the Guiding Principles’ categories – decades before they became part of contemporary commemoration values.
Why a laneway?
The Agnes Macphail Lane proposal features two key assets: it facilitates a unified place-based commemoration in Leaside of the life and work of this fine elected official, and it recognizes a woman of great courage and high distinction who was a Canadian trail blazer for “equity deserving groups” decades before contemporary human rights culture and language.
The LRA recently forwarded the revised proposal for consideration to Councillor Rachel Chernos Lin. Her staff responded that “we will discuss your concern with the councillor as part of her strategy for naming protocols across the ward.
