There will be no “Charlotte Whitton Library and Archives Building” in Ottawa.

In the face of escalating controversy, Mayor Jim Watson is withdrawing his proposal that the new building be named after the city’s first female mayor, Charlotte Whitton.

In a letter sent late Sunday night to councillors, Watson said commemorative namings should be celebratory events that “draw the community together.”

But outcry over Whitton’s efforts to deny Jewish refugee children entry into Canada during the Second World War has created “disunity in parts of the city, and as mayor, I felt it my obligation not to allow the matter to continue,” Watson told councillors.

Calling the renaming suggestion his and his alone, the mayor said “the divisiveness and character of the debate was becoming very unpleasant and for the good of unity in our community I will not proceed with the report.”

Instead, Ottawa residents will be asked “for their suggestions on who we should name this new building after,” Watson said in his letter.

The new library and city archives, at the corner of Woodroffe Avenue and Tallwood Drive, is scheduled to open next month. According to the mayor, the opening will proceed, and the facility will be named “after we have heard from the public and council has made a decision.”

Ever since council’s finance and economic development committee approved the renaming last week — with only Councillor Keith Egli voting against the proposal, and two councillors not present — elected officials have been receiving e-mails from the Jewish community and others opposing the move.

Letters to the editor, op-eds and columnists have been largely against Watson’s recommendation, expressing everything from measured concern to rabid invective, even comparing Whitton to Hitler.

The issue would have gone to full council on Wednesday, where Watson likely had the votes to support his report. But having a majority of yeas around the table doesn’t always equal a political win. The issue would have continued to generate hard feelings in the city, perhaps for decades.

Councillors are likely relieved that they will not have to publicly take sides. Late last week, College Councillor Rick Chiarelli — who represents the ward where the archives is located, as well as a significant Jewish community — said that while he was open to listening to arguments from all sides, he was “expecting to vote no.” Cumberland Councillor Stephen Blais said he had received a number of e-mails, not just from Jewish residents across the city, but from his own francophone constituents as well. Whitton, an intense anglophile, had opposed any bilingualism in Ottawa while she was the mayor from 1951 to 1956 and again from 1960 to 1964. Blais didn’t indicate how he was planning to vote, but had “some very significant concerns.”

Councillors who approved the mayor’s report promoting the Whitton commemorative naming — a report that did not allude in any way to her controversial past — argued that Whitton was a product of her time.

But representatives from the Canadian Jewish Congress and the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, as well as a Holocaust survivor, told councillors at last week’s committee meeting that Whitton did more than simply harbour the all-too-common anti-Semitic beliefs of the times.

She acted on them.

The 1983 book, None is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper, documents William Lyon Mackenzie King’s anti-Jewish immigration policy during the Second World War, and mentions Whitton’s opposition to allowing Jewish refugee children into Canada.

As secretary of the Canadian Welfare Council in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Whitton was an influential member of the Canadian National Committee of Refugees. The latter group, led by Cairine Wilson, who would become Canada’s first female senator, was in favour of accepting Jewish refugees, most of whom were thought to be orphans.

But the book’s authors argue that of her own accord, Whitton sent out memorandums to welfare groups across the country warning against admitting non-British refugee children, most of whom were Jewish.

A particularly damning quote has Whitton supporting bringing in British children to Canada while keeping Jews out in 1940.

“It is not refugees whom we want to receive ... it is part of Britain’s immortality, part of her past, part of all the hope of her ultimate future that we take into our keeping,” wrote Whitton, according to None is Too Many.

But nothing about Whitton was simple. She was political trailblazer and supporter of a number of progressive programs, including social housing in Ottawa, not to mention a famous wit.

Although no one contradicts the notion that Whitton was a racist, biographer Dave Mullington wrote to the Citizen last summer to contend that “to say that she actively campaigned ‘across the country’ against their entry here appears to be greatly exaggerating her efforts.”

Mullington wrote that Whitton was likely more preoccupied with the survival of her own organization.

In 1964, the women of Toronto’s B’nai Brith organization named her the woman of the year. But that same year, she refused to accept a $500,000 donation for a cancer centre from local business magnate Bert Loeb. Whitton said she rejected the money because the city couldn’t afford to maintain the new facility. She was the only one on council who believe so. Her critics, however, decried her as anti-Jewish.

And yet, a decade later, Whitton would be the first person to nominate Jewish businessman Lorry Greenberg for mayor. On his way to his victory party on the night of the election, Greenberg stopped in on Whitton at her nursing home. She would die the following year.

“I have spent a great deal of time immersed in the history of Dr. Whitton before and after the report was tabled and have found a wide body of contradictory information on her many statements and actions,” wrote Watson. (Whitton received a number of honorary degrees.)

“In the spirit of not furthering a long, drawn out debate on her history, merits and faults, I felt it best to not pursue the naming.”