No Montreal Metro tribute for jazz great Peterson

By Natalie Armstrong

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - A Montreal subway station in the neighborhood where the late jazz piano great Oscar Peterson grew up won't be renamed in his honor, according to the city's transit commission.

The decision comes despite an online petition signed by more than 5,000 people who have joined a group on Facebook pushing for the tribute to the Canadian musician, who died at his home near Toronto last December at the age of 82.

The Facebook group's creator says renaming the Montreal Metro station would right a 30-year-old wrong, describing the public figure it was originally named after as a racist.

Still, the city's transit commission says it won't end its moratorium on renaming stations.

"It's not a judgment on what Oscar Peterson was or what he represents, because everybody agrees he was a great musician" Marianne Rouette, a spokeswoman for Societe de transport de Montreal, told Reuters on Thursday.

The station, opened in 1978, is called Lionel-Groulx, after Quebec nationalist cleric Lionel-Adolphe Groulx.

The Facebook group says on its petition that the name should be changed because Groulx "opposed all non-Catholic immigration to Canada, supported the Fascists during WWII and the Spanish Civil War, and acted to deny access to Canada to Jewish asylum-seekers during the Holocaust."

Michael Citrome, a University of Montreal graduate law student, who created the online petition, says the moratorium should be set aside and wants the city to step in.