Choice of the selection committee

Invitations were sent to 22 sculptors in Europe, the United States and Canada in 1908, inviting them to submit designs for the proposed monument, and a dozen models in May 1909 were submitted. A committee was appointed by drawings association composed of its President, William Cockshutt, CH Waterous, TH Preston, George Hately (Secretary), AJ Wilkes, more KC and FD Reville Reville. The group selected the three best designs they favored models presented. A trio of outside judges, Sir Byron Edmund Walker of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Toronto, Senator George Allen Davis, Buffalo, New York, and Sir George Christie Gibbons, London, Ontario, all patrons were invited to join the committee to make a final decision.

After a review of the award was made to Walter Seymour Allward Toronto. The millionaire banker and philanthropist Sir Byron Walker was capable of swinging persuasion in the unanimous decision of the sculptor. Walker, the second son of a poor but well educated Ontario, who had emigrated from England, led the Museum of Fine Arts Ontario and has worked with numerous institutions, including the Royal Museum of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Champlain Society and the Guild of Civic Art. He had also been appointed to the Advisory Council of the Arts in Ottawa, and helped the commission for several previous Allward Victorian allegorical monuments and nationalism. Walker, like other Victorian Protestants at a time when Darwinism had fallen in the service of God, justified his life serving man, and one of the facets of his service was to help make art and education more accessible to all classes. In this journey Allward became one of his assistants capable.