Sir John A. Macdonald was erased from some public spaces. Now there’s a movement to bring him back

The racial reckoning of the COVID era saw Canada grapple with its checkered past — a process that led to statues of some foundational figures being removed, in some instances by force.

Five years on, there’s a growing movement to restore some of what was taken down in that tumultuous period. The campaign, led by politicians past and present, historians and members of the public, is focused on bringing back some of those monuments, in particular ones of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, which have all but disappeared from public spaces.

There are some signs the pendulum is swinging back as a result of this advocacy: Wilmot, a community outside of Waterloo, Ont., put back its statues of Macdonald and other prime ministers this summer after years in storage. The monument, which had been vandalized in the past, is more educational than it was, featuring plaques acknowledging past wrongs.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, with support from both Progressive Conservative and Liberal MPPs, also brought down the wooden hoarding that for years covered up Macdonald’s statue on the grounds of the provincial legislature, Queen’s Park.

“We’re freeing John A.,” Ford told reporters at the unveiling in June. “You have to support our first prime minister. You know, things have happened over a number of years, but we can’t just box them up. We have to move on. Stop worrying about the past.”

But many are still locked away.

Former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole is lending his name to the effort, asking that Macdonald get more recognition elsewhere considering Canada wouldn’t exist in its current form without his seminal role in Confederation and his leadership over nearly 19 years as the head of government in the new dominion.

As Canada grapples with threats to its sovereignty and a U.S. trade war, officials should “embrace a renewed sense of national pride” and honour the forefathers, O’Toole said.

“For a number of years there was this cancel culture — just this rush to tear down or erase. I think we’ve come through that period now, and it’s time to properly reflect and put the statues back up,” O’Toole said in an interview with CBC News.

The once-imposing statue of Macdonald that towered over Place du Canada in Montreal was toppled and decapitated in 2020 amid protests over the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a cop in Minneapolis, Minn.

All that’s left of what was a century-old statue is an empty plinth. The city decided Macdonald wouldn’t be returned after what protesters did to his likeness, but left the base in place.

O’Toole jogged past that moribund statue in late October and saw what was, to him, a sad sight.

He posted about it on social media with a simple caption: “Bring back Sir John A.,” a message that generated a flood of reaction — some 10,000 likes and nearly 1,500 comments on Facebook alone — with the vast majority of commentators in favour of restoring some sort of tribute to the man who brought together disparate colonies to form a new nation.

What’s perhaps most frustrating for O’Toole is that while the Macdonald statue is gone — a monument to a British naval hero, Admiral Nelson, an imperialist who defended the transatlantic slave trade, remains on display a couple kilometres away.

For O’Toole, it doesn’t make any sense that a foreign figure gets a pass while arguably the most consequential early Canadian is relegated to the dustbin of history in the country’s second-largest city.

“We don’t even have our first prime minister up — an angry mob pulled it down. I think we have to have the maturity and the strength of conviction, as a country, to put it back up,” he said.

“It’s about saying, ‘Yes, we overreacted, that wasn’t a balanced approach,'” O’Toole said. “I hope current politicians have the courage and maturity to fix it.”

It’s not just Montreal — monuments to Macdonald in Regina, Kingston, Ont., Charlottetown and Victoria were also pulled down.

A statue of Macdonald with another founding father, Sir George-Étienne Cartier, at the Ottawa airport that bears their names was also removed. Authorities said it was an “emotional trigger” for passengers and employees.

Schools, parkways and prizes that carried Macdonald’s name have been rededicated since 2020-21, when the country was grappling with preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School indicating over 200 children could be buried on the site in B.C.

Macdonald was targeted by activists and officials because of his association with that school system, which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found pursued cultural genocide by forcibly removing Indigenous children from their home communities for education in largely church-run facilities where abuse was rampant.

Some of these assimilationist schools were operational before Macdonald’s time — and long after — but his government actively encouraged their expansion.

While initially opposed to restrictive immigration laws, Macdonald flip-flopped amid political pressure and opposed Chinese immigration on racial grounds, saying it would dilute the British character of Canada. In order to limit new arrivals, Macdonald’s government passed the Chinese Immigration Act, which levied a $50 “head tax” on Chinese immigrants.

O’Toole said his campaign isn’t about sanitizing the past — other restored statues can follow the Wilmot example and acknowledge some of Macdonald’s misdeeds and the trauma his policies inflicted on Indigenous people and racialized communities.

“I think we can be proud of our past and commit to being better,” he said.

“But the response is not to erase our heritage and patriotism today for the horrible acts of the past. It’s about educating, it’s about learning, it’s reconciliation — and that means reconciling the past with today.”

Still, for some, Macdonald’s tenure is simply not worth marking in any form.

Omeasoo Wahpasiw, a professor of Indigenous studies at Carleton University, said restoring any tribute to Macdonald is “a terrible idea.”

“We don’t even know what kind of person he was besides an alcoholic,” she said in an interview, referencing Macdonald’s documented heavy drinking.

“We know that he got a bunch of other people together in a room and somehow convinced them to do something that at the time was a fiction and continues to be a fiction,” Wahpasiw said, referring to the idea that the political borders of Canada are artificial constructs on the ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples.

“He’s a symbol of nation-building for Canadians, and he’s a symbol for genocide to another group of people. Erecting a statue, it doesn’t just rub me the wrong way, it sends the wrong message about who Canadians think they are and who they want to be,” she said.

“Sir John A. represents genocide — so not cool.”

J.D.M. Stewart, an educator, historian and expert on Canada’s prime ministers, said the push to remove references to Macdonald robs future generations of a chance to learn about him, warts and all.

Stewart said activists’ demands to conceal Macdonald renders him a bad guy of history, when, to him, the record is much more nuanced.

“History is a very complex subject. There’s no black and white. There is a lot of gray. And I don’t think the way that we’ve reacted to these stories over the last five or 10 years has demonstrated that kind of reasoned reflection,” Stewart said.

“Some of those criticisms may be true, but it doesn’t mean that the other parts of what some of these leaders did was not important and visionary for the country,” he said, referencing Macdonald’s push to build the transcontinental railway that successfully bound the country together from east to west to stop American annexation, among other accomplishments.

The Macdonald government sought to suppress or outright ban some Indigenous culture — but he was also made an honorary chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River. In a photo from the time, someone in the crowd holds a sign that reads: “Sir John, our great chief.”

The government was callous toward Prairie First Nations experiencing famine after colonial encroachment and the near extinction of the bison — many starved to death as a result — but it also helped orchestrate a smallpox vaccination campaign to inoculate Indigenous communities that were susceptible to that deadly European disease.

As part of his campaign to integrate “Indians” into the dominant Euro-Canadian society, Macdonald extended the franchise to some First Nations men in Central and Eastern Canada in 1885 — a right to vote that was later clawed back by a subsequent Liberal government.

“We’re not trying to say that these historical figures are saints and that they did nothing wrong. I think quite the opposite. I think what we’re saying is, ‘Let’s look at the period in which they lived, let’s look at the measure of a person in the person’s entirety, all of their legacy, not just part of it,'” he said.

Stewart recently chastised Ottawa for wiping the name of former prime minister Arthur Meighen, who is generally uncontroversial, off of a federal building in Toronto.

WATCH | The controversy around John A. Macdonald’s complicated legacy:

The controversy around John A. Macdonald’s complicated legacy

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, has a controversial and complicated legacy. He’s called the father of Confederation, but some say his policies that hurt Indigenous people mean he shouldn’t be honoured with statues and tributes across the country. The National talks to people on both sides of the debate.

He was also opposed to the last government’s passport redesign that replaced significant historical figures and monuments like Terry Fox, the Vimy Ridge Memorial and the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Last Spike, with images of nature and geometric shapes.

“If you start chipping away at your little pieces of identity, pretty soon you’ve got nothing left at all,” he said.

“In a country like Canada that has not done a good job of preserving, promoting or teaching its history, every piece counts in terms of trying to tell your stories and preserve your heritage.”

Article source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/john-a-macdonald-statues-9.7022713?cmp=rss