Boards encase a statue of Canada's first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, at the base of the lawn of Queen's Park in Toronto on June 21.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
What kind of country keeps its founder in a box?
At Queen’s Park, the seat of Ontario’s government in Toronto, a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, a father of Confederation and Canada’s first prime minister, stands boarded up on all sides, hidden from the public.
The boards went up after protesters vandalized the statue, blaming Macdonald for the establishment of the residential school system for Indigenous children. They have remained there for the past four years – so long that rodents began using the box as a home.
A legislative committee is finally debating what to do with the statue, but what its decision will be or when it will come is unclear. In the meantime, the box bears a cryptic message: “Though we cannot change the history we have inherited, we can shape the history we wish to leave behind.” No mention at all is made of the man who stands inside. He has been rendered a non-person, his name unmentionable.
Absurd. Winston Churchill said some awful things about Indian nationalism and Mahatma Gandhi, whom he called a “malignant subversive fanatic,” but his statue still stands proudly in London’s Parliament Square. Another version stands outside Toronto’s City Hall, an acknowledgment of his heroic leadership in the fight against fascism in the Second World War.
George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon was populated by more than 300 enslaved people at the time of his death, yet the Washington monument still looms over the U.S. capital. Napoleon Bonaparte unleashed years of war in Europe, bringing much of the continent under his heel until his final defeat at Waterloo. Today tourists can visit his grandiose tomb in Paris.
Self-respecting countries remember their great historical figures, recognizing their virtues while conceding their sins. In the past several years, all of the emphasis has been on the sins. Egerton Ryerson has his statue toppled and his name erased from what is now Toronto Metropolitan University. His critics said his ideas laid the groundwork for the residential schools, though he spoke Ojibway and supported the land claims of the Mississaugas of the Credit. All but eclipsed in the controversy was his role in establishing Ontario’s public-school system.
Henry Dundas is having his name removed from Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square, which is being rechristened Sankofa Square after a word, taken from the Akan Tribe of Ghana, that suggests the value of reflecting on the past. His defenders say that the charge against him – helping to delay the abolition of the slave trade – is false. In fact, they insist, he was a determined abolitionist who once defended an escaped slave before the courts.
If it’s wrong to lionize our national champions, glossing over their failures and their crimes, it is equally wrong to villainize them. Most of them are neither complete heroes nor utter rogues. A true understanding of history demands we view them in the round, considering all their human complexity.
John A. Macdonald expressed some vile – and, sadly widespread – opinions about Indigenous peoples. He had many other flaws and made many mistakes in his long tenure as Canada’s dominant political leader. But as one of his leading biographers, Richard Gwyn, argued, all of this must be set against his accomplishments, among them the creation of the transcontinental railway and the North-West Mounted Police. Before he died, said Mr. Gwyn, Macdonald made sure that “Canada had outpaced the challenge of survival and had begun to take the shape of a true country.”
Here is how the Canadian Encyclopedia summarizes him: “Macdonald helped unite the British North American colonies in Confederation and was a key figure in the writing of the British North America Act – the foundation of Canada’s Constitution. He oversaw the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the addition of Manitoba, the North-West Territories, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island to Confederation. However, his legacy also includes the creation of the residential school system for Indigenous children, the policies that contributed to the starvation of Plains Indigenous peoples, and the ‘head tax’ on Chinese immigrants.”
The past few years have seen an overdue reckoning with the tremendous and lasting harms done to Indigenous peoples during European colonization. But there are other remedies than erasing names and pulling down statues. One is to raise memorials to the victims of those times. Mount Vernon has a slave memorial close to the tombs of George and Martha Washington. Another is to explain and educate. A few years ago the foundation that runs Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello, Va., unveiled a series of nuanced exhibits about Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore several children by the man who drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Instead of hiding Macdonald away, why not install a display at Queen’s Park about residential schools and his role in their story? Putting the statue of our first prime minister in a wooden box achieves nothing and satisfies no one. It is time to bring Sir John A. into the light.