SOME TEACHERS WANT TO STRIP THE NAME SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD FROM SCHOOL BUILDINGS BECAUSE OF HIS DISMAL PAST WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF HISTORIC CANADIANS WITH SHADY PASTS.
Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario called on all school districts to strip the name of Sir John A. Macdonald from all Ontario public schools, reasoning that he was the “architect of genocide against Indigenous Peoples.” They’re not wrong that Macdonald has a pretty dismal record on Indigenous relations, but if Canada is going to be pulling down every name associated with some uncomfortable aspect of history, the purge has only just begun. It turns out that, when judged through the prism of our enlightened era, almost everybody from Canada’s past — from famed reformers to Indigenous icons to notable women — comes off as an extremist maniac. Tristin Hopper reports.
MCGILL UNIVERSITY (MONTREAL)
James McGill was a particularly successful fur trader who founded the university that now hosts a charming statue of him nears its front gates (as well as his grave). McGill also owned six African slaves. Although Canada would ultimately become one of the first North American jurisdictions to peacefully outlaw slavery (coming only a few years after Mexico), in McGill’s era enslaved black house servants were a common status symbol among Montreal’s merchant elite. Another slave owner? The namesake of Toronto’s Jarvis Street.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
The “Columbia” part is derived from Christopher Columbus, who had barely finished discovering the New World before he started kidnapping Indigenous Cubans.
BRANTFORD, ONT.
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, the namesake of Brantford and Brant County, usually gets cited on lists of “notable Indigenous Canadians.” He’s most remembered for siding with the British during the American Revolutionary War, but his legacy is still controversial among many Mohawk. Brant owned slaves, murdered his son and was accused of selling out his own people for personal gain.
VICTORIA, B.C.
The B.C. capital is among the hundreds of Canadian places named after Queen Victoria, including Victoriaville, Que., and Victoria Island in the Arctic. Despite being the most famous woman of her era, though, Queen Victoria was an unabashed sexist. As the women’s suffrage movement took flight under her reign, she accused suffragists of “mad wicked folly” and said they needed a good “whipping.” Women, she added, were a “poor, feeble sex” who “would surely perish without male protection.”
CHÂTEAU LAURIER (OTTAWA)
Wilfrid Laurier famously said that in the ethnic mix of Canada “there is no longer any family here but the human family.” But he was remarkably selective about who got to join that family. He opposed Indo-Canadian immigration to Canada, reasoning that they couldn’t handle the cold. Laurier also raised the Chinese Head Tax and saw it as a righteous thing for Canada to settle land taken from “savage nations.”
CCGS JOHN G. DIEFENBAKER
Still under development, the next icebreaker will carry the Diefenbaker name. John Diefenbaker still has a relatively solid record on civil rights, but he didn’t care for gay people. Under his watch, the RCMP orchestrated a purge of homosexuals from the civil service, and Diefenbaker was an open opponent of Canada’s 1969 decriminalization of homosexuality. “Some say there is no God, that each man should be able to live his own life as he wills as long as he does so in private,” Diefenbaker said at the time. “I do not find any support for that philosophy in the scriptures.”
JACQUES CARTIER BRIDGE (MONTREAL)
Jacques Cartier mapped much of what would become New France, but his navigation relied an awful lot on kidnapped Indigenous people to be his guides. In one particularly egregious episode, he took a party of 10 Iroquois back to France, where they soon died. When Cartier returned to the St. Lawrence River without the Iroquois, he lied and told the locals they were all “living as great lords; they had married and had no desire to return to their country.”
BELL CANADA
With a deaf wife and mother, it was Alexander Graham Bell’s research into hearing devices that would profoundly influence his invention of the telephone. But he also had eugenicist leanings, particularly his fear that the hearing impaired would have children and form a kind of deaf fifth column, complete with their own secret language. Although Bell never considered mandatory controls on human breeding, he did press for governments to take steps against what he called the “Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.”
ANYTHING NAMED AFTER THE FAMOUS FIVE
The Famous Five are a group of Alberta women who spearheaded a 1929 legal appeal to have women recognized as legal “persons” in Canada. Between them, there’s a least a baker’s dozen of schools, streets and libraries named in their honour. But, as energetic activists, they also embraced a host of contemporary causes that seem wrongheaded or even evil by modern standards. This included eugenics, prohibition, bans on non-white immigration and the criminalization of marijuana.
TOMMY DOUGLAS COLLEGIATE (SASKATOON)
Tommy Douglas was another eugenics supporter. The iconic founder of the NDP wrote his master’s thesis on the “problems of the subnormal family,” in which he argued that poverty could be solved if mental defectives were weeded out of the gene pool. However, as premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, Douglas never implemented the eugenics laws adopted by other prairie provinces. The reason was likely a 1936 visit to Nazi Germany in which Douglas saw firsthand the stirrings of history’s greatest eugenics crimes.
DALHOUSIE UNIVERSITY (HALIFAX)
While lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, Lord Dalhousie objected to accepting an influx of emancipated slaves freed by the War of 1812. “Slaves by habit and education, no longer working under the dread of the lash, their idea of freedom is Idleness and they are altogether incapable of industry,” he wrote to the colonial office in London. It’s that letter, in fact, that prompted Dalhousie University to convene an academic panel to examine their founder’s prejudices and “recommend actions.”
EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART AND DESIGN (VANCOUVER)
The artist Emily Carr has a couple libraries, a handful of public schools and an art college to her name, as well as a prominent statue in Victoria. However, due to the frequent depictions of First Nations totem poles and longhouses in her art, Carr has been accused of stealing Indigenous culture. “I believe that there are elements of cultural violence … in the way Carr effectively seized control over the public representation of the First Nations people and their totem poles of the British Columbian coasts,” wrote B.C. academic Janice Stewart in 2005.
MOUNT MACKENZIE KING (BRITISH COLUMBIA)
Much like the $50 bill, this B.C. mountain honours Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest serving prime minister. Probably the biggest black mark against King is his anti-Semitism. In addition to King’s open admiration for Nazi Germany during the 1930s, he was against admitting Jewish refugees from Europe.
LAKE CHAMPLAIN (QUEBEC)
After returning from his first trip up the St. Lawrence River in 1603, French explorer Samuel de Champlain’s account of the voyage was entitled “On Savages.” Later, as the unofficial governor of New France, Champlain followed the typical path of a 17th century colonial governor: Trying to convert the “heathen” natives and helping to spark a wave of local conflicts.