THE CASE FOR SIR JOHN A.
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM A HISTORICAL REVISIONISM THAT NEVER ENDS
The reaction of people like me to the suggestion by Ontario’s elementary teachers’ federation that Sir John A. Macdonald’s name be removed from public schools was one of scorn, with added vitriol.
That’s because people like me view history as a record of things past that should not be altered or rewritten in Orwellian fashion by some Ministry of Truth to suit its own political ends.
But others have a different concept of history, and people like me have to accommodate their views if a less relativist view of history and ethics is to prevail.
Those people see history as the commemoration of the past in a way that confers values and endorsement. In their view, changes in a community’s values should be reflected in decisions about what should be commemorated and honoured.
The Trudeau government’s move to change the name of the Langevin Block, that building that houses the Prime Minister’s Office — named after Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation and strong proponent of the residential school system — has set a precedent that has, predictably, led to fresh calls for the tainting of other longdead political figures.
It may have helped Justin Trudeau divert attention from lack of progress on the Indigenous affairs file, but calls to sully Macdonald’s legacy because of his perceived racism will surely be followed by similar howls of outrage about Liberal icon Sir Wilfrid Laurier, and perhaps even the prime minister’s own father.
What’s needed is a framework to examine calls to rename public buildings and landmarks that incorporates both conceptions of history.
Fortunately, Yale University has provided us with one — the product of a special committee convened to look at the issue of renaming Calhoun College, named after John C. Calhoun, an architect of Southern secession and a vocal advocate of slavery.
The committee suggested that renaming on the basis of values is warranted on occasion, but only if a number of principles are met.
The most important of these, in my eyes, is the namesake’s principal legacy.
Human lives are large, said Walt Whitman — “they contain multitudes.” (Whitman himself is remembered as a poet and writer, not as the man who criticized Abraham Lincoln for insisting on equal treatment of black soldiers held as prisoners of war in the South.)
There is no doubt Macdonald held views on the Chinese and the Indigenous population that are repugnant by today’s standards. He bears responsibility for the Indian Act and for residential schools, and there is no way to sanitize his response to criticism in the House of Commons that his government was wasting money feeding the Cree. His agents would withhold food “until the Indians were on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense,” he said.
But his principal legacy is his foundational role in this country’s Confederation. It was not for nothing that Richard Gwyn called his peerless Macdonald biography The Man Who Made Us.
The second-most important question asked by the Yale committee is of the namesake’s views in the context of the time and the place in which he or she lived. If those views were unexceptional for the era, it would support the status quo, the committee argued.
Macdonald was embedded in his time and his views were, if anything, more moderate than those of his political opponents. He worked to give the federal franchise to all adult male Indians in central and eastern Canada with the necessary property qualifications. At the time, Liberal leader Oliver Mowat, unlike Macdonald, argued First Nations had no legal title to their lands at all.
As Conservative MP Erin O’Toole noted in a recent blog post critical of “presentism,” if the criteria proposed by the Yale committee were applied in Canada to cases like the Langevin Block it would lead to the names being retained. History exists in context and Macdonald’s 47-year legislative career cannot be reduced to a single quote or act.
If the Old Chieftain’s legacy is next to go down the memory hole at the Ministry of Truth, it will be swiftly followed by that of Laurier. He boosted the Chinese head tax and also believed it was moral for Canada to take lands from “savage nations” so long as it paid compensation.
The elder Trudeau even advocated assimilation for Indigenous Canadians — when his White Paper on “Indian Policy” was rejected in 1969, he responded: “We’ll keep them in the ghetto for as long as they want.”
Nobody is safe from a revisionism that never ends.
My ingenious colleague Tristin Hopper examined Macdonald’s record as a “racist, colonizer and misogynist” on the 200th anniversary of his birth. He concluded he was “the product of an age that made Archie Bunker look like Mohandas Gandhi.”
Yet even the pioneer of non-violent protest doesn’t hold up well under the microscope of modern progressivism. Gandhi’s most recent biographers claim he believed in the Aryan brotherhood, in which whites and Indians were higher up the civilized scale than Africans.
It must be hoped his legacy as a model of non-violence, simplicity, love and determination are enough to prevent his statues being toppled next.