The pretentious scrubbing of Sir John A. Macdonald

MARK BONOSKI

One of the many inconvenient truths about history is that a lot of crap happened that would not be tolerated today.

There is no question, for example, that John A. Macdonald, if looking through today’s prism, was a gin-swilling, racist and bigot who a 21st century progressive would tsk-tsk and leave to sleep it off alone in the gutter.

It’s an exaggeration, perhaps, but not much of one to witless revisionists now hogging the headlines with demands that his name be exorcised from every elementary school in Ontario.

But Macdonald, besides being multiply flawed by today’s standards, was also a political genius and this country’s first prime minister, fulfilling his promise to British Columbia by building a railroad through the Rocky Mountains.

Yes, he allowed the railroad to employ some 15,000 Chinese “coolies” to do much of the hard labour, but how is it different from the tomato farmers of today in Leamington or the tobacco growers a little further north, hauling in thousands of seasonal Mexican labourers to do the job for a few pennies above minimum wage because the locals find the pay too poor and the work too arduous? There is not a whit of difference. Now we have the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario calling on all grade schools in the province to pull Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from all their buildings because he was in power when first residential schools were approved.

Ergo, say the teachers, he was “the architect of genocide against Indigenous Peoples.”

What a pretentious lot. Now I’d be willing to wager a tidy sum that lie detectors hauled before an auditorium filled with these principled elementary school teachers would quickly expose a goodly number of alcoholics, adulterers, perverts, tax cheats and committers of all sorts of unsavoury practices that would make the devil rise from his fiery throne to give them a standing ovation.

As for our indigenous brothers and sisters, well, I cannot recall any of them apologizing for the socalled Indian wars when tribes were wiping out rival tribes in a brutal fashion befitting the times in order to expand their territories.

Perhaps there is no need for such an apology, seeing as how the white man made them pay bitterly with their ham-handed moral superiority by attempting to “kill the Indian in the child,” yanking them out of their villages, cutting their hair, stemming the flow of their Native tongue, and preaching Christianity through forced education and confinement.

That’ll teach them and, if we want someone to blame, who better than John A. Macdonald? Or Hector-Louis Langevin? Or Egerton Ryerson?

See, that’s the problem with history that has even a modicum of distance. No one condemning it today ever had to live it. They want it sanitized to reflect the values of today that have nothing to do with the values of yesteryear, if even the pretense of doing the right thing turned out horribly wrong.

But, that’s another thing about history. We’re supposed to learn from it. We are supposed to take past mistakes and not make them again.

History has always been a nasty gestation pot, but the seeds that came from it eventually led to our current liberties and freedoms.

But we obviously still have a long way to go if we believe scrubbing history will somehow change it. Future generations will hopefully look back at those trying to change history today by erasing its reminders and see them as fools.

If not, we are doomed.