Beware the dominoes of toppling statues
Two down, 11 statues still standing.
That’s how many can be found of our founder, Sir John A. Macdonald, across Canada, after Victoria city hall banished his visage in a gesture of “truth and reconciliation” with Indigenous people.
Do we really want to wipe out every last trace of him in all public places? Starting with the statue that dominates Queen’s Park in the centre of Toronto, culminating with all the schools named after him (as Ontario’s biggest teachers’ union demands)?
Wilfrid Laurier University purged another statue of our first prime minister in 2016, again because of Macdonald’s complicity in creating the residential schools that devastated Indigenous communities. But the university’s decision set an interesting precedent, for what if Laurier’s legacy as our seventh prime minister is later challenged — will it prompt an awkward name change on campus?
Revisiting, revising and rewriting history is nothing if not polarizing. It brings out the best in us (prompting a rethink of Canadian history lessons we neglected), but also the worst in us (poking people in the eye).
The outcry over Macdonald’s banishment from Victoria created an opening for Premier Doug Ford to play a political game of his own: His new Progressive Conservative government mischievously offered to adopt the orphaned statue and give it a home in Ontario.
Thus did Ford cheerfully drive a wedge of his own over the prime minister who drove the last spike on the old Canadian Pacific Railway that bound British Columbia to the rest of the country. Another lesson in the power of history to impinge on the present.
In Victoria, local councillors announced the uprooting after pondering the issue with Indigenous interlocutors, but without notice to the general public. At Queen’s Park, provincial cabinet ministers offered to rescue the statue without consulting anyone — Indigenous or otherwise — pandering without first pondering the implications.
Yes, Victoria politicians acted in haste, trying too hard to please everyone while placating no one. But Ontario’s Conservatives acted unnecessarily unilaterally, as the province’s only Indigenous MPP noted pointedly to the premier dur- ing the legislature’s daily Question Period.
“In today’s era of reconciliation, which First Nations leaders did this government consult with about this matter that will affect the relationship between peoples before acting quickly on behalf of the statue?” asked New Democrat Sol Mamakwa, who represents the mostly Indigenous northern riding of Kiiwetinoong. Ford didn’t deign to answer, just he never bothered to consult anyone before abolishing the standalone cabinet post for Indigenous affairs.
Truth and reconciliation must be more than a slogan. If we are to be true to the idea of truth, we cannot forget that reconciliation requires consultation and persuasion.
Ontario is already home to all but three of the 11 Macdonald statues that remain standing across Canada, and while I don’t support removing any of them, do we really need to add more at this precise time? We’ve done it before, albeit without historical controversy — King Edward VII on horseback looms over Queen’s Park, relocated to Toronto after postindependence India severed its colonial links by uprooting the statue.
Today, Macdonald’s dehumanizing descriptions of Indigenous “savages” in Parliamentary debates are cited as evidence of the prime ministerial contempt that underpinned residential schools. But such rhetoric was commonplace in the House of Commons back then — and by that decontextualized standard, we would have to indict (and uproot) not one but all the Fathers of Confederation.
If Macdonald was a product — and politician — of his times, how do we explain the assimilationist rhetoric of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chrétien,who argued in a controversial 1969 White Paper for the demolition of reservations and assimilation of their residents?
“We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want,” the prime minister said dismissively in 1970 when he was forced to back down.
Other countries that have tried to cleanse historical crimes or attenuate blunders have arrived at artful ways of placing those transgressions in context — by balancing the good with the bad in their political legacies. The founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong, is today described by the regime as having been “70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.” Whether that ratio is about right, or perhaps reversed, the point is that it wrestles with the vagaries of leadership.
Politics is always followed by historical reckonings — if not always reconciliations. Perhaps that’s why the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Sen. Murray Sinclair, has publicly opposed the removal of statues, arguing it is “counterproductive” to reconciliation — and “smacks of revenge.”
Removing statues precipitously, or reinstating them provocatively, won’t advance our understanding of history, or each other. History is about changing contexts and interpretations.
All the more reason to update our interpretations, not tear down images whose context is rooted in an earlier time.