New foes emerge against Halifax statue

Somewhere in Halifax, a large statue honouring British commander Edward Cornwallis – founder of the historic port city – is gathering dust.

In a move that made international headlines, city council ordered the statue cut from its downtown pedestal and hauled away this winter amid a heated debate over Cornwallis’s role in a bloody conflict with Nova Scotia’s Indigenous people in the mid-1700s.

Local resident Beth Anne Maceachen says the statue should never have been erected in the first place.

“He didn’t deserve that type of notoriety,” she says. “To celebrate him is not what we should be doing.”

But the source of Maceachen’s disdain for Cornwallis extends beyond his sordid deeds in Canada.

Cornwallis, as it turns out, was no friend of Scottish Highlanders, many of whom would later emigrate to Nova Scotia, which is Latin for New Scotland.

“I don’t think Nova Scotians realize that what happened with the Mi’kmaq was part of a second wave of Cornwallis’s cruelty ... It wasn’t taught in school,” says Maceachen, a descendant of Scottish immigrants and president of The Scots North British Society, based in Halifax.

“If they knew about Cornwallis and what he did to their great, great, great grandparents ( in Scotland) ... then more people would be up in arms about this monument.”

Almost a third of Nova Scotia’s residents can trace their roots to Gaelic-speaking settlers from the islands and Highlands of Scotland, according to the provincial government’s Office of Gaelic Affairs.

To this day, about 2,000 residents still speak Gaelic, and the language is taught at the Gaelic College in Cape Breton.

Still, it’s a safe bet most Nova Scotians have no idea what Cornwallis did before he founded Halifax with a group of settlers and soldiers in June 1749.

“He, as a figure, is not someone I would want to celebrate, knowing my history,” says Allan Macmaster, member of the provincial legislature for the Cape Breton riding that shares its name with the Scottish city of Inverness.

Macmaster, whose ancestors came from the Highlands to Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, says the British had engaged in the systematic “ethnic cleansing” of Gaelic Highlanders for hundreds of years, and Cornwallis was part of that deadly drive.

“What Cornwallis did (in Nova Scotia) to the Mi’kmaq was no different than the attitude that was shown to the Gaels in Scotland,” says Macmaster.