A defaced statue, a monumental learning curve

So how should this community move forward after someone desecrated Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue in Baden this week? Let’s start with cool heads and open minds.

Wilmot Township, where Baden is located, has found itself in the news a lot this week. Les Armstrong, the mayor of Wilmot, twice apologized for thoughtlessly sharing a troubling “White Lives Matter” video on Facebook.

Whatever consequences he faces from local voters, he did the right thing by saying sorry and pledging to try to understand ideas he has not in the past. Yes, Mayor Armstrong: This is a time when we should all be looking to understand Canada, including its history, in new ways.

Dumping red paint on Baden’s monument to Canada’s first prime minister, however, is the wrong way to encourage this process. There’s no need for us to surrender the re-evaluation of Canada’s history to vandals and let them set the agenda. Nor can this controversy be settled by the members of an alt-right hate group who gathered at Macdonald’s statue later this week and taunted Indigenous people holding a silent vigil.

At this juncture in Canadian history, it’s crucial that the voices of Indigenous people are heard. Many of them condemn Canada’s first prime minister for the brutal colonization of Western Canada and for creating the residential school system that caused so much pain and injury for more than a century.

History is complex. How it is told depends greatly on the teller. There would likely not be a Canada as we know it today if Macdonald had not done so much over many decades to create this sea-to-sea nation that is justifiably the envy of the world. To say he was imperfect is, however, an understatement. We can remember him without honouring him.

If we remove Macdonald’s statue where do we stop? Sir Wilfrid Laurier, whose name is borne by one of Waterloo’s two universities, took away the vote from Indigenous Peoples and raised the head tax on Chinese immigrants when he was prime minister.

William Lyon Mackenzie King, whose statue also stands in Baden, was an early admirer of the Nazis and led a federal government that interned Japanese-Canadians and refused to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler.

Nor are statues of dead, white male politicians the only ones that can be problematic. Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy are revered as advocates of women’s rights and represented in the “Famous Five” statues on Parliament Hill. Yet both of these feminists proposed eugenic theories that influenced Alberta’s forced-sterilization of thousands of people who were deemed unfit to reproduce. In addition, Murphy wrote an infamous book that fuelled antiChinese racism.

Even the statue of Indigenous leader Joseph Brant in Brantford, the city named after him, might get a second look when people learn he bought and owned Black African slaves.

Sorting through this won’t be easy. But it’s imperative we address the issue. In mid-July, Wilmot Township council will discuss the future of Sir John A.’s statue and the plan to raise, in Baden, statues to every prime minister. No matter what side you come down on in this issue, it must be resolved democratically. This will require an informed citizenry, wise and attentive elected representatives and goodwill from all.

At the end, this isn’t just about statues. It’s about where we are in Canada today. We need a broader view of our own history. We need to look at who teaches it and how it’s taught. Only then can we know where we’re going.