‘Canada is his monument’
Re: Sir John A. Macdonald meets cancel culture, Bruce Pardy, Oct. 14
Thank you to law professor Bruce Pardy at Queen’s University for spotlighting the sad and shameful spectacle of the denaming of Sir John A. Macdonald Hall. A nice Orwellian touch.
In the cancel culture on campus, Marx is in and Macdonald is out, a scapegoat for progressive sensitivities. This pre-eminent Father of Confederation, who was on the founding committee of Queen’s and who had “an unshakeable belief in the rule of law,” is denounced and his name expunged, as officials in the law faculty bow to historical ignorance and a political agenda. How ironic.
Sanctimonious activists are pulling down one of the most important and most interesting Canadians of the 19th century. As biographer Richard Gwyn put it, “No Macdonald, no Canada.”
More than ever we need leaders with Macdonald’s vision and courage, his optimistic outlook and “great buoyancy of spirit.” Canada is his monument.
Brian Porter, Brockville, Ont.
The writer has succinctly described the most dangerous ideological challenge ever posed to modern Western nations and where it emanates from.
Critical theory, intersectionality and their affiliated theories have one thing in common: they germinated in Western universities. These theories then worked their way into the teachers and administrators at primary and secondary schools, which means that students are now subject to these ideas at a younger age and for a longer period of their development from children into adulthood.
As graduating students moved into the working world, these theories were mainstreamed into government and media and used by various groups to further particularly divisive agendas. Ask a university student about Winston Churchill and the first thing you will be told is that he was responsible for the starvation of millions in India, not that he was a key figure during the Second World War in preventing freedom and democracy from being extinguished.
This all starts at universities and can only end there, which begs the question. How do countries regain control of education systems whose members are committed to tearing down the people and ideas that have built the most successful societies in the history of humanity?
Gary Krieger, North York