Like it or not, Sir John A.’s story is the story of Canada
Flash back to 1891. After the prime minister’s death, Wilfrid Laurier, then the leader of the federal Liberal party and later Canada’s first French-Canadian prime minister, said of his Conservative opponent: “It may be said without any exaggeration whatever, that the life of Sir John A. Macdonald, from the date he entered Parliament, is the history of Canada.”
It is true. With all Macdonald’s strengths and faults, 125 years later, our first prime minister remains one of the few Canadian figures whose influence extended across the country.
Flash forward. Last month the CBC reported that the board of governors of Wilfrid Laurier University decided to remove a recently donated statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from its Waterloo campus. Vehemently expressed opinions of our first prime minster contributed to this decision. The new negativity focuses largely on his policies toward “Indians,” as the First Nations were termed in his day.
Please allow an outsider from Alberta to butt in at this point, with a suggestion for the board. I hope that you will next cast a glance at the Indian policies of the Canadian prime minister after whom your university is named. Even a cursory look will reveal that First Nations lands received little protection during Laurier’s administration. On the prairies, the Liberals pushed relentlessly to reduce reserve sizes.
Unquestionably, Macdonald was the most important Canadian politician in the formation of Canadian Indian policy after Confederation. He was the instigator of the first treaties with the Plains Indians. He approved the Indian Act of1876, and created the Dept. of Indian Affairs in 1880 to administer it. He served as the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs from 1878 to 1887. The government’s involvement with Indian residential schools formally began during his administration. His goal was the conventional wisdom of the day, accepted by Liberal and Conservative alike, the total assimilation of the First Nations. He wished to see the First Nations become full citizens of the British Empire.
Macdonald is very complex. The contradictions of his policy include his ruthless repression of the First Nations in the northwest immediately after the unrest of 1885. What is now Alberta and Saskatchewan was administered in 1885 essentially as a police state. Yet, that same year, Macdonald extended the federal franchise to adult male Indians in Central and Eastern Canada who met the property requirement — without obliging them to lose their Indian status.
Did Macdonald deliberately plot the extermination of the Prairie First Nations? If so, why, for example, did he invite two groups of Plains First Nations leaders to tour Central Canada in the fall of1886? The first from Blackfoot or Treaty Seven country in southern Alberta included the great chiefs Crowfoot and Red Crow. Macdonald invited them to his home, Earnscliffe, in Ottawa in early October. A surviving photo shows them outside his home. Two weeks later, Macdonald welcomed to Earnscliffe four chiefs from the Treaties Four and Six areas in present-day Saskatchewan, including the influential leaders Ahtahkakoop and Mistawasis.
Macdonald’s outlook toward the First Nations is indeed complex, and cannot be easily summarized. He did not understand that the Aboriginal Peoples wanted to retain their cultures and identities. Their ancestors had lived in what is now Canada for 500 or so generations. His blind spot toward the aboriginal peoples is one still shared by many non-aboriginal Canadians.
What advice can one offer the board of Wilfrid Laurier University about the acceptance of a statue of Macdonald for their campus? Perhaps in their refusal to accept, they should alter their rationale away from his Indian policies in the middle- and late-19th century. His attitudes were all very common to the age in which he lived.
The board might reject the generous tribute to Macdonald by their university’s namesake, and instead simply quote from the diary of Sir Daniel Wilson, president of the University of Toronto, who was not so charitable.
He wrote on the death of Canada’s first prime minister, “As we walked to church today a flag at half mast told the tale. Sir John A. Macdonald, premier for so many years has been lying helpless under a stroke of paralysis, and died last night. The clergyman referred in this sermon to the death of ‘the great statesman,’ which he certainly was not. A clever, most unprincipled party leader, he had developed a system of political corruption that has demoralized the country. Its evil effects will long survive him.”