Online profiles seen as historical whitewash
Official Macdonald, Laurier entries don’t mention residential schools, Chinese head tax
When reading through the biographies of Canada’s first prime ministers on Library and Archives Canada’s website, it becomes readily apparent that some key facts about their lives are missing.
For example, in the profile of this country’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, the words “Indigenous,” “residential schools” and “Chinese head tax” are nowhere to be found.
The “realization of his dream to build a transcontinental railway” can be found at the very top of Macdonald’s biography — but there’s no mention of the countless Chinese workers who died or were injured building it, nor the years of government-enacted discrimination Chinese immigrants would face for years afterwards.
Scholars and advocates who spoke to the Star said they were disturbed at what they described as significant omissions in online profiles maintained by a federal government agency whose mandate includes being a source of knowledge about Canada that’s accessible to everyone.
“It really is a whitewashing of history that has contributed to the ongoing nature of colonialism,” said Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society.
The Library and Archives Canada website is often consulted by students for research projects, Blackstock noted. “It actually gives an official stamp of approval to the whitewashing of history,” she said, “and it misleads another generation of children and young people into believing the mythology of Canada instead of its truth.”
The profiles are among the first Google hits when searching for prime ministers such as Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier.
Within hours Friday of a Star request for comment from the agency, notes appeared at the top of the Macdonald and Laurier biographies saying the pages had been “archived on the web.”
In a statement that followed, the agency said it “regrets that the legacy biographies of certain prime ministers and certain other pages on its website have not yet been updated and may have omissions that should be corrected.”
It noted that it maintains other web pages that document residential schools and discrimination against Chinese immigrants. “These pages, like the rest of our online content, are in the process of being reviewed, updated and enhanced,” the statement said.
But the omissions from the prime ministers’ biographies are especially troubling at a time when there are calls to remove statues and rename public spaces that celebrate historical figures without acknowledging their full histories, said
Jennifer Brant, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
“Canada is still failing to acknowledge that ‘truth’ part of ‘truth and reconciliation,’ ” said Brant, whose work includes teaching a course on Indigenous experiences of racism and colonialism in Canada.
“By continuing to erase this deep and troubled history from Canadian consciousness, we can’t really move forward toward reconciliation.”
At the very least, Macdonald’s profile should mention his role as “the architect of the residential school system in Canada, which led Canada to have to acknowledge massive human rights violations,” said Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, academic director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia.
Turpel-Lafond pointed out that Library and Archives made a commitment to adopt the calls to action made five years ago by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which studied the history and the effect of residential schools on Indigenous people.
One of those calls to action asked Library and Archives Canada to “commit more resources to its public education materials and programming on residential schools.”
She said the agency has made a significant commitment in recent years to dialogue and engaging with Indigenous people, but that the issue of the profiles must be addressed quickly. “I would like to more charitably think it’s an oversight, but again with the statutory obligation and the responsibility they bear, it can’t be excused.”
Blackstock has tried to raise similar concerns about omissions and the presentation of content on the website of Parks Canada — another federal agency — about Macdonald and other historical figures involved in the creation of residential schools.
(The website refers to information on plaques commemorating Macdonald. Parks Canada said it is completing reviews of several historic designations, including Macdonald’s.)
“I judge reconciliation not by what Canada says, but by what Canada does, and when it doesn’t even modify its own public education materials to be accurate, that’s really disturbing,” Blackstock said.
The government’s efforts under Macdonald to make immigration prohibitive for Chinese immigrants in the wake of the railway’s completion, such as the imposition of a $50 head tax on every Chinese person coming to Canada, is not mentioned on his Library profile.
The information is found on other federal government websites, however, which acknowledge a “period of legislative anti-Chinese racism,” and the view that Chinese workers were “needed as a labour force but not deemed desirable as citizens because of their origins.”
The Library and Archives profile of Laurier fails to mention his government increased the head tax to $100 in 1900 and $500 in 1903.
His profile also makes no mention of a 1911 order-incouncil he signed — but which was never invoked — that barred Black people from coming to Canada because, as the document stated, they were “deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.”
The biography makes just a passing reference to the Continuous Passage Act, which made it impossible for Indian immigrants to come to Canada.
“They’re definitely written from a white privilege position, as the colonizers, the conquerors,” said Amy Go, president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.
“All we’re asking is just state the facts of what actually happened, what the colonizers did to the Indigenous communities and did to the settlers who happened to be people of colour,” Go said.
“History is not to promote white privilege, or domination, or racism. It’s quite the opposite. It’s to include, to enhance, to increase our well-being, and to eradicate oppression and discrimination.”