A monumental problem for our nation
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s recent statements arguing against the removal of monuments to John A. Macdonald — he claims this will lead to the cancellation of Canadian history — are as ludicrous as they are specious.
That said, it should come as no surprise the same premier pushing a curriculum reform lambasted by everyone from the Alberta Teachers’ Association to the Canadian Historical Association would want statues to do the heavy lifting when it comes to the public’s historical literacy.
No historian worth their salt would argue the removal of monuments would impair the public’s ability to learn about history or undermine a given nation’s historical foundation. Even though monuments, memorials and historical markers may be historical objects, they are certainly not history incarnate.
Canada’s monumental problem isn’t fundamentally dissimilar from other contemporary cases of contested commemoration, whether it be in the United States or the United Kingdom. What’s unique to our case is that, commemoration-wise, we’re locked in a very specific historical era.
The bulk of our historical monuments date to the period 1890–1940, with a considerable number of them built in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. It goes without saying the Canada of a century ago was very different from the nation we are today, yet by and large our public commemoration remains frozen in time and no longer meaningfully reflects who we’ve become — or what we’ve learned about ourselves.
Whereas our society today demands public involvement and consultation in public commemoration, the monuments commissioned over a century ago narrowly reflected only the people, places and events deemed historically significant by the elite of that era. To that point, Montreal’s Macdonald monument (which was toppled and decapitated last year) was commissioned by local power brokers with comparatively little input from city officials. Furthermore, the monument’s unveiling in 1895 was primarily a celebration of Canada and Macdonald as components of the British Empire, not so much the creation of a new and independent nation.
With very few exceptions, monuments are static and inflexible, by their very nature reinforcing a narrow understanding of the past and providing no room for critical analysis. Rather than clarifying our understanding of history or illuminating our past, our old monuments tend to obscure it by providing only dated interpretations of history that tend to become more out of sync with society with each passing year.
We have become prisoners of an imagined past, and our monuments aren’t helping. It’s hard to scrutinize the legacies of people who are cast in bronze, often larger and more attractive than in real life, and then quite literally put on pedestals in the middle of spaces paid for, in perpetuity, by taxpayers. This being the case, it shouldn’t surprise us when the public reacts strongly to monuments that had heretofore demanded obedient and uncritical veneration.
It shouldn’t have to be said, but politicians make for poor historians. We’d be wise to stop looking to them for guidance on historical matters. Politicians tend to believe in a “great men” interpretation of history, where individuals, though sheer force of will, radically transform and alter society. This is based on a reductionist interpretation of the past where individual names are attached to significant events, as if they bear sole responsibility for the event and its legacy.
This treatment has been applied to John A. Macdonald, who is increasingly portrayed as our George Washington. This transformation of historical figures into mythological ones tends to go hand in hand with a veneration of a highly romanticized past that’s always better and grander than today, something to which politicians propose we return to. All political campaigns thus essentially boil down to “make X great again.”
We need to get comfortable — and quickly — with the idea that there is no ideal past to return to, no great leaders beyond scrutiny and no unalterable chapter in our national historical narrative. We should find the courage to deal with our past head on, because we cannot escape it and can no longer hide from it.