University moves on from Macdonald
Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., has stripped the name of Canada’s first prime minister from the building that houses its law school, and on Monday, the school’s board of trustees approved the decision, saying it came about following two months of consultations.
Those consultations resulted in feedback from more than 3,000 “members of the Queen’s community,” which were then put into a 65-page report by an advisory committee that recommended the name Sir John A. Macdonald no longer grace the building.
The report said the committee “consistently heard from Indigenous, racialized and marginalized groups that the current name of the law school building creates feelings ranging from exclusion to trauma.”
“Our recommendation is based on the terrible harm Sir John A. Macdonald’s actions, from a position of the highest possible leadership, had on generations of people,” the report said.
The university will, at some point, come up with a procedure to rename the building.
In a separate note to those in the law school, dean Mark Walters conceded, “this decision will be very troubling, and even incomprehensible, for some of you,” but encouraged observers to read the report to understand the decision.
“To remove the Macdonald name from the building is not to condemn Macdonald’s character or to dismiss his contributions to Canada,” Walters wrote. “Removing Macdonald’s name from the law school building may be seen as one small way of honouring the underlying values that animate the constitution that Macdonald helped to frame.”
The legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald has been a focal point for a reckoning over Canada’s history. While Macdonald indeed presided over Canada’s foundation, he also was responsible for racist policies toward Indigenous peoples and other groups.
Statues of Macdonald in his hometown of Kingston and in Montreal, have been vandalized in recent months. Irate Macdonald defenders have also stormed public squares, condemning the reconsideration of his historical legacy.
Bruce Pardy, a law professor at Queen’s, recently wrote in the National Post about Macdonald’s rewritten legacy. “The test for tearing down statues and cancelling historical figures has become whether their values and behaviour conform to modern progressive sensibilities,” Pardy wrote. “Only monuments to the likes of Castro, Lenin and Mao have a shot at satisfying that criterion.”
Many of those who wrote to the Queen’s committee about the statue expressed concerns about erasing history or argued that Macdonald’s views weren’t that out of step with the time. Some condemned “virtue signalling.”