Boards encase a statue of Canada's first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, at the base of the lawn of Queen's Park in Toronto on June 21.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Sixty seconds isn’t very long to tell a story, particularly one as sprawling as that of Canada’s first prime minister.
So, the Heritage Minute video on Sir John A. Macdonald necessarily limits itself to a critical moment in his life, the 1864 Charlottetown Conference that laid the foundation for Confederation three years later. “Gentlemen, the time for union is now. I ask you to take the dare,” a jaunty Macdonald says at the end of the video, capturing the audacity that was needed to create Canada.
Not mentioned in those 60 seconds are the creation of cross-continental railways, the westward expansion of Canada, the Pacific Scandal – or his central role in creating the federal residential school system that brutalized generations of Indigenous children.
All of that is part of Macdonald’s legacy. And all of that was clear in 2014, when Historica Canada published its Heritage Minute spot, in part because it had commissioned a poll that showed 42 per cent of respondents could not name Canada’s first prime minister.
Then, in July 2021, Historica quietly unpublished the Heritage Minute about Macdonald (a fact that flared up online last week). What had changed?
The answer is to be found two months earlier, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation revealed that ground-penetrating radar had indicated the existence of 200 potential unmarked graves on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops.
That discovery thrust the tragedy, and crimes, of the residential school system into full public view and led to widespread repudiations of Macdonald. Statues were torn down. His name was dropped from buildings and an Ottawa freeway.
Historica’s unpublishing was a part, if only a small part, of that effort. (The organization says it will republish the Macdonald video this fall, after three years, with added context, including new material for its Canadian Encyclopedia.)
Curiously, though, Macdonald’s successors were not swept up in that wave of repudiation. Wilfrid Laurier was prime minister when the government was warned in 1907, in unmistakable terms, that tuberculosis was running rampant in residential schools, leading to high death rates among students. The Laurier administration did not act.
That was just one chapter in the tragedy and violence wreaked upon Indigenous children, over decades.
R.B. Bennett was prime minister when Ottawa gave itself the power in 1933 to strip Indigenous parents of legal guardianship over their children. In 1956, Louis St. Laurent was prime minister when the Department of Indian Affairs recommended that residential schools be closed. His administration did not act, allowing new generations to be traumatized.
It took four more decades before the last residential school closed. Eighteen prime ministers served in office while the system was in place. So why the focus on Macdonald?
Certainly part of the answer has to do with the fact that Macdonald was a loud voice for the assimilation of Indigenous people – stamping out their culture by vicious means. He promoted that cause using language that to modern ears is grotesquely racist. It’s fair to say that without his efforts, residential schools would not have become a federal institution, and a national shame.
But after his death, his successors ensured that residential schools continued well into the modern era. There is more than enough culpability to go around.
Another part of the answer, for some, is the effort to portray this country as an illegitimate state occupying stolen land – the notion of a “so-called Canada.” The history of Macdonald and Canada are inextricably intertwined. Obscuring Macdonald’s accomplishments by focusing on his misdeeds aids in slandering Canada as a fundamentally racist entity.
Lastly, the focus on Macdonald’s sins serves to unjustifiably exculpate not just the prime ministers who allowed residential schools to continue, but the rest of the country. A proper reading of history is that a succession of federal governments and generations of Canadians were, at best, indifferent to the suffering of tens of thousands of Indigenous children. They – we – did not care enough to save them.
Facing that fact is hard indeed. Far easier, then, to tear down a statue, or to delete a video.