Gee: It’s time to bring John A. Macdonald out of his confinement

Yes. And charge people for any defacing or vandalism along with a plaque or display on his role in residential schools. Same should be done for Ryerson:

…If it’s wrong to lionize our national champions, glossing over their failures and their crimes, it is equally wrong to villainize them. Most of them are neither complete heroes nor utter rogues. A true understanding of history demands we view them in the round, considering all their human complexity.

John A. Macdonald expressed some vile – and, sadly widespread – opinions about Indigenous peoples. He had many other flaws and made many mistakes in his long tenure as Canada’s dominant political leader. But as one of his leading biographers, Richard Gwyn, argued, all of this must be set against his accomplishments, among them the creation of the transcontinental railway and the North-West Mounted Police. Before he died, said Mr. Gwyn, Macdonald made sure that “Canada had outpaced the challenge of survival and had begun to take the shape of a true country.”

Here is how the Canadian Encyclopedia summarizes him: “Macdonald helped unite the British North American colonies in Confederation and was a key figure in the writing of the British North America Act – the foundation of Canada’s Constitution. He oversaw the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the addition of Manitoba, the North-West Territories, British Columbia and Prince Edward Island to Confederation. However, his legacy also includes the creation of the residential school system for Indigenous children, the policies that contributed to the starvation of Plains Indigenous peoples, and the ‘head tax’ on Chinese immigrants.”

The past few years have seen an overdue reckoning with the tremendous and lasting harms done to Indigenous peoples during European colonization. But there are other remedies than erasing names and pulling down statues. One is to raise memorials to the victims of those times. Mount Vernon has a slave memorial close to the tombs of George and Martha Washington. Another is to explain and educate. A few years ago the foundation that runs Thomas Jefferson’s plantation at Monticello, Va., unveiled a series of nuanced exhibits about Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore several children by the man who drafted the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Instead of hiding Macdonald away, why not install a display at Queen’s Park about residential schools and his role in their story? Putting the statue of our first prime minister in a wooden box achieves nothing and satisfies no one. It is time to bring Sir John A. into the light.

Source: It’s time to bring John A. Macdonald out of his confinement