Gee: Toronto District School Board should reconsider the decision to rename three schools

2025/02/11 Leave a comment

Agree:

…None of this seems to have made the slightest impression on the TDSB, Canada’s biggest school board. A report that went to the board’s governance and policy committee on Jan. 27 noted that, under a section of the “Revised Naming Schools, Teams and Special-Purpose Area Procedure,” the TDSB was undertaking a “proactive critical review of school names.” Dundas, Ryerson and Macdonald are the first three to be sentenced to deletion.

The report says that for some students, the names might act as “a potentially harmful microaggression.” It goes on: “Having to enter school buildings commemorating such individuals may even contribute to mental-health triggers which negatively impact students, staff or families’ ability to effectively participate in the school environment.”

It may not occur to the kids rushing to gym class in Dundas Junior Public that they are the victims of microaggression (if they even know who Dundas was), but the TDSB is going to protect them from it all the same.

As for the cost of making new signs, plaques and team jerseys with whatever name is chosen to replace the three forbidden ones, well, not to worry. The report says that the changes “will be implemented within the existing budget framework.”

What the board seems to have missed is that the climate on historical erasure is changing. Most people don’t much like being called settlers in their own country, even if they accept that great crimes were committed against its original inhabitants in the process of settlement.

A reaction against all this is one reason that Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives has been leading in the opinion polls and that the abysmal Donald Trump is in the White House again.

Decent countries acknowledge their past sins while also celebrating their virtues. It is a balancing act, hard to get right. Schools are a good place to learn it. They should be teaching students about residential schools and slavery, Expo 67 and Terry Fox. They should be showing them that history is more than a simple story of heroes and villains. They should be asking them to debate the record of names like Dundas, Ryerson and Macdonald, gathering all the evidence and weighing the good against the bad.

What they should not be doing is stripping those names from their front doors.

Source: Toronto District School Board should reconsider the decision to rename three schools

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Lynn McDonald: A new museum to reclaim our history from those who want to topple it

2023/06/08 Leave a comment

The appropriate counter reaction?

Winnipeg is justly proud of its Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which opened in 2014, but we need a new museum in Canada to flag current concerns: a Canadian Museum of Misinformation, or possibly the Canadian Propaganda Museum. Whatever the title, Toronto deserves to have it.

The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in front of the provincial legislature, Queen’s Park, is currently boarded up. Of the nine other Macdonald statues in the country, only the one on Parliament Hill is still in view. The others were put into storage, often after being defaced or, as with statue in Montreal, beheaded.

Toronto can also boast about beheading the statue of Egerton Ryerson, who brought us free public  schools and free public libraries. The misinformation on him amounts to reversing his pro-Indigenous work — he was named a “brother” by an Ojibway chief and given an Ojibway name for his support. Yet at what was then known as Ryerson University, he was condemned as being responsible for the Indian residential school system.

Toronto’s other great trump card in the misinformation game is Dundas Street, which was named after Henry Dundas, whose work as a lawyer led to the abolition of slavery in Scotland in 1778. Yet his Toronto detractors — thousands signed a petition against him — make him responsible for delaying the abolition of the slave trade in 1792.

His supposed offence was to get an amendment adopted in the British House of Commons to make abolition gradual. A motion tabled in the previous year, 1791, for immediate abolition failed miserably, 163-88. And, as a statement of opinion, rather than a law, it would have had no effect.

Detractors, however, like to have a culprit to blame, as opposed to the many economic and political circumstances at play, in this case the French Revolutionary Wars, which meant that the Royal Navy had to be on guard against invasion from two pro-slavery countries — France and Spain.

Dundas understood, as other well-meaning advocates for abolition did not, that the slave trade could not be ended by passing a law in one country. Slave owners in the West Indies could simply buy new enslaved people from ships carrying false papers and a false flag — Spain, Portugal and France all continued their slave-trading businesses.

Yet in 2021, Toronto city council adopted a motion to rename Dundas Street, without even holding the public inquiry promised by both council and the mayor.

What to put in the museum? A statue of Sir John A. Macdonald is a must, and the one taken down in Victoria would be ideal. The mayor of Victoria at the time had it removed to prevent it from being vandalized.

A particularly fine statue, it was commissioned by the Sir John A. Macdonald Historical Society and given to the city. The society is now looking for a home for it in Glasgow, Scotland, where Macdonald was born. Toronto should speak up before it’s too late.

The new museum should also display the Ryerson statue, either in its parts (oh the shame) or put together again. For educational purposes, the plaque placed next to it at the university should be displayed at the museum.

It makes the accusation that Ryerson was “instrumental in the design and implementation of the residential school system,” when he had nothing to do with either — rather, he supported the voluntary, bilingual day schools that Indigenous parents and leaders wanted.

The task force that recommended dropping the Ryerson name from the university and permanently removing his statue did so on the basis that he was “associated” with the residential schools. It provided no evidence for such a charge, nor is any available. His lack of responsibility for residential schools was confirmed at a meeting of the university’s senate on Oct. 5, 2021, after the board of governors announced the name change.

It would be important for the museum to set out the sequence of accusations, who made them and any evidence for or against them. It would be highly desirable, as well, for the museum to reveal the university’s concerted efforts to prevent any information getting out about what communications it received for and against the name change.

Otherwise, we have to take it on faith, just as on Chinese interference in Canadian elections, and without even a former governor general to assure us that we can believe what we are told

Lynn McDonald is a former member of Parliament and a fellow with the Royal Historical Society.

Source: Lynn McDonald: A new museum to reclaim our history from those who want to topple it

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Egerton Ryerson doesn’t deserve an anti-Indigenous label: Smith

2017/07/07 Leave a comment

Good historical account of Ryerson’s life and relationships with some Indigenous persons by Don Smith:

A variant of the line “those who forget history are condemned to repeat it” could be “those who are ignorant of history are condemned to ignorance:”

As a Canadian historian of nearly half a century’s standing, I find the current controversy over Egerton Ryerson, the namesake of Ryerson University, totally baffling. I wonder how deeply his critics have probed into the past of the founder of the modern Ontario public-school system. Their portrayal of him as anti-Indigenous misrepresents the man completely.

Egerton Ryerson (1803-1882) was a Christian minister. Perhaps this is the central problem. As the University of British Columbia anthropologist Kenelm Burridge said so well in his book, In the Way: A Study of Christian Missionary Endeavours (1991): “Whatever missionaries do or have done will be perceived as good by some, otherwise by others.”

At the Credit Mission, located in what is now Mississauga, young Egerton set out in 1826/27 to learn Ojibway. As he later wrote: “I must now acquire a new language, to teach a new people.” The first Methodist (now the United Church) minister to the Mississauga (Ojibwa, or Anishinabeg) acquired a basic speaking knowledge. The future Mississauga chief, Kahkewaquonaby (Sacred Feathers), known in English as Peter Jones, became a close life-long friend. The Credit Mississauga liked Ryerson. He rolled up his sleeves, worked beside them in the fields, ate and lived with them. He gained their respect. At a council meeting in December, 1826, they gave him the Ojibway name of one of their deceased chiefs: “Cheechock” or “Chechalk.” The name meant “Bird on the Wing.”

A decade later, Ryerson did his best to advance the studies of Henry Steinhauer or Shahwahnegizhik, an Ojibwa from the Lake Simcoe area, at the Methodist College that is now Victoria University in the University of Toronto. In the 1850s, Ryerson, as the superintendent of education for Canada West, welcomed Allen Salt, a Mississauga from the Rice Lake area near Peterborough to the Toronto Normal (teacher training) School, the predecessor of what is now Ryerson University.

So grateful was Steinhauer for his assistance and encouragement that he named one of his sons Egerton Ryerson Steinhauer. At Rev. Salt’s last mission on Parry Island (Wasauksing) on Georgian Bay, the mission day school bore the name Ryerson. Only recently was the First Nations day school renamed, to Wasauksing Kinomaugewgamik.

As educational historian Robin Harris wrote in 1959: “Ryerson was Christian, first, last, and all the time; his religious principles were his first principles.” Yes, he had a Christian agenda, but he also supported the Credit Mississauga’s fight for a title deed to their Credit River reserve and their efforts to build a strong economic base for their community.

Ryerson was not the creator of the Indian residential-school system. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1. The History, Part 1. Origins to 1939 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), pp. 75-78, clarifies his outlook toward Indigenous education. In 1847, he did write a short report on Indian boarding schools where older male students could learn European-style agriculture.

In preindustrial Ontario, farming was the motor of the economy. As his educational model, he favoured the respected Hofwyl School for the Poor near Berne, Switzerland.

Jones and Ryerson were true friends, perhaps best described as “blood brothers.” Toronto’s Dundas Square borders Victoria Street. The site ofRyerson’s home 150 years ago is located toward the eastern end of the urban park. Its actual site is now under Dundas Street East.Ryerson welcomed Mr. Jones and his wife to stay with his family for a month in the spring of 1856 while Ryerson sought the best medical advice to restore Jones’s health. After the attempt to find a cure failed, Jones returned to his home in Brantford, where he died two weeks later. As Jones had requested while he stayed at the Ryerson’s that spring, Ryerson gave the eulogy at his funeral on July 1, 1856.

To describe Egerton Ryerson, or Chechalk as the Mississauga called him, as anti-Indigenous misses the mark. Back to you, Ryerson Students’ Union, for further study.

Source: Egerton Ryerson doesn’t deserve an anti-Indigenous label – The Globe and Mail

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