The Fight Over Canada’s Founding Prime Minister
The memory of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, is not thriving these days in the country he brought into being. In 2018, his image was removed from the Canadian $10 bill, which it had decorated since 1971. His name has been quietly scrubbed from the Ottawa airport named in his honor in 1993. In August 2020, vandals toppled statues of Macdonald in Montreal and in Kingston, Ontario. (The city of Kingston legally removed that statue on June 18—a special blow to Macdonald’s memory in the city he represented in Parliament throughout most of his career.) This summer, the province of Prince Edward Island removed a modern statue of Macdonald from its capital, Charlottetown. Even the small town of Picton, Ontario, where Macdonald argued his first law cases, will soon remove a statue erected with donations from local residents, my wife’s family among them. Macdonald’s name has been erased from university and school buildings, and even book prizes.
These changes are not driven by public opinion. A 2018 poll by the Angus Reid Institute found that 70 percent of Canadians opposed the erasure of Macdonald’s image, compared with only 11 percent who supported it. Another poll in summer 2020 found that 75 percent of Canadians opposed the “spontaneous” teardown of Macdonald statues.
In his lifetime, Macdonald often remarked, “Forms are things.” Attacks on symbols of nationhood are not merely symbolic actions. They strike at the nationhood the symbols represent. By the standards that would have extended suffrage to property-owning unmarried women and widows. As attorney general of the pre-confederation province of Canada, he to protect escaped American slaves from extradition. His government persuaded the British government in 1862 to pass a new habeas corpus act that imposed new restrictions on cooperation with U.S. slave hunters. He welcomed Jewish immigration to Canada and for a long time strenuously but unsuccessfully to exclude Chinese immigrants (he later flip-flopped when he saw that the cause was lost). He headed a political coalition that bridged Canada’s great divide between French speakers and English speakers—and worked all his life for accommodation and respect between the two mutually suspicious cultures. Macdonald shared many of the prejudices of his time—as you and I share the prejudices of ours. Perhaps our prejudices will look better a century and a half hence than Macdonald’s look now. Perhaps not.
