The reappearance of his statue at the Ontario legislature is not the end of the conversation. It should be the beginning

This summer, the Ontario government will remove the box that has, for several years, concealed the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park. It was in 2020 — after several statues across Canada had been painted, toppled and even beheaded — that Macdonald’s likeness in Ontario’s capital was boarded up.

Uncovering the statue is a welcome move. But if that’s all we do, we are likely to find ourselves back here again before long. Until Canadians are willing to revisit the actual historical facts — and in particular Macdonald’s relationship with Indigenous-Canadians — the cycle of erasure and outrage will continue.

The most widespread and damaging misunderstanding is the idea that every Indigenous child was forced by law to attend a residential school, was taken far from home, kept for years and subjected to routine abuse. This narrative has become almost universally accepted in Canada.

However, the reality is that, in many years, the majority of Indigenous children who attended school went to day schools and most of the students dropped out after Grade 1, whether at day or residential schools. These facts were well known at the time. They were discussed in Parliament and reported in mainstream newspapers.

For example, in 1946, decades after the first residential schools were built, the Globe and Mail reported that, “Of the 128,000 Indians in this country, only 16,000 last year received formal schooling. Of this number, few stayed more than a year and only 71 … reached Grade 9.”

A populist movement towards compulsory education had begun in the 1870s in Canada; by the 1940s, most Canadian children were required to attend school till at least age 15. However, the government in Macdonald’s day, and through many subsequent prime ministers, respected the wishes of Indigenous families, who were not forced to keep their children in school beyond the early grades.

Clearly, neither Macdonald’s government, nor any succeeding one, was engaged in genocide, cultural or otherwise. There were also a number of initiatives of Macdonald’s governments that likely saved tens of thousands of Indigenous lives and are equally inconsistent with the notion that he had any interest in genocide.

Smallpox killed thousands of Indigenous people in Canada in some pre-Confederation years and Macdonald’s governments, in the colonial era, and later when he was prime minister, ran programs to ensure that every Indigenous person in Canada, no matter how remote their location, was vaccinated against it, thus ending the threat.

Similarly, when the buffalo population collapsed, Macdonald immediately initiated what was certainly the largest famine relief operation in Canadian history. Moving supplies across the county when no railway existed was an enormous undertaking, and it had the usual missteps associated with a hastily organized program of this scale. However, the program likely saved thousands of lives and avoided a human catastrophe across western Canada.

A stark difference between the Canadian settlement experience and that of the Americans is the absence of war. The Americans fought a series of “Indian wars” over a period of over a century in which tens of thousands of people died.

Macdonald was determined to avoid such bloodshed. His government’s policy was to ensure that treaties were signed and in place before allowing widespread settlement in western Canada.

Finally, his government created the North West Mounted Police to protect the legal rights of both Indigenous people and settlers, and to deter incursions from the United States. As the famous Siksika Chief Isapo-muxika stated in 1877: “The Mounted Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” As a result, there were no deaths in Indian wars in Canada.

None of this means we must idolize Macdonald. But tearing down or boxing up his statue doesn’t just erase a man, it erases our shared memory and history. Statues are not about sainthood. They are about significance and shared challenges that have been overcome. Macdonald led Canada into existence. He held it together through rebellion, war and economic depression.

The reappearance of his statue at Queen’s Park is not the end of the conversation. It should be the beginning, with a plaque that tells the truth — good and bad — and with school curricula that examine his record in full. We can’t build a better country by forgetting the people and the blood, sweat and tears that got us to this point.

Greg Piasetzki is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation and an intellectual property rights lawyer in Toronto. He contributed a chapter on Sir John A Macdonald to “The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should Be Cherished, Not Cancelled.” Photo: WikiCommons.