Unless one has been absent from Canada for years, it’s no secret that many academics and politicians appear to be in a race to cancel historical figures. Toronto has been ground zero for this behaviour which could be taken directly from George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel 1984. That book describes a future in which the government continuously re-writes history, consigning all records, newspapers, and books that record inconvenient facts to be tossed in the “memory hole.” 

The approach has been simmering for some time in academia, but it really entered the public domain in Canada in a big way in 2020 with the arrival of the American-based Black Lives Matter movement. Suddenly, cancelling anyone who was deemed unworthy when measured against 21st-century standards became all the rage. 

In 2020, Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue at Queen’s Park in Toronto was boarded up to prevent vandalism. In 2022, Ryerson University was renamed Toronto Metropolitan University because of the supposed sins of educator Egerton Ryerson. Rather than remember Ryerson as the founder of Ontario’s system of “free” public schools and libraries, Ryerson was cancelled for merely suggesting a possible curriculum for what would later become Indigenous residential schools. 

Enter Henry Dundas, the Scottish lawyer and politician—a key figure in starting the rhetorical and legal march against slavery in the United Kingdom and Canada—but whom Toronto city council and staff thought should be wiped from city maps, i.e., Dundas Street and Dundas Square. 

The city’s former mayor, John Tory, summarized the ostensible case for renaming the famous street (and then square), based on a flawed report from city hall, this way: “An objective reading of the history, the significance of this street which crosses our city, the fact that Mr. Dundas had virtually no connection to Toronto and most importantly, our strong commitment to equity, inclusion and reconciliation make this a unique and symbolically important change.” 

Toronto city hall seems to have backed off for now on renaming Dundas Street, in part because of its potential $12.7 million dollar price tag. However, they are following through on their 2023 decision to completely re-sign/rebrand Yonge-Dundas Square by the end of this year to Sankofa Square. 

Also completed or in the works: Toronto city council has directed the Toronto Transit Commission to rename the Dundas and Dundas West subway stations, and the Toronto Public Library Board to rename the Jane/Dundas Public Library. 

But instead of accepting this revisionism from city hall, we should be taking a different approach and examining the actual facts of Dundas’ life and his contributions to Canada and the world. 

Who was Henry Dundas?  

Dundas was a major figure in both Canadian and British history and accomplished much, including for our country. He should be remembered and even cherished. But to grasp why, we must let go of the notion that virtuous ideas—the abolition of slavery—could somehow magically happen overnight, without accounting for the views and realities of the 18th century. 

Abolition was a new, radical idea in that century. For those already of that conviction, one had to first persuade others and surmount opposition. Dundas and his late 18th and early 19th century colleagues did just that. 

In 1776, as a young lawyer, Dundas waived his fees and successfully argued on behalf of Joseph Knight (who was enslaved in Jamaica and brought to Scotland), that no slave could remain a slave once they arrived on Scottish soil. On the final appeal before Scotland’s highest court, Dundas argued passionately against the inhumanity of slavery. 

This was progress. 

Add to this that Dundas was one of British Prime Minister William Pitt’s most trusted and powerful ministers during the momentous events of the French Revolution and the wars between Britain and Napoleonic France. 

Because he was a staunch abolitionist, he was also committed to ending slavery as an institution not only in Great Britain but in the British Empire and the entire world. Given his commitment to end slavery, why is Dundas criticized today? Because he was practical and saw that given the entrenched financial interests of slaveholders, and yes, the racism of the age, instant abolition of slavery was a non-starter. 

And so, Dundas amended a 1792 motion in Parliament made by the famed British abolitionist, William Wilberforce to end slavery. The original motion called for the immediate end to the slave trade. But outright abolition was clearly unrealistic at the time. Realizing this, Dundas’ amendment called for a more gradual end to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. His strategy worked, and his amended motion passed with a significant majority. 

Fifteen years later, in 1807, with the passage of the Slave Trade Act in British Parliament which outlawed slave trading (though not slavery itself ), the British navy, then the largest in the world, began a 60-year-long naval blockade to end the trade worldwide. The blockade involved stopping and searching all ships leaving the African coast and seizing and freeing any slaves they found. Later, other nations joined the blockade and the greater movement to end slavery. 

Dundas’ successful amendment in 1792 and the following end to slave trading in 1807 were thus both critical steps on the long road to the eventual worldwide abolition of slavery itself. 

Back to Canada. As Britain’s Home Secretary under Pitt, Dundas also exercised an outsized influence on the colonies that would become Canada. Importantly, that influence was wielded in support of issues that we would today describe as progressive: relating to equity, inclusion, and reconciliation. Ironically, these are the exact “commitments” purportedly justifying Toronto’s condemnation of him. 

Dundas was a close friend of John Graves Simcoe (another staunch abolitionist) and appointed Simcoe as the first lieutenant-governor of the province of Upper Canada in 1791. It was Simcoe who, two years later, would introduce the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, the very first legislation in the entire British Empire to limit slavery. 

The legislation meant that Canada became a safe haven for slaves fleeing the United States. Over the next seven decades, some 40,000 black men and women would risk their lives to escape slavery and find freedom in Upper Canada through what is now known as the Underground Railway. 

Dundas also ordered the governors of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to honour Britain’s promise of land grants to 4,000 former slaves who fought for the British against the American Revolution and to offer free passage—courtesy of the British Navy—to any who preferred to return to Africa. In 1791, Dundas instructed the English governor of Lower Canada (Quebec) to require that legislation be passed in both English and French. This was the first example of official bilingualism in Canadian history. He was, in other words, a multiculturalist and tolerant before either became “cool.” It again also showed his pragmatic side: the French were not going anywhere and needed to be accommodated. 

Given the facts of Dundas’ life and service in the cause of abolition, freedom, and tolerance, Toronto city council’s treatment of Dundas is clearly not only ahistorical but shameful. 

Such attempts become even more bizarre when you consider what Dundas Square has now been rebranded as: “Sankofa Square.” 

“Sankofa” comes from the Akan language and the Akan peoples of West Africa. This is a problem, or at least it should be, for Torontonians: the Akan were notorious slave traders. During the transatlantic slave trade, it is estimated that the Akan captured, enslaved, and sold between one to two million of their fellow Africans into slavery, or about 10 to 20 percent of the entire trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

If Toronto’s politicians from Mayor Olivia Chow on down really want to promote “reflecting on and reclaiming teachings from the past,” they should start with the truth about Dundas’ legacy. 

They should keep Dundas Street and Dundas Square named after a compassionate incrementalist, the man who helped politically engineer an end to slavery. 

Greg Piasetzki is a Toronto-based intellectual property lawyer, a Fellow of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Ontario.