130 Prominent Canadians Defend John A. Macdonald's Racist Legacy In Full-Page Ad

A group of more than 130 historians and politicians are claiming Canada’s first prime minister is being judged too harshly for his role as architect of the residential school system, in a statement Indigenous scholars say amounts to whitewashing.

The statement, titled In Defence of Sir John A. Macdonald and His Legacy, says the prime minister’s racism towards Indigenous peoples must be weighed “against an impressive record of constitution and nation-building, his reconciliation of contending cultures, languages, and religions, his progressivism, and his documented concern for and friendship with the Indigenous peoples of Canada.” 

It was put together by the Friends of Sir John A. Macdonald and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and its signatories include historians Charlotte Gray and Margaret MacMillan, military historian Jack Granatstein, Conservative politicians Peter MacKay, Joe Oliver and Jean Charest (who was a federal Progressive Conservative but a provincial Liberal), commentator David Frum, and former Toronto Star publisher John Honderich. 

"The sustained attacks on monuments to Sir John A. Macdonald and the attacks on his good name in schools and at Queen's University in 2020 prompted many of us to simply say: Enough!,” said Ryerson University professor Patrice Dutil in the statement, which was published in a full-page ad in the National Post, Canada’s largest conservative newspaper, Tuesday, a day after Macdonald’s birthday. 

Last year, Queen’s decided to remove Macdonald’s name from its law school building to make Indigenous and racialized students feel more welcome. In August, activists topped a statue of Macdonald in downtown Montreal, beheading it. 

Several Indigenous academics told VICE World News the statement minimizes Macdonald’s white supremacist views and actions. 

“John A. Macdonald was all for an aryan Canada,” said Mi'kmaq elder and historian Daniel Paul, 82, describing Macdonald’s intentions with the residential school system as cultural genocide.

“It’s an unforgivable thing,” Paul said. 

More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were forcibly placed in residential schools, where they were forbidden from practicing their culture and were often subjected to physical and sexual abuse; more than 4,000 children died, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. 

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called for schools across Canada to teach students about the legacy of residential schools, but that has been met with pushback; a survey from August found that nearly half of Canadians never learned about residential schools in school. 

Paul said Macdonald was racist not only towards Indigenous peoples but Chinese men whom he excluded from voting. 

“He was quite open about the fact that Canada should be a white country.” 

Daniel Heath Justice, a professor in Indigenous studies at the University of British Columbia and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, said statements defending Macdonald are doing a disservice to history.

“If they wanted a truly balanced look at Macdonald, we would talk about not just his appalling treatment of Indigenous people, not just his avowed white supremacy. We would also maybe be talking about his very dubious financial ethics and how he was under constant assault for graft and corruption.” (The Pacific Scandal of 1873 forced Macdonald to resign after his government was accused of accepting a bribe in exchange for handing out a contract to build the Canadian Pacific Railway.) 

“If you’re interested in a balanced look at history we have to actually look at the shadows and we have to talk about the shadows not as accidental mistakes but as generationally reinforced policies,” Justice said. 

He noted that there are more Indigenous kids in state care now than went to residential schools. Black and Indigenous children in Ontario, for example, are over-represented in the child welfare system. 

Omeasoo Wāhpāsiw, a professor of arts and education at the University of Prince Edward Island who is Cree, said Macdonald’s legacy isn’t under threat. 

But she said the campaign to defend him speaks the narrative that history is “objective,” when in fact historians are affected by their own biases like everyone else. 

“The message that I attempt to send in my classes is that there are many different knowledges. And this particular message says only one knowledge matters because it is objective,” she said. 

Both Wāhpāsiw and Justice said colonialism has robbed many Indigenous peoples of their own histories and cultural practices. 

“There are so many settler Canadians who can tell you who their family was how many generations back and I can't,” Wāhpāsiw said. “And you know why? Because my history was erased.” 

Paul, who lives in Nova Scotia, said statues and relics dedicated to Halifax founder Edward Cornwallis have started to come down, in part because of the work he and others have done to expose Cornwallis’ racism. Cornwallis offered cash bounties to kill and scalp Mi'kmaq people.

But Paul said taking down monuments is not the same as erasing someone from history. 

“They want to put them on a pedestal and for the whole country to jump up and down and pay homage to them,” he said. “I’m 82 and I don’t know how long I have to go but I damn well won’t be singing the praise of John A. Macdonald.” 

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