The Case For John A Macdonald.

The case for Sir John A. Macdonald and his problematic legacy 

The Market Place of Ideas 

July 18,2022

The cry of people who regard the founding of our country and it's found father, John A MacDonald as problematic have grown increasingly vocal within the last number of years.

The cries to tear down statues that bear his image,Or strick his name from universities,and hospitals have reached a fever pitch.

Regardless of how you feel about him  Macdonald, is owed our thanks and gratitude for forming the country Canadians call home.

He is however deserving of  your contempt and disgust for some of the most egregiously horrendous human rights violations that have ever been recorded.

All Canadians deserve to hear the full magnitude of the remarkable story of Macdonald’s legacy it is one of great accomplishment and fortitude.

The ability to create a modern day country takes a great degree of confidence.

This great nation would surely never have come to be without him.

Alongside his contemporaries like George-Étienne Cartier, their cabinet set out to take on the massive task of creating Canada.

He led the original Confederation effort, persuaded three other provinces to join Canada, hugely expanded Canada’s territory, dissuaded American expansionism, and brought economic stability, promoted unity between Canada’s language and religious factions.

Along with all this monumental work,

One of Macdonald's greatest achievements in the eyes of some Canadians past and some present was building a successful national government. 

He also forged the new Dominion, using patronage to create a strong Conservative Party, promoting the protective tariff of the National Policy, and completing the railway.

However in the same breath he was instrumental in disregarding,and displacing the numerous first nations  peoples who had been stewards of this land for thousands of years prior to colonialist rule. He was a key figure in establishing the residential school system. Where religious instruction and discipline became the primary tool to “civilize” indigenous people and prepare them for life as mainstream Canadians. 

Even though the goal of trying to remove the Indian from his or her  culture and language failed it was  not for lack of trying on the part of Macdonald.

He authorized the creation of hundreds of residential schools and granted government funds for those that were already in place.

Many detractors of the policies argued that the children of indigenous peoples should stay within their communities.

However John A MacDonald and his cabinet disagreed as he would be quoted

“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages… He is simply a savage who can read and write." 

Now it would have been wonderful if these institutions actually were there to help and educate their students,unfortunately these  schools were schools only in name.

They should have been places of safety and learning, regrettably they were truly horrendous institutions of misery and pain.

Records show that everything from speaking an Aboriginal language, to bedwetting, running away, smiling at children of the opposite sex or at one's siblings, provoked whippings, beatings, and other forms of abuse and humiliation.

Residential schools in conjunction with the catholic church and the later polices of the  "sixties scoop" created a long and sustained culture of unnecessary suffering and pain. 

All of which created a legacy  of trauma  which came back to the surface to further haunt our Aboriginal communities to the present day.

Last year  an anthropologist detected ground disturbances on radar at Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021, they concluded that these were 215 "probable burials" (this number was later revised to 200).

"The graves could no longer hold its secrets and it was almost as if mother earth was shouting there here".

Said a residential school survivor last year while talking to global news.

Since the schools were expected by the Department of Indian Affairs to keep costs as low as possible there was a lack of nutritious food and proper medical supplies. Many students were forced to do strenuous manual labour. Survivors of residential schools have reported that they experienced sexual and mental abuse, beatings and severe punishments. Overcrowded living conditions were common and children were forced to sleep outside in the winter in some cases.

Outbreaks of disease led to the creation of mass graves when the schools had insufficient staff to bury students individually. 

However, across the entire residential school system, the number of identifiable children who are documented as having died while in their custody is over 4,100 individuals; the fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada had previously "identified 3,200 deaths before further findings revealed even more lost lives.

The pain and intergenerational trauma of residential schools cannot be placed solely on John A Macdonald, due to the fact that Indian residential schools operated in Canada between the 1870s and the 1990s.The last Indian residential school was closed in 1996. So there were 23 Priministers that had these policies in place during their terms. 

All of this leads us to where we are in present day.

We must look at Macdonald as he was and weigh his actions based on not only his impressive record of constitution and nation building, but also his complete and utter disregard for Indigenous peoples of Canada. He was quoted as saying"The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.” With no Indians there would be no treaties and the land could just be taken outright.

While some would be willing to do away with John A Macdonald's, statue's and plaques.

The attacks to remove monuments to Sir John A. Macdonald are problematic and dangerous.

It is easy to criticize the past and the decisions made there. But it is an even worse decision to try to remove, and whitewash the past.

Like John A Macdonald's outlawing the potlatch

Calling for “an iron hand on the shoulders” of Indigenous peoples, Macdonald outlawed the potlatch or the Indian dance known as the “Tamanawas”.

Anyone found in violation of this ruling was guilty of a misdemeanor, and liable to imprisonment for up to a maximum of six months in jail.

Macdonald even extending his racism to the Chinese migrant workers as well by imposing a head tax on any of the workers who would die on the railroad and attacked their right to vote. 

As he said in 1885, “When the Chinaman comes here he intends to return to his own country; he does not bring his family with him; he is a stranger, a sojourner in a strange land, for his own purposes for a while; he has no common interest with us…has no British instincts or British feelings or aspirations, and therefore ought not to have a vote.”

However he didn't let Asian  workers have all the fun he also denied the right  to vote to Indigenous people, women, people with disabilities, and men without property.

When people fought back against these policies John A McDonald made an example of them.

His brand of justice would fall heaviest on  Aboriginal leaders. 

He proudly used the ancient British high treason law to murder Métis leader Louis Riel. As Macdonald said, “He shall hang, though every dog in Quebec shall bark in his favour.” 

Macdonald also incarcerated Cree Chief Poundmaker, and used a mass execution of Cree warriors as a public display of his power.

Macdonald was also particularly found of using starvation as a weapon against Indigenous peoples. 

As James Dascuk documented in Clearing the Plains: Politics, Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, 

“For years, government officials withheld food from Aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.”

In addition to all this the hits kept coming 

Due to the Red River Resistance of 1869, Macdonald sent a military force, to show those“Impulsive half breeds" a thing or two.

That Military would become the North West Mounted Police the forefather to the RCMP, that would go on to crush the North West Rebellion of 1885. 

Rather then destroy and hide the sins of the past they need to be presented in the light and exposed. John A MacDonald should not have his utter contempt of our nation's actual founding fathers and first nations peoples deleted from the memory of history.

True patriots hold their leaders,past and present to the the high standard that their position garnered.

Let us be crystal clear Sir John A. Macdonald is owed a massive amount of thanks and our unbridled anger.

He was the definition of a walking contradiction.

He was a politician of his time a strong voice for this great country, and the reason Canada is a nation.

However at the same time he was a truly flawed individual, a colonizer, 

a misogynist and a unapologetic racist who lacked empathy for the Aboriginal people that he played a central role in displacing.  

If future generations are to do better we must learn and grow from our past not remove it or silence it.

The countless Aboriginal victims who suffered under the Indian Act and other numerous racist policies,deserve far better than that.

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