Article content

Sir John A. Macdonald continues to vanish from the Canadian landscape.

The latest to jump on the politically correct bandwagon is Victoria, which has removed a statue of Macdonald from in front of its city hall. It is kind of ironic, actually, considering that Victoria is named for the Queen who ruled during the Macdonald era and to whom he swore fealty as a loyal Britisher.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Lakritz: History tells a much more balanced tale of Sir John A. Macdonald Back to video

Poor Sir John A. He is the unfortunate victim of a narrow 21st-century mentality that sees him as a one-dimensional figure, someone who laid the foundation for the Indian residential schools and made derogatory comments about the need to civilize the “savages.” Therefore, he must be erased from the landscape, as if he had no more importance than a stick figure drawn in chalk on a blackboard.

Pretty soon, there will be nothing left of him, and it will be generally believed that Canada simply materialized on its own out of thin air. Of course, for all that the current generation knows of history, it probably already seems that way.

Yes, Macdonald said and did those things for which he is being censured and banished today. But he also said, “There is no paramount race in this country … ” And he wanted First Nations people to have the right to vote. Yes, you heard correctly.

Writing in the National Post in 2015, Richard Gwyn, the author of a two-volume biography of Macdonald, said: “Macdonald wanted native people to gain the franchise, an act at that time of immense symbolic importance, without losing any of their rights under either the Indian Act or any of their treaties.”

It only took almost another 100 years before anyone as enlightened as he presided over this country.

Gwyn added: “By the manner of his extension of the vote to Indians — a model of integration as opposed to the discredited alternatives of either assimilation or apartheid — Macdonald was even further ahead, almost by a century. His initiative affecting indigenous people did not out-live him, though: in 1898 it was cancelled by the newly-elected Wilfrid Laurier. Thereafter, native people continued to be denied the vote, all the way to 1960 when John Diefenbaker restored Macdonald’s initiative.”

Macdonald also wanted women to have the vote. “He wanted to amend the act so that the ’Persons’ clause would read ’Persons means men … or women who are widows or unmarried’. He anticipated the famous ’Persons’ judicial decision of 1929 by almost half a century,” Gwyn wrote.