And once we’re done with St. John A., let’s go for William Lyon Mackenzie King, who may have helped us win World War II but kept Jewish migrants out of Canada in the 1930s ....

Lisa Helps must feel a sense of satisfaction. The Mayor of Victoria has just got her city council to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from the entrance to City Hall.

But her self-described goal of “rewriting history,” getting rid of all those uncomfortable bits of history that upset some people, has clearly only just begun. We’re surrounded by history, some of it unpleasant, and just like Sir John A., Helps clearly believes it needs to be all rewritten or alternatively, just hidden.

Victoria city council voted on Thursday by a margin of 7 to 1 to remove the statue and put in storage as a form of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. According to Helps, getting rid of the statue, showing Sir John A. in quite a jaunty pose, will eliminate for Indigenous Canadians “a painful reminder of colonial violence every time they enter city hall.”

Sir John A., for those of you who failed Canadian history in primary school, can be considered the founder of Canada, its first prime minister and the driving force responsible for linking the country with a transcontinental railway. He also represented Victoria as a Member of Parliament.

But in 2018, all that counts for little. Instead, the narrative is Macdonald drank too much, had a soft spot for corruption, and helped establish the residential school system for Indigenous Canadians, which we all know now had devastating consequences for communities and individuals. So Sir John A. must now be expunged from our consciousness, a la Harvey Weinstein.

The movement to get rid of Sir John A., got its start in Ontario, naturally enough, where Macdonald spent his formative years. The Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario wants his name removed from schools in the province because his name creates “an unsafe environment for children.” Huh?

There’s clearly lots left to do, like get his name off Ottawa’s airport, the main bridge linking the capital to Quebec and the parkway along the Ottawa River. And while we’re at it, how about obliterating his face from the $10 bill? Why not replace it with a more popular visage of Canada like Celine Dion or Sidney Crosby, perhaps.

And once we’re done with St. John A., let’s go for William Lyon Mackenzie King, who may have helped us win World War II but kept Jewish migrants out of Canada in the 1930s and interned the Japanese during the war. We can always bulldoze his former estate in Gatineau Park and sell it to real estate developers.

Back to Victoria, where the mayor should get busy on the next step in rewriting her city’s history. How about the name Victoria itself? As an M.A. in history, she should know that her fair city was named for “Queen” Victoria, the ultimate symbol of colonialism and imperialism. Not only was Victoria heir to an undemocratic form of government, she ruled over an often-brutal colonial empire and was actually proud of turning half of the world atlas British red.

Talk about a painful reminder of colonialism. Plus there was all that sexual repression and overwrought architecture linked to the Victorian Era. If Macdonald needs to be put in storage, so should Victoria. And while we’re at it, can we change the name of the city’s newspaper? It’s insensitively called The Times Colonist. And the Empress Hotel? It has got to go too.

Once we’ve eliminated Victoria, how about moving on to British Columbia. Can you think of a less inclusive name for a province that’s Canada’s door to Asia? What about everybody who’s not British who makes the province home? And Columbia? Apparently, the name has its roots with Christopher Columbus, who started the whole nasty business of colonizing America with those three little ships. If only he could have stayed in Genoa.

There’s a movement underway in several U.S. cities to get rid of all statues of Columbus, who’s accused of genocide and murder for his actions in colonizing the continent. If white men hadn’t found the place, imagine how many problems could have been avoided!

Jack Knox, a columnist with the Times Colonist, has got a jump-start on the provincial renaming issue, and recently asked readers for suggestions.

The most popular alternatives were boring variants on Cascadia and Pacifica, the bland names that are popular on both sides of the border to indicate that part of the continent. The other problem is that Pacifica is the brand name of a gas-guzzling SUV, sure to upset the province’s ecologically-minded citizens.

Some readers suggested dropping the full British Columbia name but keeping the initials, either as BC or BeeCee or changing the name and keeping the initials. Among my favorite suggestions are Bud Central, Best Cannabis or Basically China.

Once we’ve renamed Victoria and British Columbia, there’s still the big one—Canada. According to historians, it comes from Kanata, the Indigenous term for “village” that Jacques Cartier came across when exploring modern-day Quebec City. He liked the name so he decided to brand the whole country as Canada. Talk about cultural appropriation!

Getting rid of all the unpleasant parts of our history might make Lisa Helps feel better. But once everything is made neat and tidy, we’ll have no idea of who we are and where we came from.

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