Geoff Russ: Conservatives across Canada must defend Macdonald
The left wants to destroy his name, and Canada's too.
It is time for conservatives across Canada to fully embrace Sir John A. Macdonald once again. What better time to begin than now, one day after the 211th anniversary of his birth?
The COVID-era frenzy that saw his name, memory, and statues boxed up, toppled, or removed from public view is fading. In its place, a modest counter-movement has emerged that insists Canada’s foremost Father of Confederation belongs in the public square for good.
It took years, but Ontario Premier Doug Ford finally removed the wooden boards covering Macdonald’s statue at Queen’s Park. Predictably, the same voices that demanded the hoarding in the first place wailed and whinged that Macdonald is toxic and polarising, and therefore unworthy of commemoration at all.
This battle for Macdonald’s memory is a test of whether conservatives will remember that their purpose is to safeguard what is worthy.
Defending our first and founding prime minister defends the foundation and worthiness of Canada, and of Canadians as a people. For too long, custodianship of Macdonald, and Confederation for that matter, has been ceded to people who think that it was all a mistake at best, or a crime against humanity at worst.
It is not exercising moral hygiene to remove his presence from the public square. We cannot allow the deliberate hacking away at the public symbols of Canada’s legitimacy to continue without putting up a real fight.
Since 2015, monuments and tributes to Macdonald have been erased with astonishing speed, as statues disappeared from Victoria to Charlottetown to Kingston and elsewhere, while other commemorations were scrubbed from view. A country that cannot tolerate its founder in bronze is a country being trained to distrust its own origins.
There was little public demand for it. To this day, Macdonald remains one of the most admired and respected prime ministers in our history. Nonetheless, attacking him was upheld as a sort of morally respectable tantrum, with weak-kneed municipal governments hopping on the fashionable bandwagon, including Victoria’s removal of Macdonald’s statue from city hall.
The new moral map of Canada imposed by the left is one meant to make Canadians feel like squatters in their own home, which they insist is “stolen land”. In that worldview, Canada itself is the problem, not one policy, one injustice, or one flawed leader.
For all the pro-Canada rhetoric summoned by the left over the past year due to Donald Trump’s rhetorical threats, they will still insist that Canadians apologise for their existence. For example, B.C. NDP Premier David Eby has described British Columbia as requiring a correction for the “original colonial mistake.”
B.C. and Canada have colonial origins, but neither was a mistake. Both were deliberate attempts to forge societies and outposts of ordered liberty in the English tradition, the sort that has produced the most prosperous and just societies in the history of mankind.
Conservatives should not be naïve about the possibilities of dialogue with the left, for they will always assign a guilty verdict to both Macdonald and Canada, no matter how earnestly you try to debate them in good faith. Their only goal is to replace our national story with theirs, one in which Canada is illegitimate and sustained only by coercion. In this false portrayal, Canada can only be “fixed” by transferring power away from democratic institutions and into the hands of permanent grievance management.
There is no honest consensus to be had where conservatives can only plead and bargain for a little more Macdonald in the public sphere, shrink-wrapped in “context”, as part of the price for being tolerated by the left. That bargain is a mirage, because every concession becomes the new boundary to be dissolved by the next demand.
How can you argue for the man when so many bureaucrats and overly open-minded politicians have accepted the slanderous framing of Macdonald as an “architect of genocide”? If that language is the baseline, there is no real possible discussion about history or legacy. It is a moral veto, designed to end debate rather than win it.
Macdonald did not invent or begin the residential school system, nor were his bigotries unique within mainstream thought in the 19th century. The “genocide” charge has been refuted by leading Canadian historians, but that has had no effect on the left’s efforts to destroy his name, and might have even emboldened them.
Apart from the rare and appreciated federal Liberals willing to speak bravely about Canada’s history, politically rehabilitating Macdonald will have to be an effort led by conservatives, if only to stand up for their own parties.
The Progressive Conservative parties of Ontario and the Maritimes are the institutional inheritors of Macdonald’s legacy. In 1867, they became, or began as, the provincial allies of the original Conservative Party and the Macdonald-led faction among the Fathers of Confederation.
Great leaders make history. Collective forces do exist, but it is the exceptional men and women who lead us on the path. Macdonald, more than any other person, willed Canada into existence. His vision of a permanent country has rarely been matched, and never more fully realised.
The movement to restore him is worth the time and effort. It is essential to repair and restore his monuments and other tributes wherever possible, and to push other organisations to do the same. If context must be added, it should be done without the outlook of national self-loathing, or conceding the false premise that Canada is a living, breathing crime scene.
Refusing to defend Macdonald is surrender. If you want Canada, you do not get to erase the man who made it.
Geoff Russ is the Editor-at-Large of Without Diminishment. He is a contributor to a number of publications, including the National Post, Modern Age, and The Spectator Australia.
