A complex man
John Alexander Macdonald is a polarizing figure, but his legacies are worth reconsidering
Covers of John A.: The Man Who Made Us (2008) and Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times (2011) by deceased Canadian historian Richard Gwyn.
“Politics is a game of requiring great coolness and an utter abnegation of prejudice and personal feeling.”
— John A. Macdonald’s maxim to rule, in Gwyn, 2008, p. 200
Overview
John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister and the reason Canadians exist today, is venerated and condemned passionately. As a Canadian and lover of books, I wanted to learn about the man myself, so I decided to read Richard Gwyn’s two-part biographical series on Canada’s founding father: John A.: The Man Who Made Us (2008) and Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times (2011).
Gwyn is a Canadian author and historian who, sadly, passed away on 15 August 2020. Reading both books in the series is important and necessary since Ontario’s public school system was lousy at educating me about my country’s history. As an adult with limited knowledge of my country’s past, I decided to take matters into my hands.
For this blog post, I will mostly focus on Macdonald’s character and his legacies on Indigenous people and other Canadians.
Some things worth mentioning
Duly note that I am neither a historian nor academic. The purpose of this blog post is to present some key details about Macdonald’s record that I found helpful to me personally.
I do not support removing statues of Macdonald or renaming public infrastructure bearing his moniker. I am aware that many groups, particularly Indigenous Canadians, are rightly appalled by the presence of Macdonald’s statues. Steve Paikin’s (2020) suggestion is wise to keep the figures and add plaques describing his character and legacy to help educate passersby of the nuances and facts of controversial events and people. I would add, however, that Canada should erect statues of notable Indigenous Canadian figures as well since, unfortunately, their history is often ignored, and too few people bother to read plaques. The symbolism is necessary, and it is our responsibility as Canadians to engage with our history maturely and honestly, rather than perpetually self-flagellating.
Indigenous people are often relegated to mere footnotes or textboxes in public school textbooks. I, for one, did not know of Indigenous residential schools or the Sixties Scoop until my second-year Canadian Politics course at the University of Ottawa. I do not recall learning of these events in secondary school in Ontario, where only one history course was mandatory at the time. This must change if we wish to accomplish both Truth and Reconciliation across our politically, regionally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse country.
I encourage everyone to learn more about Macdonald from reading both of Richard Gwyn’s books and other reliable resources to formulate and challenge their preconceived notions. Do not solely rely on this blog post or Gwyn’s books.
Who was John A. Macdonald, the man?
This subsection will focus primarily on Macdonald’s personality, work ethic, and overall impressiveness. I choose to highlight these aspects of historical characters because I find them inspirational and helpful when handling life’s circumstances. Reading autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs is more stimulating than boring self-help, pop psychology books on the New York Times’s best-selling list. Learning the histories of real people with skin in the game, for me at least, is far more practical and entertaining.
Many modern Canadians can probably relate to Macdonald’s circumstances. To start, Macdonald migrated to Kingston from Glasgow when he was a young child, for similar reasons why many come to Canada today: hardship, poverty, and a land-owning aristocracy back home (Gwyn, 2008, p. 9). The Macdonalds sought upward mobility and a better chance at an honest, decent life – just like the rest of us. Unfortunately, he remained poor since his father, Hugh Macdonald, managed businesses poorly.
Aside from living in near-perpetual poverty because of his father’s incompetence and imprudence, Macdonald was called “Ugly John” because of his dark curly hair and big nose, but he made up for it with wit and humour (p. 31). What is the lesson here? We all have strengths and talents; we need to learn and harness them and shake off the negativity.
Macdonald was a pragmatic man of action, not an intellectual. Gwyn explains this is likely because he descends from Scottish highlanders (p. 10-11), a hearty breed who get on with work and plug away, rather than incessantly intellectualizing (p. 294). One can only speculate that if he were an overthinker and ponderer, he probably would never have accomplished his goal of Confederation but instead merely wrote about it like an academic, journalist, or public intellectual.
Luck often plays a vital role in one’s success, so it was the case for Macdonald. Gwyn explains that because he was a Scott, Macdonald could travel up and within the circles of other extraordinarily successful Scots while benefiting from the amicable relationship between French and Scottish Canadians (p. 44). According to Gwyn, unifying the country would have been harder for an Irishman or Englishman due to the deep-seated acrimony between the two and the French in early British North America.
But luck usually never suffices. Macdonald, indeed, was an exceptional politician because he worked at it. He read widely, studying for hours in the library, which allowed him to have the evidence necessary to craft cogent arguments for legislative debates (p. 102). His work ethic, combined with an exceptional memory and sense of humour that was never nasty or impertinent, garnered respect from his peers, despite his disadvantage of having a low voice (p. 105). He also compensated with candour and a willingness to listen to other people (p. 275). Macdonald exemplifies how we can be exceptional at our jobs without being crude, mocking, or mean, so long as we put in the work, a lesson that will likely always ring true regardless of our industry or colleagues.
Despite his strengths, like everyone else, Macdonald is imperfect and prone to mistakes. He initially thought the western prairie regions were useless (p. 225) and that the American south would succeed in the Civil War. Gwyn notes that Macdonald was also on the wrong side of history because he privately supported the Confederate South as they were more conservative and British in character (p. 245). And, as Canadians are aware, he was a binge drinker, regularly inebriated when enduring challenging circumstances in his career or personal life (p. 2011, p. 232-238), which was common amongst men of all occupations for his time (2008, p. 265).
Despite Gwyn’s assertion that Macdonald embodied “Burkean prudence and experience” (2008, p. 296), Macdonald’s prudence seems unique to his political career. Modern conservative readers would likely be horrified to learn that Macdonald, like his father, was a poor businessman (2008, p. 111). He regularly accumulated debt and financially tested his law partner, Alexander Campbell (p. 110). Macdonald owed approximately $80,000 in 1869 (roughly 1.5 million in 2011 dollars) that his business friends helped pay off (2011, p. 53-55) – so much for personal and fiscal responsibility. One can only assume that the lesson here is that even the best of us are imperfect. We all fall on hard times and need the courage to ask for help when necessary.
What is Macdonald’s legacy on Indigenous people?
John A. Macdonald’s legacy on indigenous people is complicated. Gwyn rarely discusses Indigenous issues in both books, which is a glaring omission so painfully apparent to modern readers that I would argue a new biography series is needed to fill this abysmal lacuna. Gwyn, for example, does not explore the issue of residential schools. It is a critical failure of the series. He also agrees with Joseph Pope’s statement that “there was ‘an entire absence of prejudice in his [Macdonald’s] large and liberal mind.’” (2008, p. 129). We should be skeptical of this view for reasons I will outline below.
Why is Macdonald condemned for his Indigenous legacy?
To start, let us explore how John A. Macdonald championed the Gradual Civilization Bill 1857 when he was attorney general. The bill’s purpose was to protect Indians from white settler contamination and enable Indians to “assimilate their habits” with the whites. Yes, these goals are contradictory. What was the result? Two things, allow me to quote Gwyn at length:
Any adult Indian male judged to be of good character, educated and free of debt could apply and, after a three-year trial period, achieve outright ownership of fifty acres of reserve land. Such Indians would gain the franchise and become full citizens of Canada, while at the same time ceasing to be Indians in the official sense of that term. Policy combined paternalist protection with explicit assimilation; it accepted that Aboriginal people were “wards” of the government, but to gain the benefits of the white man’s “civilization” they had to cease being Indians. (2008, p. 153-154)
The second result was that it created the conditions to shift the responsibility of Indians from Britain to Canada (2008, p. 154). Ultimately, the long-term results were disastrous, with Indigenous people suffering low living standards compared to non-Indigenous Canadians, a fact that is all too obvious to modern Canadians.
Secondly, Macdonald’s most significant contribution to Canada, the British North America (BNA) Act of 1867, wholly overlooked Indigenous people except to say they were subjects of federal jurisdiction, explains Gwyn (2008, p. 416). Many early Canadians contributed to drafting the first constitution, but Macdonald drew most of the articles and spearheaded the conferences between the provinces and the Crown. So, he is mainly responsible for this failure.
Thirdly, Macdonald’s National Policy meant clearing the plains of Indigenous people for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). From the 1870s to 1880s, the buffalo population on the western plains precipitously declined due to American overhunting. Many Indigenous tribes in the region relied heavily on the buffalo and consequently experienced mass starvation. Quoting extensively from James Daschuck’s 2013 book “Clearing the Plains,” Tristin Hopper (2018), writing in the National Post, says there is “ample primary evidence showing that Macdonald’s Indian agents explicitly withheld food to drive bands onto reserve and out of the way of the railroad.”
Though Gwyn discusses the starvation of plains Indigenous people (2011, p. 422-423), he provides scant details of their suffering. Macdonald was urged to increase food and clothing supplies for Indigenous people out west (p. 402), but he relented, likely because of his greater focus on Louis Riel’s re-entry into Canada and the CPR’s construction. Gwyn admits that Macdonald’s “involvement with the Indians – as with Riel and the Métis – became his tragedy” (p. 417) and that Indigenous involvement in these events “received comparatively little attention” (p. 415). It is a horrific legacy. Yet, the steel spine connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and all the settlements in between was necessary for building the nation.
However, the famine on the Plains isn’t so straightforward. In an excellent piece from C2C Journal, Greg Piasetzki (2020) provides bountiful evidence suggesting Macdonald did not intend to starve and kill the Indigenous plains people. In fact, opposition MPs criticized Macdonald for being too charitable with food aid. Piasetzki explains that “no treaty obligated the federal government to provide rations to any natives living off-reserve. From this perspective, a diet of half rations should be seen as evidence of Macdonald’s compassion rather than malice” because he was attempting to get Indigenous people to return to their reserves. Additionally, under Macdonald, the Indian Affairs budget grew from $276,000 to $1.1. million in 1884, which was larger than National Defence, in the middle of a “severe economic recession in Eastern Canada” – duly note that the author does not specify the portion of this budget that went to food aid, nor is there a citation.
Fourthly, Macdonald was a key architect of the residential school system, which he authorized in 1883 as Prime Minister. As already mentioned, Gwyn omits these details. I will not list or describe at length the atrocities and abuses Indigenous children experienced while attending these schools. But I do encourage readers to explore the subject further. To learn more, read Jorge Berrera’s (2018) “The horrors of St. Anne’s” from CBC News and “Residential Schools in Canada” by Tabitha Marshall and David Gallant (2021) in The Canadian Encyclopedia. And for those who do not want to delve into the non-fiction material, watch the feature 2017 film Indian Horse available on Netflix Canada.
But what was the primary purpose of residential schools? According to the 2010 UN report, “Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study,” residential schools were “not to benefit indigenous peoples…[but] to forcibly assimilate indigenous [sic] children into the larger society” (p. 26). The report does not focus solely on Canada since many countries included residential schools in their repertoire to destroy other people and cultures, but that does not absolve Macdonald entirely.
There are, of course, alternative perspectives. Piasetzki argues that these schools have existed since 1695 (without any citation). He also states that “the federal government was obligated to build and staff such schools only when requested to do so by native leaders, or, as Treaty Six states, ‘whenever the Indians of the reserve shall desire it.’” Piasetzki argues that many Indigenous leaders desired the construction of the schools since “no fewer than 185 on-reserve day schools and 20 residential schools were built” under Macdonald’s tenure (Piasetzki does not provide a reference for these numbers). Macdonald believed that these schools should not be compulsory and should require Indigenous parental consent; it was ultimately up to them to enroll and remove their children. Piasetzki concludes that the residential school policy was not “cultural genocide” and that, even though Macdonald did not necessarily save lives, “it was certainly a compassionate approach to the vexing problem of moving native Canadians from a pre-industrial to modern world.” Whatever the motivations, the results were a failure. Many were forced to attend these schools, and the “compassionate approach” ruined several generations of Indigenous people’s mental and physical health, language, culture, and economic prospects.
Fifthly, Macdonald has a history of contradictory policy beliefs and decisions. In 1884, he felt Indigenous people would “never be satisfied” with the provisions he supplied and was too focussed on the Riel affair (Gwyn, 2011, p. 433), even though, as outlined by Hopper above, he purposely withheld and restricted aid. Later in his career, after the final spike of the CPR was struck on 7 November 1885, Macdonald wanted to prevent violence on the plains to encourage immigration. He respected treaty rights and felt restricting Indigenous people’s movement was not right, but he approved of increased administrative and regulatory burdens on Indigenous people and even banned the Sun Dance (or Thirst Dance) (p. 489-491). Also, in light of the deteriorating conditions of Indigenous people out west, he seemed to lose interest in meeting with their leaders as he grew older (p. 502-503).
When Macdonald did choose to meet with Indigenous leaders, he was dismissive and scolding. For instance, when Macdonald took a trip out west from Ottawa on 10 July 1886, he met with chief Crowfoot in southern Alberta, a loyal to the Canadian government. Crowfoot complained about how the sparks from the train’s engines were causing fires on his reserve. Macdonald used that opportunity to lecture him on why Indigenous people ought to learn to farm like white men (p. 502-503) rather than attempting to resolve the issue.
Why is Macdonald lauded for his Indigenous legacy?
In 1839, when he was a young lawyer, John A. Macdonald defended the Indian Brandt Brandt for allegedly killing another Mohawk Indian while drunk at night. Thanks to Macdonald’s defence, the jury found Brandt guilty of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced him to merely six months in jail (Gwyn, 2008, p. 53-54). Though Macdonald supporters may be quick to exalt him for defending a Mohawk Indian in court, it is unclear how prevalent Macdonald’s actions were for white men in that period. We also do not know why Macdonald chose to defend Brandt in the first place. Could it have been for money, the love of the law, or respect towards Indigenous people? Gwyn, unfortunately, does not provide enough details. More information is necessary to truly gauge Macdonald’s intentions and attitudes towards Indigenous people when he was a young man.
Gwyn, however, later explains how “Macdonald’s own views about Indians were the same as those of most Canadians at this time: they should be protected from whites but assimilated into white society” (p. 154) (my bolding). But Macdonald differed in two respects. One, he valued negotiated treaties; he rejected requests from individuals, conservatives and non-conservatives alike, to purchase reserve land. Two, Macdonald personally knew and understood Indigenous people, unlike many whites of his time. For example, he sang in an Anglican missionary church choir with a Mohawk Band in Napanee in the Tyendinaga Township. He also knew members of the Mississauga and became friends with Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby, which means “sacred feathers”). The Kingston Herald denounced Jones’s marriage with a white woman, Elia Field, but Macdonald defended the marriage on the grounds of assimilation (p. 155) – I’m uncertain if this is good or bad reasoning. Macdonald’s defence of Jones is respectful, but it’s awkward for modern readers because it’s for assimilation purposes. Macdonald was also friends with Peter Martin (Oronhyatekha) (2011, p. 418), a Mohawk physician and scholar, though there are few, if any details, in Gwyn’s book about their relationship.
Aside from defending and knowing Indigenous people personally, Indigenous people dubbed the forty-ninth parallel the “medicine line” because they were safer in Canada. In the latter half of the 1800s, many American Indigenous tribes migrated north for healing, such as the Ottawas, Potawatomis, and Chippewas. It was widely viewed by both Canadians and Americans that Canadian Indigenous policy was much better. Fewer Indigenous people were killed by encroaching pioneers, and they were protected by the North-West Mounted Police. Another purpose of the police force was to stop the illegal liquor trade from America, which was devastating Indigenous tribes. According to Blackfoot chief Crowfoot (Isapo-muxika), the police force protected Indigenous people like feathers on a bird against frost. Sadly, the long-term effects of these policies trapped Indigenous Canadians into seemingly perpetual dependency. At the time of his writing, Gwyn explains that Indigenous Canadians are more poorly educated and suffer worse health outcomes than their Indigenous American peers by the latter half of the twentieth century (2011, p. 242; p. 462-428).
The Franchise Bill of 1885 originally extended the vote to Indigenous people while keeping their treaty Indian Act rights. During a speech five years earlier in 1880, Macdonald said, “Indians possessed certain inalienable rights; that they were not whites, and in a fundamental sense never would be; and that successful change would take many decades.” (2011, p. 422). Gwyn admits it’s possible that Macdonald was merely interested in scoring additional votes but that he may have felt it was necessary considering how escaped enslaved people were allowed to vote. However, opposition and his own party’s legislators were furious with the bill, especially in light of the rebellion on the plains in March 1885, when Indigenous people slaughtered whites (p. 412). Many Indigenous people also opposed the bill since they felt it would mean losing their identity and way of life (p. 419-420).
As Anthony Wilson-Smith (2015) writes in an article titled “Aboriginal Peoples and the Fight for Franchise” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, “many First Nations people had the right to vote,” so long as they renounced their Aboriginal status under the process of enfranchisement. (To learn more about enfranchisement, see this article by Bennett McCardle from The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2014). The legislation was repealed in 1898, seven years after Macdonald’s death, under Canada’s second prime minister, Wilfred Laurier.
It is difficult to assert that Macdonald was a sadistic, genocidal maniac based on the record above. Others have argued that defending Macdonald for his nation-building efforts is “a bit like defending Lenin on the grounds that Marxism was real hip in 1917” (Cosh, 2021). However, the record is mixed. Macdonald seems neither indifferent nor hateful towards Indigenous people, though he, according to an Indian chief, “doubted that assimilation would ever succeed” (Gwyn, 2011, p. 423), further complicating his legacy. Additionally, after Confederation, most Canadians referred to Indigenous people as “our Indians” as an expression of national pride because they were treated better than their US counterparts. But attitudes quickly changed for the worse after the North-West Rebellion from 26 March 1885 to 12 May 1885. At this turning point, Canadians then referred to Indigenous people as “‘the Indians’ or, worse, as ‘the Indian problem’– a complication, irritant, a disappointment.” (p. 481). Yet, as Gwyn explains, Macdonald used the phrase “Indian question” (p. 423), which was far less disparaging.
If you would like to learn more about Indigenous people, politics, and public policy in Canada, check out these seven organizations:
Center for World Indigenous Studies (this is a US-based organization with an international scope)
The socioeconomic and health conditions of many Indigenous people in Canada are appalling. Canadians of all backgrounds and faiths should learn more about this country’s history. Lambasting Macdonald as a lunatic drunk foaming at the mouth for an opportunity to kill Indigenous people does not unite us.
It is fashionable to say we cannot skip Truth and immediately jump to Reconciliation. I agree. So let us acknowledge the truth of Macdonald’s character and legacy, rather than solely selecting the troubling aspects of his (and our) past.
What is Macdonald’s legacy on other groups of people?
This section will explore Macdonald’s legacy on other groups since here, too, many regularly criticize him.
John A. Macdonald had a prejudice against homosexuals. There was an instance of homophobia when he was young, in which he felt a two-year sentence for soldiers found guilty of committing sodomy while drunk was too lenient (Gwyn, 2008, p. 156). By today’s standards, this is egregious. But for his time’s standards, it was probably typical. There is little to gain by retroactively applying today’s moral standards to the past, especially if the past is well over a century ago.
When he was a lawyer, Macdonald defended Archy Lanton, an escaped enslaved American arrested for stealing a horse. Macdonald felt Lanton’s arrest was illegal, a point acknowledged by David Frum in The Atlantic (2021). However, Gwyn carefully specifies that Macdonald was not troubled by slavery or the ill-treatment of Blacks. He defended Lanton because he felt the law itself must be protected and that it was being used unjustly; this was because Macdonald was a staunch conservative who respected law and order (2008, p. 151). Evidently, nuance is always important, and one’s actions do not always make one’s intentions and motivations immediately apparent.
Macdonald also defended blacks who defended themselves when attacked by white mobs in 1882 (Gwyn, p. 2011, 529). It’s exemplary, but his legacy gets more complicated. Macdonald also rejected the possibility of Jamaica and Barbados joining Confederation because of the “Negro Question” (p. 530). Gwyn, upsettingly, does not provide much detail about Macdonald’s views on individuals of African ancestry, but there may well not be enough evidence on these matters.
Macdonald genuinely believed Chinese people were unfit as settlers. He passed Canada’s first racially discriminatory law after the railway’s construction, the Chinese Immigration Act in 1885, limiting the inflow of Chinese by forcing them to pay a $50 head tax upon entry. He was initially reticent to completely halt the influx of Chinese workers to British Columbia because a large quantity of cheap labour was needed for the railway’s completion, despite the incessant complaints of white British Columbians about non-white immigrants (p. 447 and p. 533). Many criticized Macdonald’s leniency with the Chinese, which he was compared to the US where Chinese were entirely banned, according to J.K. Johnson (2017), writing in The Canadian Encyclopedia. In other words, one could argue Macdonald was liberal-minded for his time and place.
Were Chinese workers in Canada exploited? Absolutely. Was this exploitation necessary for the railway’s construction and consequent nation-building efforts? It is possible.
Though it is unsavoury to admit, both Gwyn and Patrice Dutil, a professor of politics and public administration, say this immigration policy legacy is ultimately a “success” because Canada gets to “choose the immigrants we want” by forcing newcomers “through various hoops” and a point system (Maclean’s, 2015); even if that point system is not always used.
Macdonald tried to extend the vote to women. The Franchise Bill in January 1885 would have given unmarried and widowed women the right to vote. The bill was indeed politically expedient for Macdonald because many women were conservative. But there was too much opposition. Macdonald was the first national leader in the world to attempt passing such a bill, and Canada was consequently the first country to debate the subject, though not the first to extend voting rights to women (Gwyn, 2011, p. 519-522).
Finally, under Macdonald’s watchful eye, there was mass immigration to western Canada in the 1880s: Mennonites avoiding military service in Germany; Icelanders fleeing a volcanic explosion to places like Gimli (paradise), Manitoba; Hungarians to “Huns Valley”; and Russian Jews sponsored by Lord Rothschild to Saskatchewan (p. 330), which, according to Jane Hilderman, Executive Director at ClimateWest and former Executive Director at the Samara Centre for Democracy, “was unique in his period” (Maclean’s 2015). In other words, Macdonald seems relatively open and progressive-minded to accepting various types of European people, which may not have been the case among many Anglo-Saxon men in North America of his time.
Why Macdonald’s troubled legacy is important to Canada and Canadian identity
If it were not for John A. Macdonald, Canada would not exist. Canada’s origin story is mostly about not wanting to become American (2008, p. 4), explains Gwyn. The author provides ample evidence of Americans flirting with and asserting the goals of annexing Canada and conquering the whole of North America, particularly the sparsely populated and poorly understood Northwest frontier. Many in the mid-to-late 1800s believed annexation was inevitable. American scientists (2008, p. 224), congressman (p. 243), the Union Army (p. 245), and media (p. 431) all joyously and bombastically shared this belief (and 2011, p. 93-97). Canadians should, therefore, be grateful for Macdonald’s success in handling Confederation, the railway (p. 184), and his performance at the Washington Conference in the fall of 1869 (2011, chapter twelve). Had he failed, the United States would have succeeded, and Canada would merely exist in mythology as a backwater, fledgling British colony in the dustbin of history.
Other important contributions of this biography series
Even if you are uninterested in John A. Macdonald the individual, I would still strongly encourage everyone to read these two books because Gwyn addresses several important themes and events, such as:
The origins of a national Canadian political culture (2008, p. 90-96).
The critical role of patronage in early Canada (2008, p. 167).
The history of political campaigns (Gwyn, 2008, p. 238).
The roots of Canadian anti-Americanism (2008, p. 255-257).
The necessity of a strong central government and Confederation (2008, p. 331-335).
The significance of ethnic, linguistic, and regional diversity in early Canada, and why those lessons remain relevant today (2008, p. 352-354).
The meaning of being a Canadian in Macdonald’s time and how it has changed significantly (2008, p. 365-369).
The history of “peace, order and good government,” Canada’s version of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (or is it? You’ll have to read the books to find out) (2008, 400-403).
The impacts, contributions, and uniqueness of the BNA Act of 1867 on Canada and other countries (2008, p. 416-418; 2011, p. 365-366).
The role of the railway for nation-building efforts, despite its mixed record (2011, p. 88-90).
The 1885 Northwest Resistance led by Métis Louis Riel (2011, chapter twenty-six).
Conclusion
I hope readers found this blog post informative, entertaining, and valuable. I have attempted to present Macdonald objectively and fairly while focussing mainly on Gwyn’s biography series (this is a book blog, after all). Love him or hate him, Macdonald is important to Canadian identity and history. He is a human being, complete with strengths and faults of his own, just like every other individual. No one is politically perfect. Attempting to find political perfection in past figures is impossible; it is illogical to retroactively apply modern moral and ethical standards to past figures.
Canada was a country that asked for some (not complete) independence in the 1860s, and Britain said yes. Yet, despite the steps towards independence, our past is still bloody. I cannot help but wonder: are there any countries without blood in their past?
Thank you for reading.
References
Barrera, J., & News, C. B. C. (2018, March 29). The horrors of St. Anne’s Residential School revealed by police files. CBC News. https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/st-anne-residential-school-opp-documents
Cosh, C. (2021, July 22). Colby Cosh: David Frum tries to defend Sir John A. Macdonald. He fails. National Post. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/colby-cosh-david-frum-tries-to-defend-sir-john-a-macdonald-he-fails
Frum, D. (2021, June 21). In Defense of Canada’s First Prime Minister John Macdonald. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/defense-canada-prime-minister-john-macdonald/619236/
Gwyn, R. (2008). John A.: The Man Who Made Us: The Life and Times of John A. Macdonald: Volume One: 1815-1867: Vol. One. Vintage Canada.
Gwyn, R. (2011). Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times: Volume Two: 1867-1891: Vol. Two. Vintage Canada.
Hopper, T. (2018, August 28). Here is what Sir John A. Macdonald did to Indigenous people. National Post. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/here-is-what-sir-john-a-macdonald-did-to-indigenous-people
Johnson, J. K. (2013). Sir John A. Macdonald. In The Canadian Encyclopedia (2017th-11th–28th ed.). https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sir-john-alexander-macdonald
Maclean’s. (2015, January 11). A toast to Sir John A., Canada’s controversial nation builder. Maclean’s. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/a-toast-to-sir-john-a-canadas-controversial-nation-builder/
Marshall, T., & Gallant, D. (2021, June 1). Residential Schools in Canada | The Canadian Encyclopedia. The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools
Paikin, S. (2020, August 31). What we lose by tearing down Sir John A.’s statue [Public Broadcaster]. TVO.Org. https://www.tvo.org/article/what-we-lose-by-tearing-down-sir-john-as-statue
Piasetzki, G. (2020, November 28). Sir John A. Macdonald Saved More Native Lives Than Any Other Prime Minister. C2C Journal. https://c2cjournal.ca/2020/11/sir-john-a-macdonald-saved-more-native-lives-than-any-other-prime-minister/
Wilson-Smith, A. (2015). Aboriginal Peoples and the Fight for the Franchise. In The Canadian Encyclopedia (2015th-12th–02 ed.). The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/aboriginal-peoples-and-the-fight-for-the-franchise
United Nations. (2010). Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools: A Comparative Study. Economic and Social Council. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/E%20C.19%202010%2011.DOC