In his latest post for The Dominion, Ben Woodfinden attempt to defend that horrible racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, non-intersectional, dead, white, cis-gendered male monster, Sir John A. Macdonald:
Statue of Sir John A. Macdonald that formerly stood in front of City Hall in Victoria, British Columbia.
Wikimedia Commons.
The way you’re supposed to begin a piece like this is with a sort of penitential act. I should begin a discussion of Sir John A. Macdonald with a confession of his various sins and crimes, before offering an apology, and a reluctant defence of our first prime minister that essentially boils down to “history matters,” without actually explaining what that history is or why it matters.
If you do this you’ve already lost the historical fight, because you’ve willingly ceded the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors, and fallen back to a defence of history in some abstract sense, instead of a defence of Macdonald himself. This kind of Girondin impulse is far too common amongst many liberals and conservatives now, especially in elites institutions and fields like journalism and academia.
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No one, including me, claims that Macdonald was a saint, and Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people and migrants in the early days of Confederation was racist, and wrong. I doubt any serious person would deny this. But even on these questions, Macdonald’s record is complex. Tristin Hopper, wrote an excellent and accessible piece in the National Post simultaneously laying out both the bad things Macdonald was responsible for, and also Macdonald’s paradoxically ahead of his times views on Indigenous voting rights, and recognition of the terrible plight of Indigenous peoples.
But this is only part of the story of Macdonald, and the crucial role he played in our history. Too often this is all that gets discussed, ceding the narrative to Macdonald’s detractors and dooming him to inevitable damnatio memoriae. This is why, in the name of defending our history, we cannot simply defend capital H History, we have to defend the substance of our actual history.
Macdonald’s central role as the key architect of Confederation, and our country, is not well known because Canadian history, especially the history that led to confederation, is not well known by Canadians. It’s a national embarrassment, and in this vacuum it is easy to build incomplete and partial narratives about what Canada is and what Canada means.
Macdonald is best described as “the indispensable politician.” Confederation was not inevitable, it took adept figures like Macdonald to make it happen. Macdonald was not an ideologue, and his political career was defined by his masterful ability to forge coalitions and working compromises between seemingly intractable groups. He was an important political figure in the United Province of Canada (the union of Upper and Lower Canada), and proved adept at balancing and forging coalitions with the warring and disparate factions from Upper and Lower Canada forced into an uncomfortable union. He resisted, but worked and ultimately partnered with uncompromising reformers in the province like George Brown, while ultimately laying the groundworks for constitutional reform that Brown, though principled, could almost certainly never have achieved.
