Quotulatiousness

May 12, 2025

Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:

“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.

It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.

Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.

Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)

As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.

Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”

While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.

This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!

February 28, 2025

Activists get the Toronto school board to agree to rename three schools

Filed under: Cancon, Education, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For people who utterly lose their minds when the Bad Orange Man changes the names of things, Toronto’s activists are still full-steam ahead to force the Toronto District School Board to rename three schools:

According to media reports, the TDSB has voted 11 to 7 to change the names of three schools: Dundas Junior Public School, Ryerson Community School and Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute. Evidently, a process will now start to choose a new name at each school. We shall see what they end up with, hopefully something better than “Sankofa”, which is the new name for Dundas Square, and has absolutely nothing to do with Canada.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with changing a school name. Times change, and school names may need to change to reflect changing times. I attended a school which was named after a school board trustee who had served many decades prior to my time at that school. Would it make sense to change the name to that of a person who lived more recently and had a bigger impact on the community? Maybe schools should not be named after people at all, but rather should get their name from some more enduring aspect of the community, city, province, or country? These are fair questions.

But in these three TDSB cases, the reasons being given for the changes are part and parcel of an overall strategy by the activists running the school system to rewrite history according to their narrative of colonial oppression and the victimhood of Indigenous people and “people of colour”.

Two of the schools, Dundas Junior Public and Ryerson Community School, are named for men who have been accused of complicity in historical evils specifically for deemed connections to the slave trade and to do with the Residential Schools set up for First Nations children, but the third really is historical revisionism on the grand scale: the one named for Canada’s first prime minister:

Sir John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of Canada. circa 1875.
Photo by George Lancefield from Library and Archives Canada, MIKAN ID number 3218718.

The activists want our illustrious first Prime Minister’s name off a school because they say he knowingly, willfully, and intentionally starved Indigenous people in the Prairies.

This starvation narrative was popularized by James Daschuck’s 2014 book Clearing the Plains but this harsh indictment of Macdonald does not stand up to scrutiny, as his government actually spent more on famine relief for the Indigenous people in 1884 than on national defense.

Additionally, the Canadian approach to avoiding war through treaties doubtless saved tens of thousands of Indigenous (and no small number of settlers) lives, as a look south of the border, where upwards of 60 000 died in such wars at the time, will attest.

Macdonald’s government created the Northwest Police Force (later renamed the RCMP) to protect the native (and settler) population from American raids and slaughter, and Indigenous leaders at the time expressed their gratitude for it. He provided vaccination against smallpox to thousands of Indigenous people too.

It should also be mentioned that the catch-all complaint about Macdonald being somehow responsible for forcing Indigenous kids to attend IRS schools is baseless. Such schools were built at the request of Indigenous leaders according to treaties with the Crown and attendance was entirely voluntary during Macdonald’s lifetime. Indeed, mandatory school attendance only became mandatory along with such a requirement for all Canadian children in the early 20th century.

As mentioned at the opening of this article, 7 of 18 TDSB trustees voted “no” to the name changes. This is an encouraging sign that presenting a simplistic and misleading account of Canada’s past, and the people who shaped our history, in the service of affirming a putrid and deceitful narrative of oppressors Vs. victims in Canada is starting to lose its credibility. People are starting to demand a more comprehensive, nuanced, and accurate account of what really happened, and why. Yes, mistakes were made, and there were some bad actors, but by and large our history is one to be exceedingly proud of. We can learn from our mistakes and be an even greater country in the future.

July 2, 2024

Jonathan Kay on real Canadian history

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Education, France, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Canadians have never really been encouraged to learn much about our own history. When I was in school, the history content skewed as far away from anything that might be stirring or exciting as it possibly could (we skipped over all the wars, for example), so that they could emphasize the legislative assemblies, the treaties and conferences, and the mix-and-match bearded and mustachioed “great and the good” of the time. If nothing else, you could catch up on your sleep for an hour. (I exaggerate a bit, but history in the primary grades at least covered the initial discovery and exploration of what would become Canada by French and English fur traders, adventurers, and scoundrels (some were all three). We even got a relatively unbiased (for the time) introduction to some of the First Nations, mostly in Ontario and Quebec.) These days, of course, kids learn that Canada is a genocidal colonialist white supremacist horror show that has no right to exist … hardly the kind of improvement one would hope for.

In the National Post Jonathan Kay suggests the only way to really understand Canadian history is to utterly ignore the politicians (and the bureaucrats) and learn it for yourself:

These guys are important, no question, but you need to go back a long way before them to really understand Canadian history. The nation didn’t burst fully formed from Sir John A.’s forehead, Athena-style.
Libraries and Archives Canada item ID number 3013194.

The surest way to make me treasure something is to take it away. So it was with Canada Day, whose annual appearance I’d once greeted with scarcely more excitement than the Ontario Civic Holiday and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Then came 2021, when the high priests of social justice demanded that we cancel Canada’s birthday celebrations, so that we might spend July 1 in morbid contemplation of our original sin. Not being one for rituals of confession and penitence, I instead began to think harder about why I love this country, despite its flaws — even if expressing such sentiments in public was now viewed as hate speech.

“This country was built on genocide”, ran one major-newspaper headline, amid the national meltdown following reports that hundreds of unmarked children’s graves had been found at former residential schools. Calgary dropped its fireworks program on the basis that (among other reasons) such scenes of celebration might hamper “truth and reconciliation”. Justin Trudeau, who’d come into office urging Canadians to “celebrate this amazing place we call home”, now took Canada Day as an occasion to instruct us that “the horrific findings of the remains of hundreds of children at the sites of former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan have rightfully pressed us to reflect on our country’s historical failures”.

The prime minister’s suggestion that children’s corpses were being plucked from the ground en masse turned out to be a reckless falsehood. Even the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Nation, whose chief once claimed that “the remains of 215 children” had been found in Kamloops, now seems to be acknowledging that her original statements were wrong. While Canada has much to answer for when it comes to the legacy of residential schools, no graves or bodies were found at these locations in 2021. And none have been found since.

[…]

The unfortunate truth about Canada’s 19th-century origin story is that our country’s initial contours were sketched out by a group of middle-aged binge drinkers whose focus was less on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than on the mundane task of diffusing the high capital costs associated with rail construction and defending northern rivers and ports from rampaging Americans and Irishmen. (Yes, Irishmen: Visitors to Charlottetown’s Victoria Park will find a trio of ocean-facing nine-pounder guns that were installed in 1865 to guard against the Fenian Brotherhood, whose troops, many residents feared, were set to invade and conquer the island. But faith and begorrah, I do digress.) In this project, the Fathers of Confederation were successful. But the ensuing separation from Britain was a slow, bureaucratic affair that makes for dull reading (and duller television). I wish it were otherwise, fellow patriots. But alas, these are the facts.

Which is to say that if we’re looking to develop a compelling, historically accurate and, dare I say, inclusive, understanding of Canada’s national story, the story has to begin earlier. Specifically: the early 1600s — two and a half centuries before John A. Macdonald and his fellow Fathers of Confederation were knocking back the giggle juice in Charlottetown Harbour. As you might imagine, this means giving a starring role to Indigenous peoples — though not as the sacred martyrs and magical forest pixies of modern progressive imagination, but rather as the true-to-life diplomats, traders, craftsmen, hunters and soldiers that the first waves of Europeans knew them to be.

[…]

Toronto-born Greg Koabel spent most of his early academic career studying James I’s England (with a particular focus on the 1641 treason trial of the Earl of Strafford). And so, crucially, he approached the history of Canada laterally, through the prism of English and (primarily) French geopolitics. In telling the story of the first sustained European settlements in North America, he pays Indigenous populations the respect of examining them through this same geopolitical lens.

The resulting narrative, told in his brilliant Nations of Canada podcast, is so fascinating that you’ll have to keep reminding yourself he’s talking about Canada. This past week, Koabel hit a major milestone, releasing his 200th episode. And with his permission, I’ve been adapting his long-form audio chronology to written publication at Quillette. So far, we’ve published more than 100,000 words, and Samuel de Champlain hasn’t even left the stage yet.

I’m not much of a podcast listener, aside from The Rest is History and some Minnesota Vikings-specific sports podcasts, but the Quillette serializations of Koabel’s podcast episodes really are excellent and more than repay the effort to read them.

July 10, 2023

Barbara Kay – “[M]any Canadians [suffer] from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post National Syndrome”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Canadians are deluged with messages that imply — or explicitly demand — that they should be ashamed of Canada and of being Canadians. That there is nothing to celebrate in our history or cultural achievements and instead we should humbly beseech forgiveness for our many, many, many sins. Barbara Kay disagrees:

On Canada Day, near St. Sauveur, Quebec, we were treated to torrential rain, hail, nearby tornado warnings, and continually flickering power. Not a day for fireworks. Just as well, since fireworks are the last thing one craves when one suffers, as many Canadians do, from highly contagious, patriotism-suppressive Post Nationalism Syndrome.

This scourge cannot yet be cured, since it was intentionally cultivated and released into the environment by the current government. Only herd immunity can end it. However, the symptoms of Post Nationalism Syndrome can be alleviated by certain traditional antivirals, like National Postism. Last Saturday’s NP featured several commentaries that buoyed my spirits, in particular Michael Higgins’s misery-loves-company column, “Stop shaming and start celebrating Canada”.

Higgins enumerates recent examples from a tiresome litany of complaints by our elites that “want to turn us into a nation of self-flagellating penitents”. The National Gallery of Canada insinuates that Canada’s iconic artists, the Group of Seven, are linked to white supremacy; a parliamentary motion endorses the residential school system as “genocide”; the attorney general actively considers legal sanctions against “denialism” — dissent from genocide as a proper descriptor (including me); and the erasure of Sir John A. Macdonald’s name from the eponymous Parkway.

In a nearby feature, the false claim that Macdonald was a guilty party in the alleged schools genocide was handily demolished by lawyer Greg Piasetzki, titled, “John A. Macdonald saved more indigenous lives than any other prime minister”. This evidence-based rejoinder to sticky defamatory myths about Macdonald is an excerpt from a new book of essays by 20 writers, The 1867 Project: Why Canada Should be Cherished — Not Cancelled, published by the Aristotle Foundation, and edited by its founder and president, Mark Milke. 

Piasetzki’s essay mirrors the 19 others in its forthright challenge of our culture’s reigning anti-western dogmas, which brand Canada as a failed nation. Every author encourages the pride in being Canadian that has not dared to speak its name since Justin Trudeau came to power. I highly recommend it. If enough Canadians read it, we might arrive at herd immunity to Post Nationalism Syndrome.

March 9, 2021

QotD: Canadian culture

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Everywhere one turns one sees a tendency toward mimesis — we tend to copy rather than invent — qualified by intellectual emptiness. In other words, it may be that the vacancy of the Canadian mind reflects the vacancy of the Canadian landscape. Of course, much of the land is variegated — lakes, rivers, forests, the impressive mountain ranges running down the length of “beautiful British Columbia” — in the same way, metaphorically speaking, that we can boast a number of resonating exceptions to the staple of tepid cultural and intellectual sameness.

One thinks of novelist Mordecai Richler, poet Irving Layton, critical minds Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, musicians Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot. Our founding father, Sir John A. Macdonald, was the ne plus ultra of our political class; there has been none like him since, which may explain why he is now on posthumous trial for war crimes and a hue and cry has gone up to remove his statues and rename eponymous schools.

The constitutive factor, however, exceptions aside, is the “howling emptiness” of a vast landmass that may partially account for the emptiness of our intellectual topography — if, as Jared Diamond had argued in Guns, Germs and Steel, geography governs the development of culture and spirit.

Any nation the preponderance of whose citizens regularly elects left-wing political parties; accepts single-payer healthcare; believes in the efficacy of the welfare state; endorses the hoax of global warming; accommodates swarms of third-world immigrants and refugees who have no love for or understanding of a country becoming an open-to-all multicultural tombola with the highest proportionate rate of immigrants in the Western world; has allowed its educational industry, from pre-school to graduate school, to be corrupted possibly beyond retrieval by lockstep Leftism, “diversity and inclusion,” and “social justice” claptrap; has caved to the feminist and campus-rape fable; dutifully takes CBC Leftist propaganda as gospel; has fallen for the 16th Century meme of the “Noble Savage” in its dealings with the aboriginal peoples; extravagantly celebrates a second-rate rock band like The Tragically Hip and names a street after it; reads (when it does read) tedious scribblers like the acclaimed Joseph Boyden and Ann-Marie MacDonald; and gives a complete ignoramus like Justin Trudeau a majority government on the strength of name and coiffure, cannot be regarded as informed, well-educated or in any way distinguished. Unlike the U.S., there are no cracks, to quote Leonard Cohen, where the light gets in. The Canadian political, cultural and academic spectrum has gone dark from end to end.

David Solway, “The Canadian Mind: A Culture So Open, Its ‘Brains Fall Out'”, PJ Media, 2018-10-10.

August 12, 2020

Defending Sir John A.

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

[…]

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.

January 18, 2019

QotD: Political colours in the US and Canada

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We, Conservatives, were a coalition from the very beginning, in Canada. We were, of course, the Liberal-Conservative Party under Sir John A, reflecting the alliances formed between Ontario and Atlantic Canadian Tories and Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine’s moderate Parti bleu in Quebec. This was in contrast to the Liberals who were formed by the Clear Grits from Upper Canada and the Papineau’s radical Parti rouge in Quebec.

(So Quebec has always been central to both Conservative and Liberal political success in Canada and it was Quebec that gave us our modern Conservative blue and Liberal red icons ~ which are opposite to the Democratic blue and Republican red in the USA.)

Ted Campbell, “Our Conservative Roots”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2017-03-05.

August 12, 2018

Public statuary … can we just get rid of the politicians?

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the wake of Victoria’s city council deciding to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Colby Cosh suggests that we apply a broader brush to what is acceptable for public display and get rid of the rest of the politicians, too:

The mayor of Victoria, Lisa Helps, emphasized that the removal of the statue is “temporary,” promising to “find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way.” This suggests that the statue will find a home somewhere, perhaps even in its accustomed place, but will have to be accompanied by a sanitizing “This was a bad, racist guy despite having led the creation of our federation” text inscribed nearby.

All of this gives me a chance to rehearse my inconveniently unclassifiable views on the subject of revisionist iconoclasm in public settings. Part of me is sympathetic to the anti-revisionist case. Even if Victoria took a year with this decision, a year is not a long time to reconsider an act of commemoration that was intended to be permanent in the first place. Any one generation, let alone a small group within it, ought to be hesitant in removing public statuary — doubly so, perhaps, if you are doing it “temporarily” but without a deadline for its return. Putting objects of built heritage in storage is the easiest way for a government to demolish them, through neglect, on the sly.

With that said, I could be convinced to pick up a hammer if there is to be a general smashing of statues of politicians. No city or country really has a shortage of people to honour whose contribution to humanity is unambiguously and uncontentiously positive. Those who exercise political power, even in a democracy, rarely fall into this category. If we were building a country from scratch, I would suggest we start building statues to those who excel in the realm of pure thought — physics, math, music, scholarship — and work “down” through artisans, philanthropists, innovators and entrepreneurs.

Once we’re past the tradesmen who did good work and mentored the young, and we have made modest busts or reliefs of everyone who just worked to make a neighbourhood nicer or cleaner or safer, and we have put a few people on postage stamps just for contributing their own earnings or effort to any of the Corporal Works of Mercy, we can start with politicians of an especially noble and humane character who executed great necessary enterprises by means of law.

Politicians get big-ass statues because it is politicians who build statues: that’s all. The problem is that this encourages the dangerous habit of reverence for politicians, who, despite endless complaining about the thanklessness of their vocation, hardly go without social privileges or deference or celebration within their own lifetimes. In the case of statues or images of Sir John A. Macdonald, the veneration is all but explicit. The Old Chieftain represents the juvenile desire to have a George Washington-like national paterfamilias, to have a single founder to serve as the incarnation of our glorious state.

I am not a politician and I endorse this message. I’d be even more on board if we also chiselled off the names of politicians from schools, community centres, streets, and any other edifice built with taxpayer money.

November 6, 2013

“Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

David Warren explains why Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford had to exist:

… every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

[…]

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

Update: Take it away, Taiwanese animators!

March 1, 2012

A “Confederation theme park”? The jokes write themselves

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

In the National Post, Lorne Gunter has a bit of fun with the notion of what kind of attractions to put in a theme park celebrating Confederation:

“It’s easy to mock Preston Manning’s idea for a Confederation Theme Park … for starters, it’s somewhat odd to see the pro-small-government, West-wants-in Reform Party founder to be proposing a large government expenditure on a historically slanted amusement park to be located, of all places, in Ottawa.”

So said the Ottawa Citizen’s Mark Sutcliffe — two years ago!

It’s still easy to mock.

Although ultimately endorsing Mr. Manning’s idea (in his own altered form), Sutcliffe called the project “Epcot Centre on the Ottawa River,” a dig at the multinational exposition at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (The one lasting impression I have of Epcot is that every pavilion was tedious and getting from one to the other required a lot of uncomfortable, fruitless walking. Hey, maybe that would be a good blueprint for a celebration of Confederation after all.)

Sutcliffe had his own satirical ideas of what rides a Confederation Park might offer. There could be “Universal (Health Care) Studios” and the “Sovereignty Movement Roller Coaster” that soared to the same dizzying highs and plunged to the same gut-turning lows as Quebec nationalism has experienced over the past 40 years. Patrons could also “board the Avro Arrow as it sits on the runway and never takes off!”

[. . .]

Imagine the joy on tots faces when Mom and Dad tell them that instead of going to central Florida for Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World (gad, I still have that cloying song stuck in my head), Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and Typhoon Lagoon, they’ll be heading to Ottawa in February to watch an animatronic debate between robot John A. Macdonald and robot Joseph Howe over the British North America Act’s division of federal and provincial powers at the authentic recreation of Charlottetown’s Founders’ Hall at the PEI display.

Then there’ll be a ride on the Drop of Western Alienation Doom; the Endless Trip to the Sovereignty-Association Dentist (sponsored by “money and the ethnic vote”); the Constitutional Reform Merry-go-round (also dubbed the Canada Round); topped off by the Centre-of-the-Universe Centrifuge where riders strap themselves into cars resembling Canada’s regions and the entire contraption revolves around Toronto.

August 28, 2010

QotD: The Canadian (lack of) taste for charismatic leadership

Filed under: Cancon, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

Canadians like their politicians dull. Perhaps at some point, many moons ago, this was a defense mechanism of sorts. A dull politician is unlikely to do anything rash and interventionist, thereby mucking up the daily life of the nation. This is no longer a safe strategy. Lester Pearson was politely dull, and unleashed Medicare, an ahistorical flag and Pierre Trudeau on an unsuspecting nation. Never was so much harm, done by so few, in so short a period of time, than in Mike Pearson’s five years in office. Much of what people blame Trudeau for was actually begun by Pearson. But who could hate Mike? He was such a nice guy. He wore a bow tie.

There have been only three genuinely charismatic Prime Ministers in Canadian history: Wilfred Laurier, John Diefenbaker and Pierre Trudeau. John A Macdonald might be a weak fourth, depending on how fond you are of boozy charm. What did they all have in common? What the Elder President Bush disdainfully called the “vision thing.” You may not like their visions, but they were about something and attracted a train of almost fanatical — by Canadian standards — followers.

You can’t run into an aging baby boomer in Toronto, they are ubiquitous here, without being bored to tears with their particular Trudeau story. They campaigned for him. They met him walking down some solitary Montreal street. You get the odd Trudeau in the wilderness stories. The funny ones usually involve a disco, a blond and something that happened after the third cocktail. Urban legends used to surround Laurier as well. Dief, as Peter C Newman noted, had the presence of an Old Testament prophet.

Their vision and their charisma were not coincidences, but corollaries. Just being charming and interesting will get you only so far.

Publius, “Iggy Why”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-08-26

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