FLETCHER: It’s time to restore the broken history of Canada

Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.My first experience with the deletion of Canadian history here in Victoria was in 2007, when MLAs voted overwhelmingly to remove four historical murals from the foyer of the BC legislature. Painted by George Southwell in the 1930s from research that included oral histories, the scenes included “Justice,” a frontier courtroom where BC’s first Chief Justice Matthew Baillie Begbie passed sentence on an aboriginal man. Another, “Labour,” depicted shirtless men and women unloading logs from a ship to build Fort Victoria in the 1840s.One of three dissenters in the murals vote was Skeena MLA Dennis MacKay, who noted the established artist had reviewed records showing one local tribe “did hire out their slaves to build Fort Victoria.”Chief Maquinna, whose statue is set into the south wall of the legislature, had up to 50 slaves. They included two of 27 American crew members of the sailing ship Boston, the only survivors of an attack by Maquinna’s warriors in 1802. They were forced to serve him, including by carrying wood and joining in the slaughter of a neighbouring tribe, before they were rescued after 28 months in captivity.MLAs said the mural removal was for reconciliation, and promised they would be relocated. But since they were painted directly on plaster walls, they were covered over instead, replaced with early photographs of the harbour.In 2020, the target was a sculpture of Captain James Cook, the English explorer who charted the Vancouver Island region in the 1700s while seeking a northwest passage with his midshipman George Vancouver. The sculpture was splashed with red paint as anti-colonial sentiment grew on college campuses..In 2021, as false claims of secret children’s graves swept the country and churches were burned, a mob came back to finish the job. The statue was broken down and tossed into the harbour as police watched from a distance.No one accused Cook of any crime, other than being an early European explorer. Cook established trade with Chief Maquinna among others. He was murdered by natives in Hawaii in 1779.“While mapping the west coast of Vancouver Island, Cook gathered and recorded a vast amount of data pertaining to the indigenous people of the area and their cultures,” says the BC legislature website.The stage for Cook’s erasure was set in 2018, not by rioters but politicians. Victoria’s mayor and council, after closed-door meetings with a local indigenous lobby group they call the “city family,” quietly ordered the statue of one-time local MP Sir John A. Macdonald from in front of city hall. It was replaced with a large potted plant.The statue, which had been commissioned by a local historical group and donated to the city, was put in storage at an undisclosed location. Its current status remains unknown, with promises to relocate it now all but forgotten.The following year, New Westminster council voted 4-2 to take down the statue of Begbie outside the BC Supreme Court in that former capital city, in the name of reconciliation. Another statue of him remains set into the legislature library wall, too high for protesters to reach, along with depictions of Cook and Maquinna. George Vancouver’s gold-plated statue tops the building..Begbie’s legacy has been degraded to a single case, where a jury convicted five Chilcotin men for the murder of members of a roadbuilding crew. This was during the Cariboo wave of a gold rush that led the British to create and defend the colony of British Columbia from being taken over by thousands of Americans.Begbie was labelled “the hanging judge” well after his death. It is a misnomer as a jury’s finding of murder carried an automatic death sentence in his time, and he averaged about one hanging per year. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography tells a fuller story of Begbie’s career. He left a London law practice to bring order to a violent place, writing the statutes that defined BC and travelling epic distances to enforce them, living in tents and hunting to feed himself.After drafting the Gold Fields Act in 1859, he walked 350 miles from New Westminster to Kamloops and back to introduce miners and gold commissioners to the new law. By 1865, he had horses available, and he rode an estimated 3,500 miles that year to preside over circuit courts in the BC Interior.None of this is taught in public schools or apparently law schools. In 2017, a sculpture of Begbie riding his horse was ordered removed by the Law Society of BC from its offices in Vancouver.Tom Fletcher has covered BC politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.comX: @tomfletcherbc