ROBSON: The Toronto Star’s multiple errors on Sir John A Macdonald

Dr. John Robson is a historian, author, columnist, and documentary filmmaker.Given how dismal most of world history is, many people understandably romanticize their ancestors while governments peddle insolent propaganda. But why would Canada, so blessed by history and geography, have grafted onto a past as discouraging, as it is false?Consider an August 19 item in the state-funded Toronto Star about a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald and his supposed sins against aboriginal Canadians. Supposedly, it embodies the corrosive post-modern decolonial attitudes that led our prime minister to claim an ongoing aboriginal genocide on his watch without even resigning. Billed as news not opinion, it was derogatory fiction.First, “Four years after a Queen’s Park statue of founding prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald was boarded up for protection from vandals, a committee of MPPs slowly gathering input on its future has been scolded and schooled by a First Nations equity consultant.” But the 1894 statue was shut in a rodent-infested box in 2020 lest protestors topple it while police watched idly.Also, legislators “scolded” by a “consultant” might be news. But what does “schooled” mean? Supposedly “debate simmers over… a historic figure whose legacy is tarnished by his role in creating residential schools, where thousands of Indigenous children died in tragic and brutal circumstances.” Except there’s no debate, just a joint media-activist “schooling” in which brutal extermination is taken for granted.As is the consultant urging “a collaborative approach respectful of Indigenous and ceremonial traditions, that would not just seek opinions but offer genuine involvement as partners in the decision-making process.” Technically under our Constitution to become partners in lawmaking you must get elected. But the new mythology assumes aboriginals, far from being subject to Canadian law, get to dictate changes to abolish “colonial-expectational oppression.”Nobody talked that way in pre-contact North America. But when “an elder known as Grandmother Blue Skies” stands up elected members for following standard legislative-hearing procedures, they’re hectored, “These things are important to know, but as someone who’s not Indigenous, you won’t know them.”We might if someone told us. Ontario’s sole elected Indigenous MPP could be asked where these rules are codified, and when we agreed to them. Instead, he said keep the statue in its rat cage because “we are trying to find the remains of our children,” and over issues like on-reserve boil-water advisories for which Trudeau not Sir John A. is responsible.Even the Star’s “Macdonald’s government initiated residential schools in 1883” is wrong; it was Alexander Mackenzie in 1876.As for, “During those years, about 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend the schools,” many aboriginal parents desperately wanted their children taught to read to survive a drastically-changed world. Also, in the pre-antibiotic era child mortality was high everywhere for everyone, and worse for aboriginals, so the implication of wilful neglect or worse is false.As for “trying to find the remains,” or the Star’s “a search for graves continues at the sites of former schools across the country,” ever since the supposed 2021 discovery of 215 unmarked burial sites at a former Kamloops residential school, conventional Canadian wisdom calls residential school administrators, especially Christian, murderous child molesters.But no actual graves have been found anywhere except in known cemetery sites where time and neglect often destroyed markers. And they have not been found partly because, despite a large accelerating gravy train for searching, nobody is really looking.They can’t, because a desultory initial effort suggested the Kamloops “ground disturbances” were an old tile bed. But it’s impossible either to admit there aren’t bodies or produce any.So, instead we pretend, including the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations speaking of “our solemn commitment to finding the children” and “the first findings in Tk’emlups”.If there was no genocide how would our elite flagellate us? MPPs thanked the consultant for berating them, and she responded “My goal is to make others get used to feeling uncomfortable, and then work with that towards your own education and learning.”So it’s reconciliation with pain. And while Kingston’s commissioner of community services, which also chucked Macdonald’s statue down the memory hole, spoke of “a dialogue about identity” there’s no dialogue, just a monologue by aboriginals with nothing to learn pillorying settlers with nothing to teach, the former being gifted with sublime and complete wisdom even before becoming elders at an age where the latter just start having extra trouble finding our glasses.Or so our pernicious mythology insists, mocking reconciliation and truth alike.Dr. John Robson is a Senior Fellow with the Aristotle Foundation, an adjunct professor at Augustine College (Ottawa), historian, author, columnist, and documentary filmmaker.