Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy‘Sir John A. Macdonald, the greatest PM of all’ was the title of a January 9, 2015, Toronto Star opinion piece commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Canada’s first prime minister. The editorial’s author was the late Richard Gwyn, the Toronto Star’s leading political columnist for years.Given the present-day vilification of Macdonald, it is well worth considering Gwyn’s celebration of Canada’s founder because it comes from a left-of-centre journalist who wrote a highly acclaimed, best-selling two-volume biography of Canada’s founder. The first volume, 'The Man Who Made Us,' won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction in 2008. The second volume, 'Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times; Volume Two: 1867-1891,' won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2012 and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English-language nonfiction and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction..According to Gwyn’s Toronto Star piece, Macdonald’s first and most important achievement was the creation of Canada itself: “Had there been no Macdonald, there would be no Canada for anyone to be a citizen of.”“Macdonald’s overall contribution to Canada was irreplaceable… The best description of what he did for this country is that because of him, Manifest Destiny never became manifest. This is to say that the Americans’ assumption that all of North America was intended by God or geography to be theirs would never be realized.”Other achievements during Macdonald’s two terms in office — 1867-1873 and 1878-1891 — were the extension of Canada from sea to sea, partly by building a railway the entire way from eastern Canada to the West Coast; high tariffs to protect Canadian companies from their far more efficient American rivals; creation of the North-West Mounted Police (today, the RCMP,) which he dispatched to the Prairies to impose the rule of law throughout the region.“South of the U.S. border, the gun ruled. North of it, the law ruled. Below the border, not a single jury ever judged a white man guilty of mistreating native people. Above it, white men were hauled into the courts on charges of treating natives badly." “Prairie Indians understood the difference. The name they gave to the border was The Medicine Line, suggesting that above it there might just be some fair play and healing.”.Gwyn also acknowledged Macdonald’s alleged faults, albeit tempered by positive observations:“He most certainly had flaws. He was a drunk, the single fact about him most Canadians are aware of. Known by very few, though, is the fact Macdonald quit, an accomplishment even more difficult in that hard-drinking era than it is for addicts today.”“In the past few years, Macdonald’s reputation has been assaulted by an entirely new and a deadly accusation. This is that he was a ‘racist’ who, once the buffalo had been exterminated, deliberately allowed Indians to starve in order to clear the way for his railway. Sometimes, 'racist' is escalated into an accusation of him having a ‘genocidal’ policy.“His actual policy for getting food to the Indians — one his critics always avoid citing — was: “We cannot as Christians, and as men with hearts in our bosoms, allow the vagabond Indian to die before us… We must prevent them from starving, in consequence of the extinction of the buffalo and their not yet (having) betaken themselves to raising crops.”"Circumstances made that task extremely difficult. Amid a depression, few Canadians were prepared to be generous. The opposition Liberals seized the opportunity and repeatedly charged that by feeding native people, Macdonald was turning them into permanent dependents of government."“In effect, Macdonald is now a scapegoat so that guilt for misdeeds done in one way or other by all Canadians can be transferred to him alone.”.In 2020, Richard Gwyn died of Alzheimer’s disease, at the age of 86. It was just a few short weeks after Black Lives Matter protesters splashed a statue of Sir John A. with pink paint at Queen’s Park, Toronto. Had he still been in good enough health to understand this mindless desecration, it would surely have deeply saddened him.This vandalism was only one of several instances of statues of the first prime minister damaged or removed from public view across the country because of Macdonald’s role in establishing Canada’s Indigenous Residential School system.What Gwyn called scapegoating can no better be seen than by a June 5 Globe and Mail Editorial Board commentary excoriating the government of Ontario’s decision to remove the security boards from the repaired statue because Macdonald’s “legacy is stained by the establishment of a national residential school system aimed at stamping out Indigenous culture, causing generations of trauma.”Instead, it suggests, “To reflect Macdonald’s legacy properly, remove the protective box now hiding his statue — and erect an equally prominent memorial to the victims of residential schools.”The editor also claims such a memorial should be in the hands of indigenous bands who best know “how to commemorate that sorry [Indian Residential School] history, in which thousands of children died and more than 150,000 in total were victimized. Position Macdonald’s statue so he is left to gaze at the memorial.”These inflammatory claims obscure the known facts about these boarding schools.These facts show that thousands of children were sent to these schools to escape the trauma of dysfunctional home life on poverty-stricken reserves.They also prove that “stamping out Indigenous culture” was impossible given the short period most students spent in these schools. Moreover, few deaths — and even fewer burials — of indigenous students took place on school property..Lastly, the indigenous-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the boarding schools never claimed, let alone proved, that 150,000 students “were victimized” in any way while attending them.Each of these counter-claims is carefully documented here, here, here, here, and here.Did Sir John A. Macdonald’s policies and programmes always prove acceptable or beneficial to all indigenous people? Of course not. More importantly, no rational or objective person would ever claim he was anything close to a perfect prime minister.Still, Richard Gywn’s last sentence in his 2015 essay asks and answers the most critical question of all: “Who else among our 22 [now 24] other prime ministers has done more than Sir John A. Macdonald did for his country?”Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
