The Beheading of Sir John A. Macdonald

In 2020, a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s founding prime minister, was toppled and decapitated in Montreal. It was the second time the statue had been beheaded; the first had been in 1992; it was periodically vandalized with paint, as well. This time, the city decided not to restore Macdonald’s statue to its pedestal. Montreal isn’t alone—across the country, Sir John A. Macdonald is being purged from public view.

“It’s hard to imagine a reputation being trashed so hatefully, so suddenly, and so thoroughly,” historian Patrice Dutil wrote of Canada’s first prime minister in his new book Sir John A. MacDonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885, published late last year. Dutil didn’t know it at the time, but the campaign to smear Macdonald goes all the way to the top. New reporting has revealed that the federal government’s Parks Canada Historic Sites and Monuments Board recommended that Macdonald be essentially eliminated from public memory.

“The Board recommended that Sir John A. Macdonald be commemorated by means of information to be made available on the Parks Canada website and that no plaque be erected,” read minutes from a meeting on December 12, 2023. Members concluded that Macdonald is a “polarizing and controversial figure in Canadian history.”

“Given that Macdonald continues to be a polarizing figure, the Board noted the challenge of crafting a statement that views him from multiple perspectives and that there will continue to be a public dialogue about Macdonald’s legacy to present day Canada,” the minutes continued. “The Board then turned to consider whether or not it was appropriate to erect a plaque for Sir John A. Macdonald.” They decided against it.

As Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre put it in response to the news: “It’s very simple: no Macdonald, no Canada. No federal board has the right to cancel the first Prime Minister of our country. Sir John A. Macdonald deserves to be clearly recognized for his role in the foundation of the wonderful country we get to call home.”

But the Board concluded that Macdonald’s gravesite, as well as existing statues, were quite enough of Canada’s founder. Of course, many of those existing statues were toppled, vandalized, or moved during the frequently riotous struggle sessions of the Trudeau years. 

The city of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, voluntarily removed its statue after a council vote following five instances of vandalism; it now sits in storage. The Macdonald statue that stood outside City Hall in Victoria, British Columbia, was removed preemptively; the statue in Wilmot, Ontario, was removed after being vandalized with red paint in 2020. The Macdonald statue that stood for 125 years in his hometown of Kingston was removed after vandalism, as was the statue in Regina, Saskatchewan.

The statue at Queen’s Park in Toronto was boarded up in response to vandalism in 2020; it struck me, when I saw it, how much it looked like Canada’s first and third prime minister, who served for a total of 19 years, had been stuffed into a vertical coffin. The statue was finally cleaned up and the hoarding removed last month. 

It gets worse. Parks Canada’s reopening of Macdonald’s home in Kingston last year was replete with contemptuous speeches about racism, misogyny, and white supremacy; indeed, it is difficult to tell if Parks Canada regrets the founding of Canada as much as they regret the existence of her founder. Several schools named after Macdonald have been renamed, and the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway along the Ottawa River has been renamed “Kichi Zibi Mikan.”

Macdonald was, like America’s George Washington, his nation’s indispensable man: Without him, Canada would not exist. He immigrated to Kingston from Scotland in 1820; was elected to the assembly of the Province of Canada in 1844, and became prime minister in 1867. He was a key architect of Confederation and became the first prime minister of the new Dominion of Canada in 1867. He swiftly expanded the new nation to Manitoba (1870), British Columbia (1871), and Prince Edward Island (1873), also championed the Canadian Pacific Railway, connecting the vast country and ensuring its survival.

Macdonald was a titan, and those who wish to delegitimize Canada must destroy him to do it. Macdonald was, as Patrice Dutil noted in his essential rebuttal to this iconoclasm, remarkably progressive for his period, but activists have scavenged the historical record to cherry-pick quotes that sound racist to modern ears. References to Indigenous peoples as savages, for example, are touted as the measure of the man rather than a summation of the era.

The iconoclasts, however, do not explain why American Indians frequently fled across the border to the safety of Macdonald’s Canada to escape the U.S. Army, and do not mention that the government sent them supplies to ensure their survival on the winter prairies. When rations ran out—Dutil emphasizes Macdonald’s genuine anguish over this—the history is slanderously rewritten as a deliberate attempt to starve Indigenous people to prop up the “genocide” narrative. That, Dutil notes, is simply “not the case.”

Indeed, most Canadians are unaware of the fact that Macdonald made statements in defense of Indigenous rights against genuinely racist opposition and his own political interests, and even advocated for their political enfranchisement. 

“Here are Indians, Aboriginal Indians, formerly the lords of the soil, formerly owning the whole of the country,” Macdonald stated. “Here they are, in their own land, prevented from either sitting in this House, or voting for men to come here and represent their interests. There are 120,000 of these people, who are virtually and actually disenfranchised, who complain, and justly complain, that they have no representation.”

Indeed, I was unaware of how much of the progressive narrative about Macdonald I had unconsciously absorbed until I read Dutil’s Sir John A. MacDonald & the Apocalyptic Year 1885 earlier this year. The difference between Macdonald the malign caricature and Macdonald the man is so stark that it is impossible to read Dutil’s offering without becoming angry at the libeling of this great man. In beheading his statues and stuffing them into storage units, activists are essentially deliberately decapitating the Canadian story in pursuit of a new, “progressive” Canada with new heroes.

“The land of my birth has, in a sense, vanished,” the great Canadian journalist Ted Byfield wrote in 1980. “The Canada I grew up in and was expected, should the occasion arise, to fight and die for, has changed so much that it has effectually ceased to exist. I think of it as Old Canada, a country pulled together in the latter 19th century by Sir John A. Macdonald and endowed with a constitution. New Canada, on the other hand, has been fashioned in the latter 20^th century by Mr. [Pierre] Trudeau.” 

In the decades between the two Trudeaus, Canada has ceased to be herself and is now a different country inhabited, for the most part, by a different people. For those who celebrate this rupture with the past and this breaking with Canada’s heritage, Sir John A. Macdonald must be destroyed. For them, smashing statues and slandering the great man at his own Kingston home is nothing more than taking out the trash.