GIESBRECHT: MacDonald's Mistake
Brian Giesbrecht
Published:
August 17, 2018
Updated:
August 17, 2018 7:00 AM EDT
A statue of Canada's first prime minister has been removed from the grounds outside Victoria City Hall, days after the city council voted to remove it. The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald overlooks the Imam at Masjid Al-Iman, Ismail Mohamed Nur, speaks during a vigil to honour the victims of a shooting at a Quebec City mosque, in Victoria on Tuesday, January 31, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito ORG XMIT: CPT104
Victoria City Council removed John A. MacDonald’s statue from City Hall to promote reconciliation with Indigenous people. The latest of many attacks on important Canadian historical figures, bewildered officials believe an Orwellian rewriting of Canadian history will bring about “reconciliation”.
Macdonald is our greatest Canadian. If not for Macdonald, there would be no Canada. His vision included peoples from other parts of the world settling and farming the west, with a railroad tying the country together. Without Macdonald, everything west of Ontario would have become a northern extension of our troubled neighbour to the south. He made one great mistake- that mistake involved peoples then known as Indians.
By1867 Canada’s Indians had been laid low by disease, warfare, and a disappearing hunting and gathering way of life. Particularly in the west, Indian tribes were poor, scattered and few in numbers, considered of no economic importance and a minor obstacle to big plans for the west. Despite this, it would be a mistake to say that Macdonald did not think long and hard about ‘what to do’ with the Indians.
Macdonald’s critics today call him a racist bigot, but they fail to note that by today’s standards most folks in 1867 would be adjudged that. Those were times when it was taken as given that some groups of people were superior to others – Chinese workers and Ruthenian peasants were thought inferior to Anglo-Saxons, and Irish and Catholics were not to be trusted. Indians were near the bottom of the totem pole with other brown-skinned people.
The real racist bigots of the day were content to do nothing for the Indians. Macdonald was not one of those, representing the philanthropic side which urged action to save a dying people by bringing them into civilization. This applies to the creation of residential schools. Pushing aside the nineteenth-century rhetoric that is today considered racist, Macdonald wanted Indians to learn English so that they could survive in the new world. Today, successful Indigenous persons are either fluent in English or French. Macdonald’s mistake was making special reference to Indians in The British North America Act. It made necessary The Indian Act, and its dead-end reserve system.
The BNA Act could have made no reference to Indians. But, there was precedent for singling out Indians for special treatment – The Royal Proclamation of 1763. Macdonald did not have to follow it, he could have asked Westminster to omit any reference to Indians in the BNA Act and leave Parliament to make land allotments and compensation (as was done in the United States). There would have been no reserves. The end result would have been that Indians would to be ordinary Canadians (in every respect).
Macdonald should have treated Indians the way everyone else was treated. Compensation would have been made to Indians as individuals, and they would have adjusted. After all, Indians had adapted to new circumstances before. When the newly chartered Rupertsland created opportunities in the fur business, Indians adjusted and prospered. The same thing happened when a buffalo economy opened up. That is the way it works. Instead, Indians languished on reserves while the rest of the country turned into a modern and prosperous country.
Macdonald’s mistake was in not treating Indigenous people like everyone else.
Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge, senior fellow of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
http://torontosun.com/news/national/giesbrecht-macdonalds-mistake
