You are not the wonderful person that many Canadians thought you were
Good riddance!
Bye, bye Sir John A
Mon, 2018-09-03 23:00
#1
Bye, bye Sir John A
Tue, 2018-09-04 10:03
#2
Someone spraypainted the one in Regina's Victoria Park last week. With Victoria's gone it is now the last statue of him remaining in western Canada.
Tue, 2018-09-04 10:33
#3
So should babble apologize for publishing stuff like this...?
Peace. Order. Good Government. Plus a healthy respect for the value of putting our own compatriots first, in trade as well as simple patriotism. Sound ideals to live by, as it turned out, and thankfully resistant to the tinkerers, like those in our present government, who to serve their own interests would turn this place into a warped reflection of the United States as quickly as they could if given half a chance -- which we have very nearly done and ought not to risk doing again.
Macdonald, a Tory in the true meaning of the word, recognized the threat that United States imperialism posed then to our country, as it does in a different way now, even if the current stewards of his great old party's name do not and will not.
******
And we must acknowledge that, as was the character of the time, he was a racist. Perhaps this is part of the answer to the mystery of why we do not celebrate a national holiday on this date, or, as noted, yesterday, when his birth was recorded in Glasgow.
Regardless, we have it in our power to correct the errors of the past, not add to them as some would have us do, and still to acknowledge the great good that was handed down to us by this imperfect Canadian.
......
We can be thankful John A. Macdonald was our first prime minister. As we look toward the future, we should remember that today's "Tories" are not the same thing at all.
Or is this, unlike the statues, redeemed by the one paragraph mentioning that Macdonald was a racist, "as was the character of the time"?
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:17
#4
no.
a reminder today's Conservatives are way beyond worse than Macdonalds is a good thing.
they make the racism and bigotry of former Con regimes seem mild.
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:25
#5
Apologize? No.
When I consider that without his ramming through the takeover of western Canada we might be worring about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh this morning, his legacy is a conflicting one. Even with the genocide he started, and his general racism against anyone who wasn't Protestant and Anglophone.
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:27
#6
no.
a reminder today's Conservatives are way beyond worse than Macdonalds is a good thing.
they make the racism and bigotry of former Con regimes seem mild.
Todays Cons have taken the racism of Macdoanld and have dressed it up so that people dont see it. These Cons are scum and this needs to be pointed out at every opportunity.
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:34
#7
Apologize? No.
When I consider that without his ramming through the takeover of western Canada we might be worring about the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh this morning, his legacy is a conflicting one. Even with the genocide he started, and his general racism against anyone who wasn't Protestant and Anglophone.
So if the statues had only included plaques informing us that he saved us from annexation, along with the caveats about his being racist, they'd be okay?
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:48
#8
No. A statue is a statue. An article is an article.
There is a big difference between a public monument or comemmoration, and free and open discussion. I don't see Climenhaga saying anywhere that Macdonald's system of child concentration camps was a good thing. He said that there are reasons to be thankful that he was prime minister; that is fair comment.
Tue, 2018-09-04 11:56
#9
No. A statue is a statue. An article is an article.
There is a big difference between a public monument or comemmoration, and free and open discussion. I don't see Climenhaga saying anywhere that Macdonald's system of child concentration camps was a good thing. He said that there are reasons to be thankful that he was prime minister; that is fair comment.
But I don't think the statues were saying that the concentration camps were a good thing, either. Like the article, they probably just ignored them.
Tue, 2018-09-04 12:13
#10
This might get back to why communities remove and rename in the first place. It isn't necessarily absolutist or revisionist; it is about what we want to honour and recognize in our society. Cape Kennedy wasn't changed back to Cape Canaveral because of Kennedy's legacy.
Similarly a lot of the names of First Nations and towns aren't being changed for explicit reasons, even if some renamings - like the Langevin Block and Langevin Bridge - have political grounds.
And Nicholas Flood Davin's legacy was updated with a plaque: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/nicholas-flood-davin-gravesi...
I don't see any conflict between someone having a deeply conflicted legacy and a decision that you might not want to have his name on a school. More importantly that latter decision doesn't mean you can't talk about that legacy anymore.
My feelings about Macdonald are quite conflicted, and on the whole negative. I grew up in the town that his orange goons terrorized after annexation. The fact that I have some ambivalence about what might have happened differently is a bit removed from the simple fact I don't appreciate seeing him in a place of honour (a place of honour on the very site Louis Riel was condemned) every time I visit Regina.
Tue, 2018-09-04 12:32
#11
Smith wrote:
My feelings about Macdonald are quite conflicted
Me too(and more on that later). But I don't get the impression that the advocates of removing the statues are coming at the issue from a conflicted, or even an ambivalent, perspective. If all I ever knew about Macdonald was what I was hearing from his detractors the past while, I think I would assume that his policies in regards to First Nations were Canada's version of the Trail Of Tears.
Which may be true, for all I know. But then it seems a little odd that we'd think it okay for a left-wing, anti-colonialist site to lionize the guy, with only a brief sentence acknowleding that he was "racist, along with the times" and we can now correct his "errors".
As for my own conflicted attitudes, yeah, I'm glad to be Canadian and not American. I kind of wonder, though, if Macdonald and his band of "orange goons" could have foreseen that the country they were creating would be the one that was miles ahead of their land-hungry neighbour on issues like reproductive choice and marriage equality(basically, the issues alluded to in your Kavanaugh reference), if they would have wanted to resist annexation as hard as they did.