Statue-be-gone: Sir John A. Macdonald - the Racist Essence of Canadian Colonialism
Photo Credit: (The Globe and Mail / Google Images)
Written by: Bruce Katz
As the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald has been lionized both by Canadian historians (generally English-Canadian historians) and the traditional media. A number of statues have been erected in his honour, which remains untarnished in the eyes of many Canadians. The myth of Macdonald as the pillar of Canadian nationhood and a paragon of integrity seems rock-solid. The reality is otherwise.
The Canada of Sir John A. Macdonald was a colonial project of the British Empire. It was built on that Empire’s prevalent ideology: expansion based on a certain Anglo-Saxon nativism. The Empire’s vast colonial projects were aimed at assimilating subject Indigenous populations (generally non-white) and, of course, exploiting their natural resources. This was argued to be something beneficial to the ‘civilizing’ of such ‘inferior’ peoples; in short, the racist notion of the ‘White Man’s Burden.’
This institutionalized racism underlay the all-White immigration policy of South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand which spanned the last six or seven decades of the nineteenth century extending well into the twentieth century. Although the subject of limiting Chinese immigration to Canada has been covered, few Canadians know of the $500 ‘Head-Tax’ levied on would-be Chinese immigrants via the Chinese Immigration Act of 1885. The purpose of which was to block most Chinese immigrants from entering Canada. This prevented family reunification with Chinese labourers who had arrived some two decades earlier to build the railway.
Macdonald had made it clear that Chinese immigration was necessary for the building of the national railway. However, he considered the Chinese a ‘foreign race’ that ‘could not be expected to assimilate with our Aryan population.’ (1)
Hitler, no less an admirer of Aryan purity than Macdonald, would make a similar statement regarding Jews some four decades later.
Canadian immigration policy was aimed at keeping non-White immigration – Chinese, Japanese, African, Indian, and others – to a minimum. This policy was reinforced by commercial restrictions and discriminatory federal and provincial legislation. In 1923, Canada put in place laws meant to limit immigration from eastern Europe. Essentially closing its door to Jews who had immigrated to Canada from eastern Europe in significant numbers during the previous decades. Immigration of visible minorities to Canada was closely tied to economic concerns. Irving Abella and Harold Troper sum up the philosophy of Canada’s immigration policy succinctly:
Canadian immigration policy had always been as ethnically selective as it was economically self-serving. When economic necessity dictated the admission of non-British and non-American immigrants, it was always in descending order of ethnic preference. Following British and American immigrants, preference was given northern and then central Europeans. At the bottom were Jews, Orientals and Blacks. (2)
The instances of institutionalized racism in Canada are numerous, belying the recent statements by certain individuals that there is no systemic racism in Canada. Few Canadians know that during the Second World War, the government of Canada rounded up and interned Italian Canadians, Japanese Canadians and German Canadians, deemed dangerous to national security – in internment camps. (3)
In what is the cruelest of ironies, ‘European refugees who had escaped the Nazis and made it to Britain, were rounded up as "enemy aliens". In 1940, they were transported on the same boats as German and Italian PoWs and were ‘sent to camps in New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec where they were mixed in with Canadian fascists, and other political prisoners, Nazi PoWs, etc.’ (4)
The flagship of Canadian institutionalized racism was, and remains, The Indian Act (1876) adopted in 1876 and amended several times since. It continues to remain in force. It should be noted that Canada’s Indian Act served as the legislative model for the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Israel.
‘The dark hidden part of the Canadian history is the Indian Act of 1876 and its ongoing legacy. The Indian Act was as inspiration for policies of apartheid in South Africa and, some would say, Palestine, among others around the world.’ (5)
It is the manifestation of Canada’s own particular apartheid system.
In effect, as in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the Americas, Canada was built on the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous populations. The term ‘genocide’ refers to the systemic annihilation or destruction of a racial, ethnic, political or cultural group. Macdonald was its practitioner, as the following sections of this article will show. The document, Philosophy of the Indian Act, is a crucial read which details the dehumanizing aspects of the Indian Act – with specific references to amendments of the Act.
It is against the aforementioned background of Canada’s ethnically charged immigration system and the systemic anti-First Nations elements of the Indian Act that we now turn to the ‘legacy’ of Sir John A. Macdonald. This is so that the reader may decide whether statues erected to his memory are worthy of public display. To make what Macdonald represented (and still represents), we’ll use his own words, such as they have been ‘codified’ in the works of Bob Joseph (6) and Robert A. Huttenback.
Macdonald started Residential Schools, the odious and dehumanizing institution to which Indigenous children, torn away from their families, were sent to be assimilated and brutalized, to be ‘civilized’ in the White European way. He refers to this in 1879:
‘When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.’ (7)
In 1873, Macdonald created the North West Mounted Police, today the RCMP, whose mission was to harass and control Indigenous peoples in the Prairies. This is ingrained into the culture of the RCMP, a reminder to those who claim that there is no systemic racism in that particular police corps.
Macdonald subsequently undertook a policy of starving the Métis and First Nations out of the Prairies. This was done to build a railway through their dispossessed lands – by killing off their principal source of food, the bison, much as the Americans were doing in the United States to Indigenous peoples there. In terms of modern international law, he would be guilty of Crimes Against Humanity.
In 1882, Macdonald confirmed his policy of genocide against Indigenous peoples by way of starvation in Canada’s House of Commons:
“I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole … are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”
David Mills, a Liberal MP, followed Macdonald’s ode to genocide with the complaint that they were not being starved enough:
“No doubt the Indians will bear a great degree of starvation before they will work, and so long as they are certain the Government will come to their aid they will not do much for themselves.” (8)
The brutal, genocidal policies of Macdonald resulted in the 1885 Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel. Riel was demonized by the English-Canadian press while Macdonald was credited with being a saviour of the nation. In 1885, during the period of the Northwest Rebellion led by Louis Riel, Macdonald writes:
‘We have had a wonderful success; but still we have had the Indians; and then in these half-breeds, enticed by white men, the savage instinct was awakened; the desire of plunder – aye, and perhaps, the desire of scalping - the savage idea of a warlike glory . . . and forgetting all the kindness that had been bestowed upon them, forgetting all the gifts that had been given to them, forgetting all that the Government, the white people and the Parliament of Canada had been doing for them in trying to rescue them from barbarity . . . forgetting all these things, they rose against us.’ (9)
In 1885, concerning the execution of Louis Riel for treason, Macdonald states, confirming his contempt for the Métis and French Quebec: ‘He shall die though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.’ (10) Macdonald’s reference to ‘dogs in Quebec’ did not have anything to do with our four-footed canine friends. The racism is explicit.
Again, in 1885 before Macdonald hanged eight Cree warriors who had dared to resist the destruction of their way of life, Macdonald had this to say: “The executions of the Indians ought to convince the Red Men that the White Man governs.” (11) In 1885 Macdonald also passed The Electoral Franchise Act which limited the rights of Blacks, First Nations and other visible minorities to vote.
In 1887, confirming his intention to efface Indigenous culture, Macdonald writes in terms of the Indian Act:
‘The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.’ (12)
That Sir John A. Macdonald was a racist is unquestionable. His own words condemn him. It is wholly unacceptable to attempt to defend his callousness and bigotry by stating that ‘he was a creature of his time.’ He was the epitome of the self-aggrandizing notion of white Anglo-Saxon purity, which embodied British elites and the colonial regimes they imposed on subject peoples.
His policies, especially in regard to the First Nations and Métis, was genocidal. That Macdonald continues to be celebrated as Canada’s first and greatest statesman is a tribute to the intellectual spuriousness of an unquestioning political class and an incompetent media.
It is time that those statues erected in his honour be removed from public view. If we must, let us keep one only and place it in a museum, perhaps the Canadian Hall of Shame. The statues of Macdonald and other racists of his ilk can be placed with large plaques on the wall detailing their dark deeds. That is ‘educating the public.’
Please consider clicking on the link below and signing the petition calling for renaming the Sir John A Macdonald Hall to the Patricia Monture Hall at Queen’s University.
Bruce Katz is a founding member and current co-president of PAJU (Palestinian and Jewish Unity), a Montreal-based pro-Palestinian solidarity organization.
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