How soon till They come for George?
By Elliot Kaufman
Aug. 13, 2018 6:41 p.m. ET
‘Thus always to tyrants,†said Brutus, but what about prime ministers? After a 7-1 City Council vote, Victoria, British Columbia’s provincial capital, hauled down a bronze statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, from the steps of City Hall Saturday. The statue will be stored away until Victoria finds a way to “recontextualize†Macdonald.
“Indigenous people do not need to walk past this painful reminder of colonial violence each time they enter the doors of their municipal government,†declared Mayor Lisa Helps. Yet Macdonald’s approximate American counterpart is not Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, but George Washington. As Canada’s leading Father of Confederation, Macdonald’s face still appears on every Canadian $10 bill.
Ms. Helps calls Macdonald “a key architect†of Canada’s residential school system, which forcibly removed aboriginal children from their communities and placed them in church-run, government-funded boarding schools designed for “aggressive assimilation.†From the mid-1880s to the late 1940s—long after Macdonald’s death in 1891—150,000 children were stripped of their language and culture. Many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse; more than 3,000 died.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/toppling-a-statue-north-of-the-border-1534200088
