John A. Macdonald’s Place in History

Wherever the statue ends up, what happened Saturday was a comment on today’s politics more than anything that happened in John A. Macdonald’s time. The country is his monument, and will remain so long after Mayor Helps and the other pipsqueaks on Victoria council are forgotten.

The drive culminated in a resolution passed by the legislature 140 years ago this month under the leadership of then Premier George Walkem, elected on a promise to “fight Canada.”

Framed as a direct plea to Queen Victoria, the motion called on Her Majesty to “order and direct that B.C. shall have the right to withdraw from the union” unless Ottawa got going on construction of a transcontinental railway.

The railway was promised in the terms of union under which B.C. agreed to join Canada in 1871. But through the middle years of the 1870s, the then federal Liberal government foot-dragged, believing the railway was not viable economically or financially.

As Liberal Edward Blake put it at one point: “If the Columbians should say — you must go on and finish this railway according to the terms or take the alternative of releasing us from confederation, I would take the alternative!”

Had Ottawa proceeded down the bluff-calling road, continental history might have unfolded much differently.

Some Americans already thought of linking California, acquired by war, to Alaska, acquired by purchase. Had Canada abandoned the promise to build the railway, B.C. might have drifted into the U.S. embrace or been annexed in the name of manifest destiny.

It didn’t happen of course. The railway did get built and B.C. became the West Coast anchor of a dominion straddling the continent from sea to sea.

The reason it didn’t happen was in large measure owed to the political will of one man, John A. Macdonald. Returned to power as prime minister not long after the B.C. legislature issued the aforementioned plea-cum-ultimatum, he made sure the railway got built.

Readers of a certain age will, like me, recall the fully audacious, history-making story as told by Pierre Berton in the National Dream and the Last Spike, then dramatized by the CBC in a landmark TV series.

Do they still teach history that way today? I had to wonder because of what happened in my hometown of Victoria last week when its council voted to summarily evict Macdonald’s statue from the post it has occupied at city hall for most of four decades.

Mayor Lisa Helps tried to frame the removal as a well-thought-out gesture of reconciliation to Indigenous people offended by Macdonald’s role in establishing residential schools and denying social justice to people he’d characterized as “savages.”

But any claim to careful deliberation and due process was undermined by the rush-job handling, with council voting on Thursday, and the statue ticketed for removal by Saturday.

The deed itself was done in the dead of night, with work crews showing up at 5 a.m. and the statue sawed from its base and gone by 7:30. Would politicians who were proud of their action have proceeded that way?

Reactions evidenced a community that was bitterly divided for and against, vindicating the concern voiced by chair Murray Sinclair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: “The problem I have with the overall approach to tearing down statues and buildings is that it is counterproductive to reconciliation because it almost smacks of revenge or smacks of acts of anger.”

The statue was installed at city hall not just in recognition of Macdonald’s role in ensuring B.C. got its railway (and was thus not at risk of joining what some people are now calling Trumpland) but also because of his special connection to the provincial capital.

Macdonald served as MP for Victoria and even visited the place after the railway was completed, pausing north of the city 132 years ago this week to drive the last spike on the completed Esquimalt and Nanaimo railway.  The spot is still marked by a cairn — reluctant though I am to mention it given the current determination to expunge all memorials to a past that does not 100 per cent live up to present day notions of moral superiority.

As bitterness gave way to sober second thought this week, there was some suggestion that the statue might find a home in the provincial museum as part of a display that told a fuller story about Macdonald.

Perhaps there would even be space to quote from the portrait of Macdonald the man, by the late Bruce Hutchison, longtime Victoria resident.

“As a boy of seven he had seen his brother beaten to death by a drunken servant. His first son died of a fall at the age of two. Then for years the young lawyer and politician had neglected his career to sit night after night by the bed of his wife and watch her die. His second marriage produced a daughter whose mind never grew out of infancy and whom he treated tenderly as a child when she was a woman of middle age. Toward the end of his days his wife discovered in his room a box filled with the toys of his dead son. The wounds had never healed. He hid them with drink, raillery and the work of building a nation.”

Wherever the statue ends up, what happened Saturday was a comment on today’s politics more than anything that happened in Macdonald’s time. The country is his monument, and will remain so long after Mayor Helps and the other pipsqueaks on Victoria council are forgotten.

Vaughn Palmer: Vancouver Sun.