On Sir John A. Macdonald and Canada’s Founding: A Book Review

Canadians are no strangers to the perceived flaws of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister.  But the time has come to revise the historical revisionists, who led the toppling of his statues and other forms of diminution following the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Report in 2015. 

With this in mind, Patrice Dutil has offered a balanced and nuanced study, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885 (2024).  1885 was the year of Louis Riel, the year of famine among Indigenous Peoples, the year of smallpox, and the make-or-break year of the Canadian Pacific Railway, our iron link to continental connection.  In Dutil’s view, 1885 was as perilous to Canada as was 1917, the year of Vimy and of the conscription crisis in Quebec.  To this we might also add: the year 2025 with Donald Trump’s turbulent tariffs and threats of annexation which have stirred Canadians and even united us.

Aside from a few clichés, the book is well written, but the best part was confined to a footnote.  In the conclusion, Dutil states that the phrase “killing the Indian to save the child” is falsely associated with Macdonald.  He goes on to put in the footnote:

Though Macdonald is consistently accused of having uttered this phrase, there is no record of it.  None of his ministers or government officials ever used it.  In fact, no Canadian politician used the phrase until Stephen Harper did in 2008 in his apology for residential schools.  This is an American expression that was first used by Captain Richard Pratt, the director of the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Beverly McLachlin, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, was probably the most eminent Canadian to cite that phrase in a speech in May of 2015. [1]

So, it appears that even influential Canadian figures don’t always get their history right. As Macdonald’s fortunes tumbled, the prestige of Indigenous Studies rose – as if in an inverse relationship.  But history is not a zero-sum game, and it should not be about one fixed allegiance to an historiographical tradition.  

The historian’s craft is about embracing complexity and its many sides: the past cannot be understood outside of history – and the historian, who cannot write in isolation.  History belongs to a time and a place.  Context matters.  While we have been busy retrofitting our house to suit current building codes, we should remind ourselves that these “codes” have changed over time.  Today’s Land Acknowledgements are oddly reminiscent of yesterday’s Lord’s Prayer.

The term “genocide” is difficult to tackle in a few, short sentences here.  But its frequency of use in popular discourse is problematic in Canada.  Today, as we attempt to reign in price inflation, could we not also, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur once remarked, have a degree of “genocide” inflation?[2]

Macdonald is pilloried for his role in the formation of Indian Residential Schools, which, in hindsight, are better seen as a national crime (in the original words from 1922 of Dr. Peter Bryce) than a mass extermination.[3]  Is it sound, legally or historically, to take a term invented in the twentieth century, amid the Shoah, and then apply it retroactively?  Coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, and then codified at the UN Genocide Convention in 1948, the label of “genocide” indicates intent, but where is it in Canada?

If Macdonald and company were so bent on “genocide”, why was his government busy inoculating the (grateful) Indigenous Peoples?  Why was almost half of the budget at Indian Affairs dedicated to supplying food to the Indigenous Peoples, who were starving?  Why were some Indigenous Peoples (men owning property) given the right to vote? Why did they have the opportunity to meet in person with Macdonald’s cabinet, and with the Prime Minister at his Earnscliffe home in Ottawa?  

More questions: Why was Macdonald’s proposed $5 head tax on incoming Chinese changed to a $50 tax?  (Answer: Because British Columbians demanded it as a condition of entering Confederation).   Why did Macdonald want Canada to be the first nation in the world to give women the right to vote?  (Answer: Because he knew of the writings of England’s pre-eminent philosopher, John Stuart Mill).

As Canadians today rally around each other, is it not incumbent on us to restore some honour to our first and founding Prime Minister?  Ask yourself: Where would you be now if Macdonald hadn’t succeeded then?  Instead of dismembering Macdonald, as others have done, Canadians should read Dutil’s book in an effort to remember Sir John A.’s many sides.

---

[1] Patrice Dutil, Sir John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year (Toronto: Southerland House, 2024), p. 312, n. 2.

[2] Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction: Conversations with François Azouvi and Marc de Launay, tr. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp. 112,113 [Original French edition published in 1995].

[3] See John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), pp. 51-75 (Chapter 4).  [Originally published in 1999].