Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie is not a fan of the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) push to rename three schools. These are the ones currently bearing the accursed names of our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald; of Scottish abolitionist Henry Dundas (of whom John Graves Simcoe, founder of Toronto, was a great fan; and of Egerton Ryerson, the crusading early supporter of public education in Upper Canada (who introduced school boards to the province, ironically enough).
“(President) Trump’s trade war reminds us why Canadian pride matters,” Crombie said in a statement, when I asked her about it. “Our history isn’t perfect, but we should learn from it — not rewrite it. (Conservative Leader Doug) Ford dodges tough conversations. I won’t. I’m proud of Canada.”
Ford hasn’t said anything about the plans to change the names, though the Canadian Institute of History Education is pressing him to. It’s leading a well-argued pushback against this typically slapdash and insulting decision, which (per the TDSB) is “based on the potential impact that these names may have on students and staff based on colonial history, anti-indigenous racism and their connection to systems of oppression.”
Note: “potential impact” they “may have.” In other words, no one asked for this. Rather, unelected educrats are doing it in the name (if not on the backs of) minority students who might well be far more interested in and respectful of actual Canadian history than the people running the schools are.
I asked Team Bonnie about this because she had already gone to bat for Macdonald earlier in the campaign, or at least for his woebegone statue at Queen’s Park. Designed by Hamilton MacCarthy, erected in 1894, it currently lives inside a plywood box for fear that unveiling it would lead to it being vandalized — as it was in 2020, necessitating repairs that the general public still hasn’t laid eyes upon. (Attacking statues is still technically illegal, for the record, but evidently only in the way that jaywalking is technically illegal.)
“Somebody should show some leadership,” Crombie told the Toronto Sun last month saying she was opposed to boxing up the statue. “Make a decision and deal with it.”
Too right. Whatever you think of Macdonald, renovating his statue and then leaving him to rot in a plywood prison is beyond pathetic — and somehow perfectly emblematic of our stuck-in-neutral politics and stunted, childish national discussion on so many fronts. As Crombie suggests, thanks to President Donald Trump, it has never been more imperative in my lifetime that we put on the big-boy pants.
There’s no need to be jingoistic about it. With respect to historical figures, it’s just a matter of defending them against transparent calumnies. Ryerson was not, in any respect, a key architect of the residential-school system. For God’s sake, he died 38 years before deputy superintendent-general of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott made attendance mandatory at the schools.
Dundas’s sin was to advocate for the end of slavery on what some felt was too slow a timeline. And our modern do-nothing politicians, who can’t resolve a traffic jam never mind the disgrace of human bondage, have the temerity to nod along as Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square is renamed “Sankofa” — a term coined by a West African tribe that was heavily involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century.
Someone viewing Ontario politics from afar, especially through the mainstream media lens, might expect Ford to be passionate about not cancelling historic figures. He has at least pretended to be in the past: In 2018, when Victoria, B.C. decided it was cancelling Macdonald, Ford as Ontario premier offered to give the city’s unwanted statue a new home somewhere in his province.
He gained nothing from the offer except some bad press — quite silly bad press, but still. From a political strategist’s standpoint, it wasn’t worth the effort. Among the many things Ford has learned since his tumultuous first year in power seems to be a general leeriness of culture-war issues as offering far less reward than risk — certainly relative to some of his conservative counterparts in Ottawa and the provincial capitals. He and his education ministers have devoted significantly less time and energy than their counterparts in Alberta, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick to worrying publicly about students who want to “socially transition” from one gender to another at school, for example.
One could easily argue that none of this should amount to a key provincial-election issue. But Crombie is on to something when she mentions a sudden imperative with respect to Canadian pride, to which Ford is very deliberately trying to appeal in pursuit of re-election.
As Canada’s oldest 53-year-old told CNN’s Jake Tapper last month, as if channelling his father’s generation, “one of the ways we define ourself most easily is, well, we’re not American.”
Justin Trudeau wasn’t wrong about that … or he wouldn’t have been if Expo ’67 or the Vietnam War or the original NAFTA debate were still going. But they aren’t. Donald Trump will no longer be president someday relatively soon, and we should want to emerge into that with some kind of authentic, rather than reactionary, pride in what could be so much more successful a country than it is now. Part of that has to be a far more honest reckoning with our own past. Everyone has to play their part.
National Post
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