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The City of Victoria is set to remove a statue of John A. Macdonald from the steps of city hall on August 11.
City Family's Witness Reconciliation Program — a group created last year to pursue issues of reconciliation with the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations — denounced the first prime minister of Canada as "a leader of violence against Indigenous peoples."
In a lengthy statement on her website, Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps notes that a plaque will immediately replace the statue until all parties involved can "find a way to recontextualize Macdonald in an appropriate way." Until then, it will be stored in a city facility.
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Helps cited a 1879 decry in which the prime minister writes, "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 "It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will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."
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https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/0...-c_a_23498763/
I'm not sure where to stand on this. John A was clearly a dbag but on the other hand, we can't ignore his role in Canadian history or pretend like the values and norms of 1879 are even remotely similar today.