It’s been a bizarre blemish on what should be one of the most glorious views in Ontario’s capital city. For the past five years, a statue of Canada’s first prime minister has sat crated up on Queen’s Park’s south lawn. The conspicuous plywood box sent a very odd message.
To recap: in recent years, Sir John A. Macdonald has been a controversial figure largely due to his role in establishing Canada’s residential school system. This came to a head five years ago, when protesters splattered the statue with pink paint. The statue was boarded up to prevent further vandalism and has remained that way ever since.
But if Sir John A. Macdonald’s conduct on Indigenous issues a century and a half ago was so beyond the pale, why wasn’t the statue taken down altogether?
Conversely, if it was unfair to judge Macdonald’s actions by today’s standards, why was he hidden away in the first place?
Somehow, our political leaders in the legislature found the worst option: box up Sir John A and leave him as an eyesore — and a symbol of their indecision.
Technically speaking, a special legislative committee has determined the statue’s fate. Each officially recognized political party has a single vote on that committee. For the past seven years, that has meant the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democrats. (The Liberals failed to achieve official party status in the 2018 or 2022 elections.) When the PCs and NDP couldn’t agree on what to do, then-speaker (and committee chair) Ted Arnott felt he wasn’t in a position to break the tie. So, nothing happened. The cladding remained.
That was until the February 2025 election returned enough Liberals to achieve official party status. One Grit MPP was added to the special committee and thus, we appear to have a new decision: Macdonald’s statue will be uncrated and cleaned up, and a plaque will be added beside it, contextualizing his record on Indigenous issues.
For whatever reason, it has taken us five years to get to the obvious place. And there are plenty of examples we could have learned from. The late American president Jimmy Carter — hardly a fan of the south’s racist past — nevertheless opposed taking down statues of slave-owning politicians or military figures. Carter preferred to add plaques beside the statues, pointing out the intolerable acts for which these men were responsible. The president’s thinking was: if these statues are taken down and shoved out of sight, the opportunity for us to discuss and learn from their mistakes disappears along with them.
The Thomas Jefferson statue at the Missouri HIstory Museum in St. Louis (Steve Paikin)
A year ago, I visited the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis to see how it handled similar controversies. The museum features an enormous statue of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and the author of the inspiring Declaration of Independence. But, of course, much has been learned about the less honourable side of Jefferson’s past since the statue was erected in 1913. The Missouri museum did not box Jefferson up and take him away.
Instead, numerous signs beside the statue urge patrons to consider some difficult issues.
“Can we still be moved by Jefferson’s words but horrified by his actions?” one asks.
A sign accompanying the Thomas Jefferson statue. (Steve Paikin)
“Can we acknowledge the abuse inflicted on those forced to labor at Monticello but still recognize Jefferson’s importance as one of this country’s founders?” asks another, referring to the slaves at Jefferson’s Virginia estate.
“This statue will not answer those questions for us,” the sign concludes, “but it challenges us to answer them for ourselves.”
Another sign deals with the acquisition of the territory of Louisiana (from France) in 1803, effectively doubling the size of the United States. “How do we best acknowledge the dispossession of Indigenous peoples while also acknowledging the Louisiana Purchase as a pivotal moment in the growth of the United States?”
A plaque that accompanies the Thomas Jefferson statue. (Steve Paikin)
The museum seems to have found a way to promote a third way of treating history. We don’t have to glorify past nation-builders with hagiography. But we also don’t have to make them disappear, as if they simply never existed.
It looks as if we’re going to take the same approach with Macdonald, with a new plaque beside it. The statue can acknowledge our first prime minister’s singular contribution to the creation of one of the world’s most successful countries. But the plaque can also acknowledge that Macdonald was flawed, and while some of his views were quite progressive for the time (such as voting rights for women and Indigenous people), other views, such as the worthiness of residential schools, clearly don’t stand the test of time.
Missouri figured this out ages ago. It’s a shame we didn’t. But we can do the right thing now.