Stop Apologizing: Macdonald And The National Spirit

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In an April 17th article, Rodrigo Garfinkle contextualized the recent push to return Sir John A. Macdonald’s statue to Kingston’s City Park. Condemned to a dusty warehouse in the summer of 2021, locals have started in numbers to finally question the confinement of our first prime minister.

With a recent surge in nationalist sentiment in response to bellicose American imperialism, there seems to be something worth having in a visionary figure like Macdonald, known best through most of our history for having built a nation in deliberate defiance of the States as much as geography. Growing up, Macdonald’s biography was always quite simple. He helped build a nation east to west, from sea to sea, from the Rockies to the Maritimes. He brokered internal deadlock, laid the foundations for a strong federal state, and banded us together with a great belt of steel, knowing we could be stronger as one than as many.

But having worked with Rodrigo on this initiative, it has become apparent that many nominal allies do not fully grasp the importance of restoring Macdonald to prominence. They join enthusiastically in calling for Macdonald’s return, yet take an essentially reactionary position, one which dooms our heroes and history to scorn and iniquity. Here, I offer a more appropriate position for the furtherance of the Canadian spirit, and in the interests of national stewardship.

I take issue with the sort of person who says, “We can’t hide history.” Well-meaning, they say that rather than toppling down our heroes, we should seek to contextualize their wrongs. What we need to do is cover Macdonald in plaques or put him in a museum. We need to inoculate the next generation so that they do not run the risk of catching any pride or fellow-feeling. To the degree our children are to be educated on Macdonald, it should be in explicating the foul and rotten nature of our national foundations. Not everyone is quite so extreme, but the apologetics are usually of this rough shape and flavour. “We can’t hide our history” is often a kind of thought-terminating cliché, the terse expression of an intuition one struggles to defend in the face of a hostile mob. They do not want Macdonald to go, but they can not quite say that he was a great man.

My first and most obvious objection is that there are a very limited set of facts most people will ever learn about history. If we attempted to teach everything about history equally well, it would be incoherent and serve no purpose greater than trivia. What we choose to teach is an act of story craft as much as it is a faithful conglomeration of facts. Evidently, we hide our history all the time by framing and omission. Not then for trivia, we ought to teach history so that the next generation is situated in place and time, informed about who and why they are, and what it is that they can do.

Ultimately, our focus will depend on the sorts of people we want to create. We do not care about Macdonald simply “because that is history.” We care about Macdonald because of his keystone function in our national myth. There are few figures more dangerous to reject than Macdonald. He is, I wager, the singularly most memetic figure in our history, tied more deeply than anyone else to the unification of our people. To delegitimize Macdonald is to delegitimize Canada. It is to raise into the world a generation of Canadians who understand themselves as the product of an essentially evil colonial enterprise, one they inherit without legitimate grounds, and one they have no basis to make any (particularly) substantial claim.

The enemies of Macdonald know this all too well. They centre guilt and shame not merely for fact and principle, but in pursuit of a Canada where Canadians lack the security of heroes. An honest nationalist would not say that Macdonald is unimpeachable. Great movers of history rarely are. But in centring the blemishes, we do not reach balanced compromise. One need only point to the countless losses of recent years, and to the great dishonour and humiliation we have been made to feel. We cede ground inch by inch. We continue to lose by playing sheepish games of apology. Rather than offering a more nuanced understanding of our national myth, we are perpetually on the back foot, always atoning and never asserting. Macdonald’s enemies have been playing an entirely different game from his reactionary advocates. The initiative is used not for balance, but to uproot our youth and imperil our future.

These debates over Macdonald are not good faith endeavours to come to the truth.

They are the face of a metapolitical struggle for the spirit of our nation. The reactionary supporter of Macdonald fails to appreciate that art and history are not mere window dressing. Nor are they simple matters of fact. Art and narrative are the destiny of peoples, and the basis on which we come into ourselves.

The lovers of this nation can not afford to cede ground in pursuit of the middle position. The middle was lost long ago, and our children are becoming estranged and hateful of the past and of our progenitors. Macdonald’s supporters must muster the courage to say at every opportunity that Macdonald was a great man. For every statue taken down, they must raise two more. For every exhibit for the inculcation of guilt and shame, there must be a grander exhibit of our heroes and their accomplishments. Macdonald must be taken back in the same way he was ripped away, by production of media and repetition of message. We may feel regret about the mistakes of the past, but we cannot allow these mistakes to become the leverage that decouples us from our identity and pride.

The pendulum is swinging back in Macdonald’s favour. It is time to seize the initiative with confidence. It is time to stop apologizing and to begin asserting. From the elementary school, to the cinema, to the public square, our history must be honoured.