The memory of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, is not thriving these days in the country he brought into being. In 2018, his image was removed from the Canadian $10 bill, which it had decorated since 1971. His name has been quietly scrubbed from the Ottawa airport named in his honor in 1993. In August 2020, vandals toppled statues of Macdonald in Montreal and in Kingston, Ontario. (The city of Kingston legally removed that statue on June 18—a special blow to Macdonald’s memory in the city he represented in Parliament throughout most of his career.) This summer, the province of Prince Edward Island removed a modern statue of Macdonald from its capital, Charlottetown. Even the small town of Picton, Ontario, where Macdonald argued his first law cases, will soon remove a statue erected with donations from local residents, my wife’s family among them. Macdonald’s name has been erased from university and school buildings, and even book prizes.
