Sir John A. Macdonald has been in a box, literally and figuratively, for years.
A statue of Canada’s first prime minister on the lawn of the Ontario legislature was encased with hoarding after it was vandalized in 2020, and it has remained like that for the past five years. Everyone knew what was in the box but we pretended not to see it: the same type of fiction we abet when a child playing hide-and-seek believes that he disappears when he covers his own eyes. It was a timorous half-measure by those clearly wary of running afoul of one group or another, and so we boxed up our history and left it there, assuming that the hoarding would be less ugly than the public’s reaction to an actual decision.
Trust me. Canada’s weasel politicians are proud of “Boxing Macdonald” and all it’s variants.
