Christopher Dummitt: Vandals don’t deserve a veto over Champlain statue

The Samuel de Champlain statue in Orillia before it was removed. (Source: City of Orillia)

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If events in Orillia, Ontario are anything to go by, reconciliation in the Canada of 2026 seems to mean that if a few angry Indigenous protesters don’t want something to happen, they get a veto.

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It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The South African model of reconciliation was built on the idea of a single collective exercise of truth-telling, after which individuals and groups could live together in peace. Not in Canada. Not in Orillia.

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It’s all about statues. Again.

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This time it’s a statue of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain that once stood on the waterfront in the little Ontario town of Orillia — the town Stephen Leacock made famous in his 1912 classic Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Locals erected the statue in 1925 to mark 300 years when, in 1615, Champlain first travelled through this part of what is now Ontario on his way to visit the Huron-Wendat, who were important French trading partners.

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In the years around the Great War, relations between French and English in Ontario and across Canada were strained, and the statue was meant as a gesture of symbolic rapprochement — as well as a piece of local boosterism. It was conceived with all the confidence in western civilization, Christianity, and even what its own plaque called “the white race” that many of us would find awkward and troubling today.

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Almost a 100 years later after the statue was first unveiled, in 2017, the monument needed repair and was removed. But in the midst of the restoration came the era of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was decided that something had to change, and a working group was struck to determine whether the statue should return, and if so, in what form. This appears to have been done with genuine sympathy for, and input from, local First Nations. Smaller figures of Indigenous people that had surrounded and knelt below Champlain would not be returned, and a new plaque would be written. With those modifications, Champlain was supposed to go back to his lakeside plinth.

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Then came 2021 and the Kamloops graves moral panic.

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The return was delayed, and then delayed again.

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This spring, it seems, Orillia’s current mayor decided enough was enough. It cost money to keep the monument in storage, and what if something happened to it? Why not finally return it to the plinth? Most locals seemed to agree: back in 2019, the working group solicited feedback, and of those who responded to its online survey, 70 per cent favoured reinstalling Champlain.

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But that’s not what happened.

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The mayor had the statue reinstalled last month, seemingly without broad consultation. The predictable followed. Within hours of its re-erection, someone had vandalized it. Local First Nations objected that they had not been consulted and demanded the statue come down. City council caved, and Champlain was taken down again.

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Nothing in this whole debate is really about history, or Champlain, or the wishes of the local community. It’s about power, and who gets to wield it in this era of so-called reconciliation. It’s about giving vandals a veto. Someone has spray painted the words “Rama said no” on the plinth — seemingly a link to the local Rama First Nation.