EDITORIAL: Rescuing history from the trash heap

Published Dec 25, 2024  •  Last updated 47 minutes ago  •  2 minute read

A view of the Henry Dundas statue, the 1st Viscount Melville, was said to have had a gradualist approach to ending slavery on June 10, 2020 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Photo by Jeff J Mitchell /Getty Images

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” 
― George Orwell, 1984

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Canadians are allowing our history to be rewritten by those who have no respect for this country. We’ve let vandals take wrecking balls to statues of our most venerable forebears and stand by as they obliterate them from history books.

Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, has been all but erased, his statues destroyed or boxed up. Because he had a vision of free education for all children, Egerton Ryerson, is blamed for residential schools. Henry Dundas has had his name removed from a square in Toronto, amid unfounded claims he prolonged the slave trade.

Thankfully, there’s a movement now to better educate Canadians on our history. A recent book by professor Patrice Dutil sets the record straight on Macdonald, whose Franchise Act of 1885 paved the way for women and Indigenous people to vote. He saved Indigenous lives by implementing a vaccine program during a smallpox epidemic.

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Ryerson lived among an Ojibway community, learned the language and was given the Ojibwa name Cheechock (Bird on a Wing).

In an era when children were used to sweep chimneys in Britain, Ryerson had the enlightened notion that the government should educate all children.

Dundas’ “crime” was that he was a pragmatic politician, not a dreamer. William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner, kept bringing motions to the British Parliament to end the slave trade. They were repeatedly rejected. In his definitive biography of Wilberforce, William Hague records how Dundas broke the logjam. He introduced what Hague calls the “second best” option.

“He moved that the word ‘gradually’ be inserted into Wilberforce’s motion for abolition, his object being ‘gradually and experimentally to prove the practicability of the abolition of the trade, and to provide the means of cultivation, to increase the population and to evince that all the alarms which were now entertained of danger from the measure were ill-founded.’”

The motion passed. Dundas succeeded where Wilberforce had failed.

Sure, our history has its flaws. But our forebears built the foundation for a country that’s now a beacon of civility, admired around the world for its democratic freedoms. We should stop trashing it and start celebrating it.

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