Reversing the purge – a strategy for reclaiming Canada’s historic nation-builders: Paul Bennett for Inside Policy – MLI
April 8, 2025
Fifteen years ago, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald was a much-loved historical figure with a revived profile elevated by the late Richard Gwyn’s intensely engaging two-volume biography (Gwyn 2008 and 2011). His name and likeness were much in evidence in public squares and on school buildings from coast to coast. Today, our most-widely recognized Father of Confederation is being “steadily obliterated” and facing the wrath of cancel culture in the country he played a crucial role in creating. Sir John A. suffered another indignity when Parks Canada chose the 2024 Victoria Day long weekend to reopen his Kingston residence, Bellevue House, after six years of renovation, and turned the exhibit honouring our founding prime minister into a set of rooms featuring “indigenous perspectives” with little or no connection to the building. It was only the latest and most flagrant attempt to behead our national historic tradition.
Parks Canada’s call for a “timely conversation” simply backfired. Toronto historian Patrice Dutil, author of a widely acclaimed 2024 book Sir John A. Macdonald and The Apocalyptic Year 1885, called it out as “yet another embarrassing display of national flagellation” and a thinly veiled attempt to “demonize Canada’s past and those who (mostly volunteered) to preserve it.” Even popular history author Christopher Moore, a former Parks Canada researcher and friend of the agency, conceded that the exhibit was “heavy-handed” in its depiction of Macdonald’s legacy.
