Christopher Dummitt: | National Post

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In the conclusion to his magisterial new book, “Sir. John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885,” historian Patrice Dutil laments the posthumous fate of Canada’s founding prime minister John A. Macdonald. “It’s hard to imagine,” Dutil says, “a reputation being trashed so hatefully, so suddenly and so thoroughly.”

And yet, this is exactly what has happened. Across the country, cities have removed Macdonald’s statues, and mobs regularly deface those that remain. Whether it is the names of pubs or law schools — those in authority have decided to dishonour John A. Macdonald — to remove him from a place of public prominence.

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What’s most striking for a historian to see in these attacks — in the fierce anger of the crowds or the more toned-down sombre apologies of the officials — is the extent to which these attacks all depend on a disturbing trio of traits: parochialism, ignorance and ideological zeal.

The case against Macdonald largely requires you not to care about the intricate details of the past and, if you do, to interpret them only as would a crown prosecutor, not someone who was genuinely trying to understand life in that foreign country that is history. It requires you to look largely at only Canada, and, even then, to not contemplate the values and norms of his era. And the moralizing prosecution is carried out most strenuously by radicals who would find fault with just about anything done by someone they see as just another dead white man.

Patrice Dutil’s new book takes an entirely different approach. He wants us to walk in the shoes of Macdonald through one pivotal year: 1885.

It was a consequential year in ways both familiar and forgotten. It was the year of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”; of Louis Pasteur first vaccinating a child against rabies; of the establishment of Greenwich Mean Time. The year 1885 was the year of the second Louis Riel rebellion as well as the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was also a year of disease — of a smallpox outbreak that killed thousands. It was the year when empire loyalists demanded revenge for the death of Gen. Gordon in Khartoum. Canada’s international trade was on the block in the midst of a severe recession, and Canada’s treaty with the United States regulating the fisheries was set to expire. It was a year when Macdonald attempted to expand the franchise, to allow women, status Indians and a larger segment of the working class to vote.

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Macdonald emerges as a man confronted on all sides — with battles between Catholics and Protestants, calls to push Canada further into empire affairs, demands from British Columbians for harsher treatment against Chinese-Canadians and contradictory demands from Liberal critics who wanted him to spend almost nothing on Indigenous-Canadians and then blamed him for not doing enough to prevent rebellion and discontent.

This is a must-read book for anyone who has accepted at face value the criticism of Macdonald that have developed over the last few years.

Dutil lays bare some of the more ludicrous attacks that have been, in too many circles, taken at face value. Notably, there is the idea that Macdonald led a policy of genocide that attempted to starve the Plains Indians into submission in the 1880s. This idea gained publicity with the publication of James Daschuk’s book “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life.” Dutil examines the case that has been drawn out of that book and lays bare its feeble foundations. Macdonald is said to have set policies that starved Indigenous peoples on the plains who were suffering from the effects of the decline of the buffalo. The broader phenomenon is accurate — the disappearance of the buffalo from the plain was a horrendous cultural and nutritional disaster for those who had relied on the hunt for survival.

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Yet, when Dutil starts counting — asking how many people died and why — what becomes evident is that Daschuk’s book largely relied on generalizations based on only a handful of cases. Dutil finds in Daschuk’s book records of only 65 people who are said to have died in the key “starvation years” from 1879 to 1884 — and of these, 20 died of food poisoning. These deaths also largely occurred in the communities led by the two chiefs (Piapot and Big Bear) who most resisted Macdonald’s policy — who held out on signing treaties and taking up reserves. What Dutil shows is that Macdonald’s government spent huge sums of money trying to send food west — spending more on Indian affairs than almost any other aspect of government.

What’s more, it was precisely a desire to assist Indigenous peoples to shift towards an agricultural lifestyle — where they could feed themselves on the Prairies without the buffalo — that lay behind the other kinds of assimilation measures like residential schools, that are also now derided and attacked as “genocidal.” What Dutil does is expose the hard choices that lay behind a policy that had such terrible consequences, letting readers understand the political logic behind it.

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“History is a tragedy, not a morality tale” is the fitting quotation from I.F. Stone that Dutil sets above his conclusion. There is much that is tragic about 1885 and the kinds of policies that Macdonald and others put in place. There is much that we might now find offensive — the common sensical race talk of the late 19th century, or the surety with which Macdonald and others spoke of civilization. And yet, there is also much to learn from taking this world — and the ideas of those who actually lived in 1885 — at face value — and trying to understand them for what they were.

For one thing — we will be surprised. We’ll be surprised to see Macdonald promoting a new bill to extend the franchise to women property owners, decades before women would eventually come to have the vote in most western countries. Macdonald lowered voting qualifications for working-class men and wanted to give women the vote as well as Indigenous peoples who met the same property qualifications. When his Liberal opponents criticized his desire to include Indigenous peoples as voters, he argued that Indians were “just as fit, as far as intellect goes, as far as education goes, as far as having an interest in the prosperity of the country goes, as their white brethren.” To deny them the right to vote was an “injustice.” When the vote for status Indians in Eastern Canada finally passed, he called it “the greatest triumph of (his) life”

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There is, of course, much more in the book. Dutil sets the conflict in Western Canada in an international context that is too often missing from other accounts — noting how many Indigenous peoples fled the violent Indian Wars in the United States to seek refuge in Canada. He sets up Canada’s restrictions on Chinese immigration in a wider context, noting the anti-Chinese sentiment in places all over the Pacific world from Australia and New Zealand to Japan and the United States. When Macdonald was forced to adopt restrictions to assuage pressure from British Columbia, Canada’s restrictions were more lenient than elsewhere. While other scholars go seeking out the few words Macdonald spoke about the issue and moralize about their racist nature, Dutil actually tries to understand why Macdonald said what he did and how it fits in with what we know about both Macdonald and the world in 1885.

With any luck, many will read Dutil’s book. It could begin to undo some of the harm that has been done. A good place to start would be to dig some of those statues out of storage — and name or rename schools in his honour. And if any mob comes to deface Macdonald’s statues this time, they ought to be forced to read Dutil’s book — and then clean up the mess they make. Being forced to continuously clean the Macdonald statue and shine the stone or bronze would be a fitting punishment.

National Post

Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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