Education needed, not forgettinging MacDonald

Rather than removing the statue so that we can forget about Macdonald, a better solution would be to provide information regarding the good and the bad he did.

MacDonald represented the racist views of his times, and he was not particularly bad. When his government was providing assistance to set up farming on reserves, the Saskatchewan Herald said assistance to help natives take up farming was “conducive to the destruction of self-reliance, and calculated to give them a false impression of what the Government owed them.” A Liberal MP said government aid went against “natural law” which said Indians were to go extinct. The Liberal Party objected to MacDonald’s policies as they acted “not to secure a survival of the fittest, but a survival of everybody, to put the industrious and enterprising upon an equality with the careless and idle.” MacDonald replied that “we cannot allow them to starve and we cannot make them white men...” ““The whole thing is an experiment.”

These racist views caused a lot of damage, but they were ones that were generally held, and not restricted to Macdonald. As Doug Cuthand recently wrote, what is needed is not necessarily the removal of these figures, but that more information be provided about the racist views that were common at the time and the damage these views caused, so that “the existing statues will be revealed for their racism and misplaced hero worship.”