Shame on the City for this action

We all seem to be into cancel culture today which, while easy to do, will ultimately be harmful. I cannot believe that the city is contemplating removing this statue - OUR FIRST PM!!! We have NO city museum to showcase our heritage, but rely on national institutions to do so (Mackenzie Art Gallery, RCMP Heritage Museum) and a provincial natural history museum. We have little in the way of a city heritage (in spite of saving a few buildings), so sure let's remove statues, makes a huge amount of sense! My big complaint is that history taught in our K-12 system is in a sorry state and cancel culture is doing nothing more than making it worse.

Macdonald was faced with several issues during his term which affected the future of Canada, challenges which NO leader today can even contemplate - balancing city budgets through tax and fee increases is easy compared to what Macdonald and his government was facing. Two of those issues intersected. One was the continuing threat from the US regarding manifest destiny which put the sparsely populated western lands at risk of easily being taken over by the US. And what to do with groups of nomadic indigenous people who were frankly living in the 15th century (get over it - as much as you can value the survival skills of the indigenous people their future was doomed if they could not make a transition to the 19th/20th century). How to ensure they had a future in the Canada Macdonald was building and to counter the excursions of the US into western Canada? Part of this was resolved by sending the NWMP to the west and the national railroad. The other part was through commissioning Davin to examine options to educating/training the indigenous people of the NWT to bring them forward to at least the 19th century; efforts which would ultimately lead to settlement of indigenous people. Have you read the Davin report? Both he and Macdonald have been blamed for residential schools, but that is NOT what Davin recommended. Furthermore tribal leaders were keen to provide their people with an education - those leaders understood the future better than people in 2021.

No one can say that residential schools were a resounding success, although it is now politically incorrect to point out that many indigenous people did receive an acceptable education on par with education standards for the day. Anyone going to public school on the prairies even as late as the 1950/60s went through many of the same abuses as those in residential schools.

But the bigger issue with cancel culture is that it will hit everyone at some point and NO ONE will want to contribute anything to their community for fear that 10, 15, 20 years later it will be examined through a new progressive lens and dismissed because it was not perfect in the eyes of those judging actions 20 years earlier, THAT does not build communities, I accept the good and the bad and try not to judge something from 150 years ago by the standard of today (not that the standards of today are anything wonderful)