The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Sir John A. Macdonald: the Good and the Bad

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

How should we remember Sir John A Macdonald? At the newly resdesigned Bellevue House in Kingston, visitors can see that Macdonald had many accomplishments as Canada's first prime minister, but he also left behind a complicated legacy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A nation that forgets its history has no future. So when you remember your history, you have to remember all of it. It's not a buffet that you can pick and offer there what you like and ignore what you don't like. It's all on the buffet. I'm Hugh Ostrom. I'm the National Historic Site Superintendent for Parks Canada and that means I'm responsible for a group of 19 historic sites here in Eastern Ontario. Today we are at Bellevue House National Historic Site in Kingston, Ontario, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe and the Huron-Wendat people.

Bellevue House is the one-time home of Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald. He lived here for 13 months in 1848-1849, when he was an up-and-coming lawyer and aspiring politician here in the city of Kingston. And the house is a fine example of Italianate architecture. It really predates the Italianate architecture movement in Canada by about 50 years. So it's quite an abnormal specimen in a lot of

ways, but it's in excellent condition. The redesign of the house, or sorry, the remodeling work, started with some structural issues that we were made aware of back in 2018. When that work was being done, it was identified that the plaster ceiling was damaged. So the keys were breaking and the ceiling was at risk of delaminating and falling on visitors. So we had to close the house to make the place safe. And that necessitated us removing all the furniture and artifacts and everything else from the home

to do those repairs. And that put us in a position where we could think about what we do next. We started a process of focus groups to look at what various communities would like to see in the home. We connected with Indigenous members of the Kingston community and the surrounding First Nations and started to have some sincere and like direct conversations about the impacts of McDonald on Indigenous communities and and how we can represent their stories. I'm Chief R. Donald Merkle, the elected chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quenny. My Mohawk name is Adelroth Serio, which means good friend, and I'm a member of the Wolf Clan. In the last few years, the government has

adopted a policy that there has to be First Nations consultations on things that are of interest to our history or that are of national importance, and so Parks Canada invited our community to participate in this exercise. So we formed a community advisory committee to help navigate Sir John A. MacDonald's history, Canada's history and Bellevue House's history. For the Parks Canada team that was involved in it, we learned an awful lot about the history we weren't telling, the things that we didn't know, the history that wasn't written in books and it was a great opportunity for us to learn and be

able to create exhibits that can help the broader public and our visitors learn those things as well. Well, it incorporated to some extent the impacts of Sir John A. MacDonald's policy on the First Nations people. I think it makes it complete when you tell the full story. the First Nations people. I think it makes it complete when you tell the full story. I don't think again that people are asking people to hate anybody because of it. It's just to learn more and maybe it will contribute toward becoming a more just society. The house is sort of separated into two main sections thematically for visitors. The ground floor when you enter the house is very much a time capsule of the 1840s and it represents the power and privilege that McDonald or someone of

similar stature would have been trying to present in a home like this. A lot of the furniture and furnishings, wallpaper and that sort of thing are very rich. And as you go up the stairs to the second sort of main level of the house, we talk more about McDonald's policy, its impacts on specific communities in Canada, and the long-lasting legacy of McDonald's government, the policies and Confederation. Hello, bonjour, welcome to Bellevue House. My name is Eli. I'll be guiding you throughout the house today. So here at Bellevue House, we'll be sharing a sort of more complete history of Sir John and MacDonald, Canada's first prime minister.

The dining room is our space here at Bellevue House for discussing the roles of privilege and status here in the home. In particular, we discuss the image that Sir John A. MacDonald was trying to shape for himself and the wealth that he was trying to sort of project during this period in his life. To me, the dining room really encapsulates much of what the British Empire was in the 1840s,

sort of really the height of its power through the 19th century. And the dining room really demonstrates how that came to be presented in what would be the 1% of the 1840s, that the wealthy and the elite and how they were able to obtain things from throughout the empire,

and how that was not available to the vast number of people that lived within the empire. So welcome to the nursery. Children during this period of time would have had an entirely different set of responsibilities, an entirely different set of challenges. This would differ to a major extent based on what Canadian community you were from,

which race you were born into. Here in the nursery, visitors can also come and take a look at this video right here, which discusses the lives of children living within the residential school system here in Canada which would have had direct connections to Sir John McDonald himself. described the residential school system as a form of cultural genocide. Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong and reflects a dark and shameful time in Canada's history.

I did ask one of the people of Wilbert Meracle actually when they were taking down the statues of Sir John McDonald. I said, what do you think about it Wilbert? Because he was a resident at the Mohawk Institute Residential School. He was taken when he was a young boy. And he said, I think they should leave it there. But he said, people should learn more

about the history of Sir John A. MacDonald, the full history. And so I don't think that the elders really advocated destroying anything. but they did insist that Canadians should learn more and should take an interest in learning more. I will now be taking you into the guest room here at Bellevue House. The guest room is an ideal space for us to talk about

who would have been invited to Bellevue House in particular during 1848 to 1849. We also used the space to discuss who would have been excluded from Sir John McDonald's later political conversations. This is our space for visitors to learn some perspectives from representatives of communities who would have been excluded from their invite to discussing Canada's future

around the time of 1867 around Confederation. I would say that the community reaction to this redesign has been quite positive. The city of Kingston sort of collectively and the cultural institutions in the city have been on a journey, understanding Sir John A. MacDonald and Confederation for a while now together.

The policies of the government of Sir John A. MacDonald had a profound impact on First Nations people and how they were perceived by the colonizing nation and also the exercise of their traditional and Aboriginal and treaty rights. I think some of the contributions that he made are positive. Canadians do benefit from the rail, the CPR railway line that was constructed tonight, the east and west, western provinces. So I think we have to all see that as a positive benefit for everyone. But Sir John A. MacDonald didn't start the residential schools, but he continued it during his prime ministership,

and he built a number of them across the country. So you can't deny the good and the bad, it happened. To the idea that we're a racing history, and this is a conversation we've had a few times with visitors, and there has been media about it as well. And I think that what we're doing here is not erasing history. We are simply exposing layers of history that haven't been shared before and that you know

McDonald was still Canada's first Prime Minister. Without him Canada would look very different and we're not here to say whether or not that's good or bad. We're here to simply talk about the information, share the facts and share the stories and how that has affected other communities and expand the story about Macdonald. And I think there is an appetite for a lot of Canadians to learn more about the history, the country that we live in.

And there have been Canadians who have been here for a few centuries, have been steeped in what the Crown wanted them to know. But it's not a full education system, and so the government recognizes that it's incomplete. A lot of these things are tucked away in the archives of the government and kept under lock and key. But it's time now to unlock that and let Canadians know the full story.