Sir John A. Macdonald’s name looms large in Canadian history – celebrated as the visionary Father of Confederation, yet increasingly scrutinized for the darker shadows of his policies. In recent years, statues of Macdonald have been toppled and his legacy fiercely debated, as Canadians grapple with the full truth of the country’s first prime minister. Was he the nation-building statesman who bound a fledgling country “from sea to sea,” or the architect of oppressive policies that dispossessed Indigenous peoples? The reality is nuanced. Macdonald was a brilliant and pragmatic leader who helped create Canada, but he was also responsible for harsh measures – including the Indian Act, residential schools, and policies of starvation – that inflicted deep suffering on Indigenous communities. This long-read article goes beyond hagiography or demonization to humanize Macdonald and explore his personal and political complexity. It will trace his ambitions and achievements in forging a nation, alongside an unsparing examination of how his vision of progress was built on colonial attitudes and Indigenous displacement. Concrete historical examples and Macdonald’s own words will illuminate a legacy as inspiring as it is troubling.
John Alexander Macdonald was born in Scotland in 1815 and immigrated to Upper Canada (now Ontario) as a boy. Coming of age in a colonial society, he rose quickly in law and politics, earning a reputation as a clever, witty attorney. Yet behind the public image lay personal trials. Macdonald endured family tragedy – his first wife, Isabella, was an invalid who died young in 1857, and of their two children only one survived infancy. His second marriage to Agnes Bernard brought a daughter who was born with disabilities and never learned to walk. These hardships took a toll. Macdonald at times drank heavily to cope with stress, gaining an enduring notoriety for his bouts of intoxication. He was not perpetually drunk, but suffered “spasmodic” binges during crises, as one biographer put it. In one famous episode, during an election debate, Macdonald became violently ill on stage after excessive drink. When his opponent seized the moment to call him a drunk unfit for office, Macdonald retorted with characteristic sharpness that he was sick not from liquor but from listening to his opponent’s boring rant – a riposte that drew laughter and defused the attack. Such stories of quick wit and resilience in adversity humanize Macdonald. He was a charismatic, shrewd leader with, as colleagues noted, a lively sense of humour and an “elasticity of mind”. These traits would serve him well as he set out to solve the greatest political challenge of his era: uniting the disparate colonies of British North America into a new nation.
By the 1860s, Macdonald had become co-premier of the Province of Canada (which comprised modern Ontario and Quebec) and was a leading proponent of unifying with the other British colonies. Political stalemate at home and external pressures – such as the U.S. Civil War and the threat of American expansionism – lent urgency to the idea of “Confederation.” Macdonald attended pivotal conferences at Charlottetown and Québec in 1864, where he helped forge an agreement among English and French Canadian, Maritime, and Newfoundland leaders to join in one federation. In the Confederation debates of 1865, Macdonald passionately laid out his vision for a strong central government to avoid the pitfalls of the American model. He argued that Canada’s federal Parliament must possess robust powers “to make the Confederation one people and one government, instead of five peoples and five governments,” explicitly noting that in contrast to the U.S., residual powers would lie with Ottawa rather than the provinces. This framework, he believed, would knit the country together and prevent regional anarchy. Macdonald also reassured French-Canadians by supporting a federal system that protected local institutions – the “happy medium,” as he called it, between a unitary state and provincial autonomy. On July 1, 1867, his vision became reality: the Dominion of Canada was born, with Macdonald as its first Prime Minister.
Macdonald’s contemporaries recognized his role as Confederation’s chief architect. He had overcome immense obstacles – regional jealousies, political deadlock, and opposition from those fearing lost identity – to achieve what many thought impossible. Ever the pragmatist, he built coalitions across linguistic and religious lines, notably partnering with Quebec leader George-Étienne Cartier to ensure French-Canadian buy-in. At the same time, he inspired English Canadians with a nationalist ideal. “If I had influence over the minds of the people of Canada,” Macdonald later proclaimed, “I would leave them this legacy: ‘Whatever you do, adhere to the Union. We are a great country, and shall become one of the greatest in the universe if we preserve it; we shall sink into insignificance and adversity if we suffer it to be broken.’” These words capture Macdonald’s almost romantic faith in the Canadian project. In 1867, that project was still, as he put it, “in the gristle” – not yet hardened into the bone of nationhood – but Macdonald had supplied the essential cement of unity and common purpose. Now he would dedicate himself to expanding and strengthening the young country, even as new challenges arose to test his leadership and his principles.
The first years of Confederation were tumultuous for Macdonald’s government. He faced economic uncertainty and the task of knitting together provinces that had only just joined. One of his earliest trials was the Red River Resistance of 1869–70 in the newly acquired Northwest (present-day Manitoba), led by Métis leader Louis Riel – an issue we will explore later. Politically, Macdonald’s biggest setback came in 1873 with the Pacific Scandal, a notorious episode of corruption. Eager to fulfill the promise of building a transcontinental railway to British Columbia (a condition of BC’s entry into Confederation), Macdonald’s Conservative Party had accepted large election donations in 1872 from Sir Hugh Allan, an industrialist who then won the railway construction contract. When these dealings came to light, Macdonald was accused of bribery – essentially selling the lucrative railroad contract for campaign money. The scandal brought down his government in November 1873. Macdonald resigned in disgrace, and for the first time in Canada’s short life, he was out of power.
Humiliated but unbowed, Macdonald spent five years in opposition honing a new political program to regain the public’s confidence. In 1878 he roared back to power as Prime Minister on the strength of what he dubbed the “National Policy.” This was a bold nation-building economic strategy aimed at jump-starting Canada’s growth. The National Policy had three core pillars: protective tariffs to nurture Canadian industries, the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) to unite the country’s regions, and aggressive immigration to populate the West. High tariffs on imported manufactured goods were introduced to shield nascent Canadian factories (mainly in Ontario and Quebec) from foreign competition. At the same time, the government re-committed to the transcontinental railway project with a new syndicate of investors, determined to push the line to completion. Macdonald knew that rail infrastructure was the key to unlocking Canada’s interior – both for economic development and for political consolidation. “The trans-continental railway is the most obvious and arguably the most lasting element of what became known as the National Policy,” notes one historical analysis, as it allowed goods and people to move across vast distances and “acted as a critical element in populating the Prairies with colonists.” Indeed, Macdonald’s government granted the CPR expansive land and subsidies, and in return the company aggressively recruited settlers and established towns along the route. Lastly, Macdonald’s plan envisioned waves of immigrants (mainly from Britain and Europe) to turn the prairie wilderness into productive farmland – creating new markets for eastern industries and cementing Canada’s hold on its western territories. In effect, Macdonald sought to build a self-sufficient transcontinental nation: east and west tied by iron rails, trading within a protected domestic market, and bolstered by a growing population of farmers and laborers.
The National Policy, launched in 1878–79, soon reshaped Canada. Factories in Montreal and Toronto flourished behind tariff walls. Thousands of newcomers arrived to homestead on the prairies (though not always in the numbers hoped for, as the U.S. still drew more immigrants). Most dramatically, the Canadian Pacific Railway forged ahead. Despite engineering perils in the Rocky Mountains and near bankruptcy in 1885, the CPR was completed in November of that year – an astonishing feat that linked Montreal to the Pacific in just over four years of construction. Macdonald hammered a last spike into the line (figuratively – the famous “Last Spike” photo features CPR officials, not the Prime Minister). The railway was more than an economic artery; it was a tool of nationhood and imperial ambition. It enabled Canada to send settlers, goods, and even troops across the continent in days. In fact, when a second Métis uprising erupted in the spring of 1885, the CPR (though not fully finished) allowed government soldiers to rush west and suppress the insurgency with unprecedented speed. This would prove both the triumph and the tragedy of Macdonald’s nation-building: the iron horse that he saw as binding the country was also used to impose Ottawa’s will on distant peoples. Macdonald himself exulted in 1885 that Canada had strung a telegraph wire and rail line across the plains “and the very day after the outbreak [of rebellion], troops were on their way” – something he believed no other colonial power could have achieved so swiftly. The CPR stood as the crowning achievement of Macdonald’s economic vision, but it came at great human cost to those who stood in the path of his nation-dream.
Macdonald’s expansionist policies were not without prejudice. While he welcomed immigrants from Europe to “whiten” the West, he held racist views toward other groups. Under his government, **anti-Asian immigration laws** were introduced. In 1885, the same year the CPR was completed largely with Chinese labour, Macdonald’s government imposed a hefty head tax of $50 on Chinese newcomers – the first of many measures to discourage Asian immigration. Macdonald openly argued in Parliament that the Chinese were undesirable settlers, insisting that Canada’s future should be “Aryan” and warning against a “mongrel race” through mixing with Asians. He also moved to strip Chinese Canadians (and Indigenous people) of the right to vote in 1885. These policies reflected Macdonald’s belief in an Anglo-European character for Canada, underscoring that even in his nation-building, a hierarchy of race determined who was welcome and who was not. It is a stark reminder that Macdonald’s vision of a prosperous Dominion was intertwined with assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority. The greatest victims of those assumptions, however, were the First Nations and the Métis – the Indigenous peoples who already inhabited the lands Macdonald sought to develop. It is to his Indigenous policies that we now turn, in order to understand the full measure of his legacy.
Long before he became Prime Minister, Macdonald was involved in shaping colonial policies toward Indigenous peoples. In 1857, as a young politician in pre-Confederation Canada, he supported the Gradual Civilization Act, a law aimed at assimilating First Nations men by enfranchising them (granting the vote and citizenship) if they gave up their traditional status and adopted European ways. This paternalistic approach – “enfranchise” and thereby civilize – laid early groundwork for what would later become the Indian Act. When Canada was formed in 1867, the Constitution (British North America Act) explicitly placed “Indians and Lands reserved for the Indians” under federal jurisdiction. Macdonald saw it as essential that the new Dominion have uniform control over Indigenous affairs. By 1876, his government consolidated all previous colonial laws regarding First Nations into the Indian Act, a comprehensive statute that would govern virtually every aspect of Indigenous life for generations. The Indian Act made Indigenous people legal wards of the state, imposed band council systems, restricted Indigenous land rights to reserved territories, and enshrined a vision of eventual assimilation. It was, in effect, the blueprint for turning independent First Nations into dependent communities regulated by Ottawa. Macdonald unabashedly articulated the ultimate goal: “The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change,” he told the House of Commons in 1887. In his mind, Indigenous peoples were to be remade – socially, politically, and culturally – in the image of the settler society.
To carry out this assimilationist vision, Macdonald made a fateful decision upon returning to power in 1878. He personally took on the role of Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs (in addition to Prime Minister), effectively making himself the minister in charge of Indigenous policy. “Indian matters, and the land granting system, form so great a portion of the general policy of the Government that I think it is necessary for the first minister… to have that in his own hands,” Macdonald wrote in 1881. From his office in Ottawa, Macdonald oversaw a series of measures designed to force Indigenous peoples to abandon their traditional lifestyles and integrate (at the lowest rungs) into Canadian society. The Indian Act was amended repeatedly under his watch to increase control: in 1884, for example, the Potlatch and other Indigenous ceremonies were banned in an effort to stamp out “heathen” cultural practices. Macdonald’s government also introduced the Pass System after 1885, an internal passport regime (never authorized by law but enforced by officials) requiring First Nations on the prairies to obtain written permission to leave their reserves. This effectively turned reserves into open-air prisons in the years following the Northwest uprising. A new electoral law in 1885 explicitly disqualified “Indians” from voting (except those who owned property and met certain criteria), thus silencing Indigenous political voices in the wider polity. All these actions stemmed from Macdonald’s fundamental conviction that Indigenous peoples must be “managed” and gradually molded to fit colonial norms – or else marginalized and kept out of the way of the settler population.
Perhaps the most notorious aspect of Macdonald’s assimilation policy was his support for the creation of Residential Schools. Macdonald’s government, influenced by similar programs in the United States, believed that separating Indigenous children from their families and educating them in distant boarding schools was the surest way to “kill the Indian in the child” – to extinguish Indigenous languages, spirituality, and identity in the next generation. In 1879, Macdonald commissioned politician Nicholas Flood Davin to report on American industrial schools for Indigenous children. The resulting Davin Report recommended Canada establish a network of government-funded, church-run boarding schools to aggressively assimilate Indigenous children. Macdonald acted on this advice. By 1883, his government authorized funding for the first three such industrial schools in the Northwest – at Battleford, High River (Dunbow), and Fort Qu’Appelle (Lebret) – in partnership with Christian denominations. Soon, more schools followed. Macdonald bluntly explained the rationale in 1879: “When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages… He is simply a savage who can read and write,” he said. It had been “strongly impressed” upon him as the minister that Indigenous children “should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence,” and the only way was to place them in central boarding schools “where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.” By ripping children from their families and immersing them in an alien environment, Macdonald believed they could be civilized. The cruelty of this thinking – referring to parents as “savages” and deciding that government knew best how to raise Indigenous children – was matched by the cruelty of conditions in the schools themselves. Over the decades that followed, thousands of Indigenous children in these institutions suffered physical abuse, cultural disorientation, illness, and neglect. Although the worst abuses occurred after Macdonald’s era, the foundational decisions were his. He set in motion a system that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 would describe as “cultural genocide.” Macdonald’s legacy thus includes not only the political framework of the Indian Act but also the genesis of the residential school system – twin pillars of a grand assimilation project that had devastating effects on Indigenous peoples across Canada.
While Macdonald’s government was formulating policies in Ottawa, on the ground in the West it pursued a more brutal strategy to facilitate Canada’s expansion. In the 1870s, through a series of numbered treaties, the young Dominion negotiated for vast lands on the prairies – the traditional territories of Cree, Blackfoot, Ojibwe, and other First Nations. Indigenous leaders, facing the collapse of the buffalo herds and immense pressure, signed treaties that in exchange for ceding huge areas provided for reserves, annual payments, and promises of assistance (like food, tools, and farming instruction) to help transition to new livelihoods. But once the ink was dry, the government’s focus shifted to cost-saving and control. As famine spread on the plains in the late 1870s after the near-extinction of the buffalo, Macdonald’s administration adopted what historian James Daschuk has described as a “politics of starvation.” Rather than honor all commitments of food aid, officials often used relief as a weapon to force Indigenous bands into submission. Macdonald’s Indian Commissioner, Edgar Dewdney, ordered that hungry bands be given food only at government posts – thus compelling them to move to the designated reserve areas before receiving help. A policy of withholding rations was tacitly encouraged to keep costs down and coerce compliance. In 1882, Prime Minister Macdonald chillingly defended this approach in the House of Commons, stating: “I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole… are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.” The government knew Indigenous peoples were starving; instead of a humanitarian response, it saw an opportunity to enforce dependence. One opposition MP at the time condemned Macdonald’s tactics as “a policy of submission shaped by a policy of starvation”. Modern research has laid bare that this was not hyperbole – it was exactly what took place. Starvation and disease weakened Indigenous resistance, making it easier for the government to usher survivors onto small reserves and open the rest of the land for settlers and the railroad.
By the early 1880s, the situation on the plains was desperate. First Nations people, once self-sufficient buffalo hunters, were now largely confined to meager reserve lands, often far from their best hunting grounds, trying to farm with scant equipment. Many promised supplies – like farming tools or adequate rations – never arrived or were of poor quality. Government agents enforced strict rules: able-bodied Indigenous men had to perform labor to earn food relief, a measure Macdonald’s officials argued was necessary “for the sake of the moral effect” – to teach that nothing would be free. Yet even when people complied, the food was often insufficient. Hunger set the stage for unrest. In 1884, anticipating trouble, the government amended the Indian Act to tighten control: it restricted the sale of ammunition to “hostile” bands and criminalized any Indigenous encouragement of “uprisings”. That same year, officials like Dewdney grew alarmed as discontented Cree leaders such as Big Bear and Poundmaker began to agitate for better treaty fulfillment. The final spark would come from the long-frustrated Métis, who were facing their own form of dispossession.
The Métis – a people of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry – had been pivotal in the Red River region (Manitoba). In 1869, when Canada moved to take over that territory from the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Métis feared losing their land and culture. Louis Riel led them in establishing a provisional government, seeking terms to join Canada that would protect Métis rights. Macdonald’s handling of the Red River Resistance of 1869–70 was cautious but calculating. He negotiated the Manitoba Act of 1870, which created the new province of Manitoba and promised the Métis 1.4 million acres of land (through scrip or grants) to satisfy their claims. But he also dispatched a military force to Red River once the deal was struck, and tolerated an atmosphere of vengeance by Ontario soldiers against Riel’s supporters. Riel himself fled into exile as Canadian authority took hold. The land grants that were promised to the Métis were slow in coming and mired in bureaucracy; many Métis families were cheated or forced to sell their scrip to speculators for a pittance. Feeling betrayed, hundreds of Métis migrated further west into the Saskatchewan territory in the 1870s, only to face the same creeping loss of land as Canadian settlers and rail surveyors arrived in the 1880s. By 1884, Métis grievances in the North-West had reached a breaking point – their petitions to Ottawa about land surveys and representation were ignored or delayed. That year they invited Louis Riel, still in exile in the U.S., to return and lead them once again.
In the spring of 1885, the discontent of the Métis and First Nations in Saskatchewan ignited into open conflict. Riel formed a provisional government at Batoche in March 1885, demanding rights and land title for the Métis. A number of Cree bands, starving and angry at broken treaty promises, also took up arms under leaders like Big Bear and Poundmaker, though their coordination with Riel was limited. This Northwest Rebellion was a smaller uprising than 1870 but it provoked a massive response from Macdonald’s government. Thanks to the new railway and telegraph, Canada was able to mobilize over 3,000 militia and regular troops to the West within weeks. By late March, government and Métis forces clashed at Duck Lake, and a series of skirmishes and battles unfolded over the next two months. The Canadian firepower – including Gatling guns and a rapid troop deployment via rail – overwhelmed the ill-armed Métis and Cree fighters. In May 1885, Batoche fell after a four-day siege. Riel surrendered to Canadian authorities, while other leaders like Gabriel Dumont fled to the United States. Cree warriors who had attacked settlers (as at the Frog Lake incident) were pursued and captured. The rebellion was crushed by early summer, ending in a decisive government victory.
Macdonald’s actions in the aftermath were stern and, many contemporaries argued, vindictive. He was determined to make an example of the rebels. Louis Riel was put on trial for high treason. Despite his lawyer’s plea that Riel was mentally unstable, the court found him guilty. Riel himself, defiant to the end, used the trial to eloquently articulate the grievances of his people. Macdonald, however, resisted all calls for clemency. English Canadian opinion (especially in Ontario) overwhelmingly demanded Riel’s execution as justice for rebellion. In Quebec, by contrast, Riel – a Francophone and a Catholic – was increasingly seen as a victim of English-Canadian persecution, and many pleaded for mercy. Macdonald coldly resolved to hang Riel regardless of public appeals. He is reputed to have said of Riel, “He shall die though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” On November 16, 1885, Louis Riel was hanged. This decision caused a lasting rift between French and English Canada – Quebec’s population reacted with outrage and profound sorrow, while many in Ontario rang church bells in celebration. Macdonald admitted the political cost but deemed it necessary, remarking that Riel’s execution showed that “the arrangements of Confederation must not be interfered with.” Privately, he was even more blunt about asserting domination. “The executions of the Indians ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs,” Macdonald wrote in 1885, referring to the fact that eight Cree men were also hanged that year for killings during the conflict (in what was the largest public mass execution in Canadian history). With these hangings, Macdonald intended to send a final message of who ruled the Northwest. In Parliament, he insisted Indigenous and Métis people had been treated with generosity, and only the ungrateful “savage” impulse had driven them to rebel. Now, he argued, the government’s firm hand would teach them the rule of law. “We must vindicate the position of the white man; we must teach the Indians what law is,” he declared in 1885. In the wake of the rebellion, the government intensified its assimilative grip: the pass system (to control Indigenous movement) was enforced across the prairies, and Indigenous spiritual leaders like Poundmaker were imprisoned. The suppression of 1885 effectively broke organized Indigenous resistance on the plains for generations. But it also left a bitter legacy of sorrow and anger – particularly among French Canadians and the Métis, who mourned Riel, and among the Cree, who had lost revered chiefs and faced even stricter subjugation. Macdonald had secured the West for Canada’s railway and settlers, but at a grievous moral cost. The “founding” of Western Canada, under his watch, was achieved not through peaceful negotiation alone, but through violence, coercion, and state repression.
John A. Macdonald died in office in 1891, at the age of 76, after nearly half a century in public life. At the time of his death, he was venerated by many Canadians as the “Old Chieftain” who had led the country from its fragile birth through expansion and economic growth. His funeral was a national event, and statues and monuments soon rose in his honour in cities across the country. For much of the next century, Macdonald’s legacy was taught in schools as one of almost unalloyed nation-building: the genius of Confederation, the driving force behind the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the architect of Canada’s dominion status. His personal failings – such as his drinking or the Pacific Scandal – were often downplayed as footnotes. His policies toward Indigenous peoples were, until recently, seldom scrutinized in popular narratives and were sometimes even rationalized as unfortunate but unavoidable steps in Canada’s development. However, as Canada has matured, so too has the willingness to confront the darker aspects of its history. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Indigenous voices and scholars began to highlight the true impact of Macdonald’s policies on First Nations and Métis. The findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) – which confirmed the horrific abuses of the residential school system – and works like James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains (2013) – which documented how “state-supported starvation” under Macdonald decimated Indigenous communities – have fundamentally altered the public perception of Sir John A. Macdonald’s legacy. What was once taught as a heroic saga is now understood as a more ambivalent story: one of both construction and destruction.
Today, Macdonald’s legacy is the subject of intense debate and soul-searching in Canada. Critics argue that many of the injustices faced by Indigenous peoples – from loss of land to intergenerational trauma from residential schools – can be traced back in part to foundations laid by Macdonald’s governments. They point to his explicit endorsement of what we now recognize as racist, oppressive measures: the Indian Act’s paternalism, the attempted annihilation of Indigenous cultures, the hanging of Riel, and the callous use of starvation as a policy tool. These critics contend that while Macdonald may have been a product of his time, he often went beyond even the norms of his era in his zeal for assimilation. For instance, not all his contemporaries agreed that Indigenous people should be denied food until near death – some condemned it as inhumane, and even opposition Liberals (hardly progressive by modern standards) sometimes accused Macdonald’s government of needless cruelty. Defenders of Macdonald, on the other hand, acknowledge these wrongs but argue that he held Canada together in fragile times and that without him the country might not exist or might have been subsumed by the United States. They note his achievements: creating a transcontinental nation, balancing French and English interests, building the economic and political institutions that endure today. They caution against judging a 19th-century figure solely by 21st-century values – a point hotly contested by those who say that basic principles of justice and humanity are not merely “today’s values.” In fact, the debate over Macdonald often reflects a broader discussion about how to remember historical figures who had great accomplishments but also committed great wrongs.
Macdonald himself anticipated that history would be his judge. In a poignant reflection late in life, he said: “My sins of omission and commission I do not deny; but I trust that it may be said of me in the ultimate issue, ‘Much is forgiven because he loved much,’ for I have loved my country with a passionate love.” There is no doubt Macdonald loved Canada and gave his life to it. He had a clear vision of a strong, united Dominion stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he laboured relentlessly to make that vision real – often in the face of great opposition and personal hardship. But the means by which he achieved that vision included policies that inflicted profound harm on Indigenous peoples and others who did not fit into his conception of the Canadian nation. Coming to terms with Sir John A. Macdonald’s legacy means acknowledging both sides of that ledger. It means recognizing him as a nation-builder – the pivotal figure without whom Canada as we know it might not have been – and as an architect of policies now understood as deeply unjust. It requires moving beyond the simplistic portrayals, whether celebratory or condemnatory, and understanding the context and complexity of the man.
In the end, Macdonald’s life is the story of Canada’s founding in all its dimensions: the bold vision, the political brilliance, the prejudice and violence, the triumphs and tragedies. It is a narrative that does not lend itself to easy morality tales. Rather, it challenges Canadians to engage in a mature reflection on their history. A nation can both honor its founders and critically examine their actions – the two are not mutually exclusive. As Canada continues on its journey of reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, the legacy of Sir John A. Macdonald stands as a reminder that the country’s past is not just a tale of progress, but also a cautionary history of how that progress was often built on injustice. Facing that truth is essential to understanding where we come from – and to building a future that learns from, rather than repeats, the mistakes of the past. Macdonald himself, ever a realist, might well advise today’s Canadians to confront history honestly. After all, he once said that politics is a game requiring great coolness and absence of prejudice. In assessing Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada is at last trying to do just that – cooling the old hero-worship, shedding prejudices both for and against, and seeing the Father of Confederation as a flawed, complex man who both made a country and left a profoundly complicated legacy.
.jpg)
.jpg)
_in_Mountains,_1884.jpg)