Juno News - John A. Macdonald saved more Indigenous lives than ANY other prime minister

00:00:00.000 One issue in Canada that does not receive as much attention as it should but is nonetheless deeply troubling is the string of historical attacks that have taken place across the country under Justin Trudeau's tenure as Prime Minister.

00:00:14.420 None of this was really anything we ever dealt with in Canada before Justin Trudeau came along.

00:00:19.180 However, statues and monuments have been toppled across the country, names of streets and names of universities have been erased, lies about our country's history have been published, and even Parliament unanimously accepted recently that Canada was guilty of genocide, something that the evidence does not support.

00:00:39.640 And there is no character in Canadian history that has been lied about as often and maligned as viciously as Sir John A. Macdonald.

00:00:48.200 So fittingly, the Trudeau government's decision to renovate and reopen Macdonald's one-time home in Kingston, Bellevue House, and use it to attack Macdonald and attack Canada was fully embraced.

00:01:00.340 And while standing up for the legacies of John A. Macdonald, Egerton, Ryerson, Wilfred Laurier, and other great Canadians is no longer politically popular these days, there are some who have not given up the fight.

00:01:11.260 And joining us on the show today is someone who is a very loud and very strong defender of John A. Macdonald.

00:01:17.800 So joining us now on the Faulkner Show is Toronto-based lawyer, historian, and writer Greg Piazetsky, who recently wrote in the C2C Journal,

00:01:27.380 Parks Canada tries to cancel Sir John A. Macdonald in his own home.

00:01:31.620 So I just want to begin because I have been to the redesigned Bellevue House, and I, like you, was quite shocked at the way the Parks Canada, the way the federal government decided to present Macdonald's legacy.

00:01:44.060 The first question I have for you is, why do this to Macdonald's legacy in the first place?

00:01:48.900 It's not the first attack that we've seen on John A. Macdonald, and it likely won't be the last.

00:01:53.340 But what benefit does intentionally rewriting and misleading Canadians about Macdonald's history bring for our country?

00:01:59.320 Well, I think there's a couple of rationales for it.

00:02:04.060 One of them is a simple one that he was a conservative and we have a liberal government.

00:02:08.400 And I know that sounds pretty trite, but I think that's part of what's going on.

00:02:13.240 A second issue is a government that wants to remake society.

00:02:17.300 And I don't know that they have anyone smart enough to remake our society.

00:02:20.260 But that's the gist of the approach of government to destroy people's belief in themselves and their country, their pride in their country.

00:02:27.920 And once you've done that with people, they become more malleable.

00:02:30.940 Maybe you can pitch them on a new angle.

00:02:33.520 And I don't think it's going to succeed because what they're leaving behind after they have destroyed the past is not much for people to go with.

00:02:41.220 People want to have some pride in their country, be proud of what their ancestors have built.

00:02:44.520 So do you think that the people involved in this effort and the renaming at universities, the tearing down of Macdonald's statues and removing his name from university buildings, do you think that the people involved in that hate Canada?

00:03:04.040 I would have to conclude they do.

00:03:07.820 But I don't know if it's what Canada they see, because it's not the Canada I know, which I love.

00:03:14.620 And I love our history.

00:03:16.320 And I believe it's a great history.

00:03:17.780 We're a great example to the world of what can be done by bringing together people from all parts of the world.

00:03:23.600 So it's very sad to see our government taking this stance.

00:03:27.300 It's rare that people involved in these efforts, and I've followed both the Macdonald rewriting and the attacks on Egerton-Ryerson quite closely.

00:03:38.960 It's rare that those people are so brazen and honest about where they're coming from.

00:03:44.160 But in the case of Bellevue House, at the opening ceremony of Bellevue House, the historian, Shannon Oyenaran, I believe that's her name, she said not only that Canada's history was, quote, steeped in racism and white supremacy, but more to the fact of being as honest as she was, she admitted that the Bellevue House redesign was, quote, a testament to rewriting history.

00:04:10.160 Now, Greg, I know you're a historian of sorts.

00:04:13.680 I personally wasn't aware that it was a historian's job to rewrite history, but I assume it is now.

00:04:19.560 What do you make of that?

00:04:21.580 Well, there's a lot of it going on today.

00:04:23.920 I mean, I think there's a simple expression that covers it.

00:04:27.260 Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but they're not entitled to their own facts.

00:04:31.740 And I don't care if somebody has an opinion contrary to mine.

00:04:35.580 What I expect, though, is that they'll back it up with some actual facts on the ground.

00:04:39.400 And that's what's missing in this whole discussion, whether it's residential schools or any of the, there are several different initiatives by McDonald's government that saved tens of thousands of Native lives.

00:04:49.680 These should be front and center on any discussion of genocide, cultural genocide, real genocide, or even just, you know, attacks on Sir John A.

00:04:57.920 We should, in connection with Indigenous issues, we should be looking at the facts.

00:05:02.140 And they're not discussed at all.

00:05:04.540 So let's go through the Bellevue House Monument itself.

00:05:10.220 People who have watched my show closely, they may be aware of my episode that I did on the Bellevue House redesign.

00:05:17.360 But what struck you when you entered the house and when you went on, perhaps you went on a tour, a guided tour, as I did, but maybe not.

00:05:25.100 But what stood out to you as perhaps the most egregious example of this maligning of McDonald's legacy?

00:05:32.960 Well, first of all, let me say I visited Bellevue House back in the 1970s with my, not my wife then, she was just a girlfriend.

00:05:40.980 But we lived in Kingston, we were going to Queens, and we visited Bellevue House a couple of times, actually.

00:05:45.900 So I can say the remake is great.

00:05:48.560 It looks a lot better than it used to look.

00:05:51.060 They've done a great job.

00:05:52.680 But what the politicization of a historic monument, especially one that's actually supposed to be a memorial to Sir John A.

00:06:01.100 Or a recognition of Sir John A.

00:06:03.100 Is astounding.

00:06:04.620 And it starts with the walkway from the visitor's center, which is where you buy your tickets, and you walk over to the house along a pathway, and they've got some signs carrying statements that are supposed to be from former visitors.

00:06:19.460 But they vary from comments like, Sir John A. was the father of confederation, to he was a monster.

00:06:27.320 And that sort of tells you where they're going.

00:06:31.240 You haven't got to the house yet, and he's being characterized as a monster.

00:06:36.660 Well, you know, that's not an historical term.

00:06:39.380 That's not a term historians use about somebody.

00:06:42.240 They have critiques of somebody.

00:06:44.000 They can talk about his policies, but they don't dismiss him as a monster.

00:06:49.300 And it goes downhill from there in the sense that, well, it doesn't go downhill, but it doesn't get any better.

00:06:55.300 When you go into the house, for example, the dining room, sometimes it's very innocuous.

00:06:58.740 There's indigenous material everywhere.

00:07:01.240 But in the dining room, they have, for example, some herbs, some indigenous herbs sitting in a bowl.

00:07:05.180 Well, you know, that's not too offensive.

00:07:06.980 You can look at it or ignore it.

00:07:08.620 It doesn't make much difference.

00:07:09.960 They have indigenous books, books on indigenous art.

00:07:14.460 They're not indigenous books, but they're about indigenous art on the bookshelves.

00:07:17.600 And it's just something you look at, and you think, well, that doesn't actually fit very well with McDonald's era or McDonald's.

00:07:22.240 But it gets really bad when you go up to, for example, the bedroom in which his child died, his infant, their first child died under the age of one, I think, and died in that house and in a crib that they have in that house, which is one of the few original pieces.

00:07:39.060 And that's a very poignant moment for any Canadian to be in that room where he lost his child and his wife and he shared such pain.

00:07:49.160 But what have they done?

00:07:50.200 They put up an Indian cradle board on the wall.

00:07:52.620 A cradle board is for carrying an Indian child, an infant. 0.95

00:07:56.840 Indian women carry them on their back in a cradle board. 1.00

00:07:58.920 And it's obviously meant to draw, you know, make you think more of indigenous people than of Sir John A. and his pain.

00:08:06.940 And in the same room where you're supposed to be feeling this poignancy, I think, about Sir John A., they have a nonstop track going where people are complaining about their residential school experience.

00:08:17.380 Like, it's really so political, so non-historical, and it really shows the bias behind the whole remake.

00:08:26.180 One of the things that struck me when I was in the house was the lack of detail about McDonald's' many accomplishments.

00:08:34.520 You would think that that would be, you know, front and center of the house, but there really wasn't much of that.

00:08:39.580 And, you know, almost comically, I found there was a flat screen television above McDonald's bed playing videos that had nothing to do about McDonald's

00:08:48.400 and were playing videos, as you mentioned in the article, about, you know, indigenous history and things that had nothing to do with them.

00:08:54.640 So there really isn't, it really isn't trying to recreate the house that McDonald lived in.

00:08:59.760 As you point out, and I think, you know, you can probably explain this in more detail, this is about pushing the ideological message

00:09:06.540 that John A. McDonald is someone that we should be ashamed of in this country and not at all someone that deserves recognition.

00:09:13.300 It's almost as if Bellevue House itself, the structure, you know, is sort of a problem for the historical rewriters at Parks Canada.

00:09:23.960 And so they decided to fill it with all of this anti-McDonald and what I believe to be anti-Canadian messaging.

00:09:30.460 Do you agree with that?

00:09:31.080 Oh, 100%.

00:09:33.160 I mean, it's funny.

00:09:34.760 There is such a remarkable lack of historical fact and so much opinion, and it's almost all negative.

00:09:40.980 I mean, just to give an example, on the residential school front, there's a number of facts that most Canadians would be very interested to know.

00:09:47.120 I mean, for example, the fact that most indigenous kids went to day schools.

00:09:50.440 Always true.

00:09:51.260 It was true before McDonald died.

00:09:53.260 It was true after he died.

00:09:54.560 Always true.

00:09:55.180 Most kids went to day schools, went home to their parents every night.

00:09:57.940 Hard to call that genocide of any sort, cultural or otherwise.

00:10:01.500 Kids who went to residential schools, which are under half of kids, the average kid went for one year.

00:10:07.200 50% dropped out after one year.

00:10:09.680 I mean, this is not a concentration camp.

00:10:12.040 They're not locked in.

00:10:13.540 They're letting them drop out after one year because if they weren't interested, they didn't think it was worth keeping them there.

00:10:18.380 Now, the reality of the residential schools is they became very much foster homes because alcoholism, et cetera, on Native reserves is so bad. 0.86

00:10:25.940 There were so many children in broken homes, suffering family violence, sexual abuse, and the like, that the residential schools very quickly became child welfare refuges, which is the old term for, you know, a home for orphans in the old days.

00:10:38.920 And no one discusses that, but the reality is these kids were not, there was no genocide going on, no cultural genocide.

00:10:48.060 I mean, here's an interesting factoid.

00:10:49.960 In 1915, the Americans sent a commissioner up to study the Canadian Indian school system.

00:10:54.820 And it's very interesting because we looked at their school system back in the 1850s because they were ahead of us in building large schools for indigenous kids.

00:11:03.420 And they taught them trades.

00:11:05.160 We weren't thinking we'd had schools for 200 years.

00:11:07.740 A few of them, they're all privately run by charities.

00:11:10.820 But they were mostly teaching academic type material, reading, writing, arithmetic.

00:11:15.640 The Americans were more into trades, and we thought that would be a great idea. 1.00

00:11:18.580 And that became a little bit of a theme of our residential schools as we built them in the 1880s and 1890s with the add on this trade issue.

00:11:25.660 But the Americans sent a commissioner up in 1915, so that's 30 years, 25 years after McDonald died, to look at our system because they felt we were doing a much better job of both educating indigenous Canadians and letting them keep their culture.

00:11:41.140 I mean, it's shocking if you hear that today and hear what people say about the schools.

00:11:45.500 The Americans thought we were doing a great job because the Indians were preserving their culture.

00:11:49.700 And in some of our schools, of course, they converted the Christmas carols into the indigenous language.

00:11:55.400 The kids were allowed to use indigenous language in certain parts of the school.

00:11:58.500 But they were there primarily, remember, and they're only there for a few years, as I just explained.

00:12:03.400 They're there primarily to learn basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and one of the official languages, English or French.

00:12:10.760 So they have some hope of a job of succeeding in the modern society.

00:12:16.420 And the movement to build residential schools happened around the same time as the movement for public schools.

00:12:21.540 There weren't public schools before 1870.

00:12:23.640 There was no compulsory education.

00:12:25.460 Schools were local.

00:12:26.380 They were funded locally.

00:12:28.600 Then there was a very big press from the public to create a school system and to have it compulsory, which they made it compulsory for four years.

00:12:37.140 That was around 1872 in Ontario, became compulsory.

00:12:40.100 Most kids didn't, still lots of kids didn't go to school.

00:12:43.340 Compulsory didn't mean compulsory.

00:12:44.660 That was the aspiration, not the reality.

00:12:47.400 So that's happening at exactly the same time as we're building the school system for indigenous kids.

00:12:51.860 And it was for the same reason.

00:12:53.000 People thought they needed the same skill set if they were to have any hope of surviving.

00:12:57.760 And not just prospering, but just surviving because there's all kinds of skellywags running around wanting to exploit indigenous people's innocence.

00:13:04.880 You know, sell them liquor, sell them stuff that mispriced values and things like that.

00:13:11.760 So everybody felt indigenous kids like every other kid should have some basic skills.

00:13:16.280 You know, as you point out and several other historians point out that, you know, this was not a program of genocide.

00:13:24.540 The residential school system was not a program of genocide.

00:13:27.140 However, the entire House of Commons unanimously passed a motion saying that the residential school system was genocide.

00:13:34.980 And the federal government said that the missing and murdered indigenous women program is a genocide back in 2016.

00:13:43.000 I don't believe history should be political, but clearly there are many that do.

00:13:48.180 What do you think needs to be done to actually put history in this country and historical education back on the right path and grounded in truth and not hijacked by ideology, which it appears it has been and hijacked by politicians?

00:14:01.000 Yeah, it's a tough task.

00:14:03.260 And I mean, I'm involved in some discussions at the provincial level of material with people who would very much like to get our historical program back on track.

00:14:12.540 But this has been a 30 year program of slowly removing factual material and skewing the content so that it's more a political narrative that kids are learning in school than basic facts.

00:14:24.420 I mean, as I say, if you had the basic facts and residential schools, you can make up your own mind about whether it's a genocide or not a genocide culture or otherwise.

00:14:32.060 But without those facts, you're at a loss.

00:14:35.040 I think many people intuitively know at least, I guess I may be giving kids too much credit.

00:14:40.980 Kids probably don't know.

00:14:42.600 But, you know, and I grew up in a different era.

00:14:45.380 But for me, these outrageous stories that began 30 years ago, I just intuitively knew they weren't true.

00:14:50.460 Like residential schools, I didn't for one second think there was a genocide going on there.

00:14:55.660 And that's what got me digging into the facts.

00:14:57.560 And I went into the Indian Affairs records to check on the, you know, the attendance records.

00:15:01.140 They kept very detailed records in Indian Affairs.

00:15:03.840 I mean, here's a fun fact.

00:15:05.820 Every member of parliament from 1870 into the 1920s received a 500 to 1,000 page report each and every year on every aspect of the Indian system, which included the schools.

00:15:19.180 So they got the stats on how many kids were in school, what percentage were attending for grade one, grade two, grade three.

00:15:25.820 This information was widely disseminated.

00:15:28.000 Nothing secret could happen anywhere.

00:15:30.580 I mean, same deal with, you know, surprising, mysterious deaths at schools.

00:15:35.540 It couldn't happen.

00:15:36.820 You've got 100 kids in a school or 80 kids in a school.

00:15:39.500 Every one of those kids is going to tell their parents some kid disappears.

00:15:43.080 Parents are going to be on the warpath.

00:15:45.120 And, you know, Indian parents aren't different from any other parents.

00:15:47.500 They'd be shocked, astounded on the warpath.

00:15:50.940 And, in fact, there's, and instead from that, there's a teacher, there's a principal.

00:15:54.520 All these people would have to keep their mouths shut.

00:15:56.200 It's not possible.

00:15:57.460 But one of the tasks of the Indian agent, every area of the country had an Indian agent.

00:16:01.660 One of his tasks was to attend the residential schools every month or so and be there for roll call to see that every kid on the roll was present.

00:16:11.480 And the government had a simple financial interest in that.

00:16:14.680 They paid per day, per kid.

00:16:17.320 They wanted to make sure kids were in school.

00:16:19.880 So the idea that any kids disappeared from schools, there were no stories.

00:16:23.220 There's no facts to back those kind of stories.

00:16:25.320 They're just stories.

00:16:26.440 And yet some of the most radical historians, if we can even call them that, I mean, they call themselves historians.

00:16:34.520 But some of these people that claim to be historians but are really just, you know, really just trying to erase history,

00:16:40.880 they claim that figures like MacDonald and Egerton Ryerson were killers and set up and were architects of a system of genocide.

00:16:48.980 You've written in the National Post, Johnny MacDonald saved more indigenous lives than any other Canadian prime minister.

00:16:55.020 And while I don't disagree with the subject of the headline and the article itself, you know, it is quite a provocative headline.

00:17:02.180 I'd like for you to explain that point because I think, you know, we're having this conversation about MacDonald.

00:17:07.440 Let's hear about some of the good things that he did and some of the things that he should be celebrated for, not just starting the country.

00:17:13.140 So, yeah, how do you come to that conclusion that he saved more indigenous lives than any other Canadian prime minister?

00:17:19.500 Well, let's start with a simple program that he ran from before Canada existed.

00:17:24.700 We had Upper and Lower Canada and then the United Province of Canada.

00:17:28.260 And he was premier of the United Province of Canada about 1865, 1866.

00:17:35.500 And he began running, and the British had done some of this before him, 0.92

00:17:38.360 they began running a smallpox vaccination program to vaccinate every indigenous Canadian.

00:17:43.140 Smallpox was a terrible disease at that time, a terrible scourge.

00:17:47.420 Fortunately, a very insightful British physician had figured out that if you infected people with cowpox,

00:17:55.260 a milder form of the disease, they would not get smallpox.

00:17:59.180 And so that was the first vaccination ever discovered.

00:18:02.360 And so MacDonald's government, both prior to confederation and then following confederation,

00:18:07.360 ran a program to vaccinate every indigenous Canadian.

00:18:10.940 And some years, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 would die of smallpox in the pre-confederation days.

00:18:17.460 After the vaccination program had been running for a number of years, there was an interesting contrast.

00:18:23.040 The smallpox epidemic broke out in Montreal.

00:18:25.920 Montrealers, for religious reasons, were averse to getting vaccinated.

00:18:29.200 And so Montreal was more exposed to the risk of smallpox.

00:18:33.960 5,000 people died in Montreal, just across the river.

00:18:37.660 It was only like a 30-minute paddle across the river to the big reserve at Kahnawakee.

00:18:42.840 There were no deaths because all of the Indians had been vaccinated against it.

00:18:46.940 So just as an example, that program saved many, many thousands of lives, tens of thousands easily.

00:18:51.600 The second program of MacDonald's government, and he gets criticized for it, and we'll touch on why he's criticized for it,

00:18:57.880 was the collapse of the buffalo population.

00:19:00.360 So the buffalo were herds of millions that roamed across the American plains and up into the part of Canada on the plains.

00:19:07.820 And there were a number of tribal groups that had depended on those buffalo for their food for thousands of years probably.

00:19:15.400 And the herds came around once or twice a year, and they'd harvest the herd and get food.

00:19:22.180 Well, the intrusion of settlers, there was some climate change going on.

00:19:28.460 There's a lot of reasons scientists haven't concluded exactly why the herds collapsed.

00:19:31.880 They were being overhunted, but they were huge.

00:19:34.080 The overhunting probably wasn't the main problem.

00:19:36.520 Climate change might have been for competition with cattle who are now roaming the same plains, huge herds of cattle.

00:19:41.740 The buffalo population collapsed, and it had been expected for about 10 years, but it suddenly happened about 1879.

00:19:48.680 MacDonald had to immediately launch easily the biggest relief program in Canadian history.

00:19:55.560 There's no railway to the west.

00:19:57.940 Picture that.

00:19:59.060 All the food supplies and everything else are in eastern Canada and eastern U.S.

00:20:02.540 How do we get them to the west?

00:20:04.460 Had to ship them down through the states, partly on railways, partly on boats, partly by wagon train to get the food to western Canada.

00:20:11.980 At the peak in the next year, there were more than most people estimate, 10,000 to 20,000 indigenous Canadians were being kept alive by these famine relief supplies.

00:20:22.940 And after a year or two, things started to settle down a bit more.

00:20:27.320 People started to adopt other ways of living.

00:20:29.960 The food supply got better.

00:20:31.280 But even his harshest critic, Daszak, who wrote the book Clearing the Plains, was very critical of MacDonald in general, acknowledged that he avoided a catastrophic death toll from famine.

00:20:44.360 So that's a second thing.

00:20:46.800 And the third thing MacDonald did, and this went on over a period of time, in the States, they had a series of Indian wars that went on over more than 100 years.

00:20:57.240 And estimates are that about 60,000 Indians were killed and about 40,000 settlers and American soldiers were killed in those Indian wars.

00:21:05.360 Canada wanted to avoid that, and Britain wanted to avoid that, and MacDonald's policy was to enact treaties with all the western tribes.

00:21:14.780 Remember, all of western Canada was picked up when we bought Rupert's Land.

00:21:18.280 That had been a British problem previously. 0.75

00:21:19.780 So his program was to get treaties in place before he allowed any settlement of western Canada.

00:21:27.660 He did that, and there were no Indian wars in Canada.

00:21:31.480 And we had a good track record before that because the British policy generally was to avoid Indian wars as well.

00:21:37.000 So throughout Canada's history, there were essentially no Indian wars.

00:21:39.740 So we didn't have 100,000 deaths on the Indian side.

00:21:43.700 We didn't have 60,000 deaths on the settler side.

00:21:45.860 So these three policies of his really had a significant impact on Indigenous Canadians and are responsible for my headline saying he saved more Indigenous lives than any other prime minister.

00:22:00.900 And not one of those facts, I believe, made it to Bellevue House.

00:22:04.700 There is plenty of space on the walls, plenty of opportunity to talk about those things, but I couldn't find one of those being presented, one of those facts being presented at Bellevue House at all.

00:22:14.740 And, you know, we appreciate you sharing some of those convenient facts for us and rather inconvenient for the ones who try to rewrite our history.

00:22:22.940 Mr. Piazetsky, we thank you so much for joining us on the show.

00:22:26.120 If you want to find and read more about Piazetsky's trip to Bellevue House, you can do so by going to C2C Journal and finding the article,

00:22:35.300 Parks Canada Tries to Cancel Sir John A. MacDonald in His Own Home, and a link to that you can find in the description of this video.

00:22:42.260 So, once again, Mr. Piazetsky, thank you so much for joining us.

00:22:45.260 Thank you for having me.

Juno News - September 25, 2024

John A. Macdonald saved more Indigenous lives than ANY other prime minister

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