00:00:00.000One 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.
00:00:14.420None of this was really anything we ever dealt with in Canada before Justin Trudeau came along.
00:00:19.180However, 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.
00:00:39.640And there is no character in Canadian history that has been lied about as often and maligned as viciously as Sir John A. Macdonald.
00:00:48.200So 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.
00:01:00.340And 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.
00:01:11.260And joining us on the show today is someone who is a very loud and very strong defender of John A. Macdonald.
00:01:17.800So joining us now on the Faulkner Show is Toronto-based lawyer, historian, and writer Greg Piazetsky, who recently wrote in the C2C Journal,
00:01:27.380Parks Canada tries to cancel Sir John A. Macdonald in his own home.
00:01:31.620So 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.
00:01:44.060The first question I have for you is, why do this to Macdonald's legacy in the first place?
00:01:48.900It's not the first attack that we've seen on John A. Macdonald, and it likely won't be the last.
00:01:53.340But what benefit does intentionally rewriting and misleading Canadians about Macdonald's history bring for our country?
00:01:59.320Well, I think there's a couple of rationales for it.
00:02:04.060One of them is a simple one that he was a conservative and we have a liberal government.
00:02:08.400And I know that sounds pretty trite, but I think that's part of what's going on.
00:02:13.240A second issue is a government that wants to remake society.
00:02:17.300And I don't know that they have anyone smart enough to remake our society.
00:02:20.260But that's the gist of the approach of government to destroy people's belief in themselves and their country, their pride in their country.
00:02:27.920And once you've done that with people, they become more malleable.
00:02:30.940Maybe you can pitch them on a new angle.
00:02:33.520And 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.
00:02:41.220People want to have some pride in their country, be proud of what their ancestors have built.
00:02:44.520So 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?
00:03:17.780We're a great example to the world of what can be done by bringing together people from all parts of the world.
00:03:23.600So it's very sad to see our government taking this stance.
00:03:27.300It's rare that people involved in these efforts, and I've followed both the Macdonald rewriting and the attacks on Egerton-Ryerson quite closely.
00:03:38.960It's rare that those people are so brazen and honest about where they're coming from.
00:03:44.160But 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.
00:04:10.160Now, Greg, I know you're a historian of sorts.
00:04:13.680I personally wasn't aware that it was a historian's job to rewrite history, but I assume it is now.
00:04:21.580Well, there's a lot of it going on today.
00:04:23.920I mean, I think there's a simple expression that covers it.
00:04:27.260Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, but they're not entitled to their own facts.
00:04:31.740And I don't care if somebody has an opinion contrary to mine.
00:04:35.580What I expect, though, is that they'll back it up with some actual facts on the ground.
00:04:39.400And 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.
00:04:49.680These should be front and center on any discussion of genocide, cultural genocide, real genocide, or even just, you know, attacks on Sir John A.
00:04:57.920We should, in connection with Indigenous issues, we should be looking at the facts.
00:06:04.620And 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.
00:06:19.460But they vary from comments like, Sir John A. was the father of confederation, to he was a monster.
00:06:27.320And that sort of tells you where they're going.
00:06:31.240You haven't got to the house yet, and he's being characterized as a monster.
00:06:36.660Well, you know, that's not an historical term.
00:06:39.380That's not a term historians use about somebody.
00:07:09.960They have indigenous books, books on indigenous art.
00:07:14.460They're not indigenous books, but they're about indigenous art on the bookshelves.
00:07:17.600And 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.
00:07:22.240But 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.
00:07:39.060And 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.
00:07:50.200They put up an Indian cradle board on the wall.
00:07:52.620A cradle board is for carrying an Indian child, an infant.
00:07:56.840Indian women carry them on their back in a cradle board.
00:07:58.920And it's obviously meant to draw, you know, make you think more of indigenous people than of Sir John A. and his pain.
00:08:06.940And 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.
00:08:17.380Like, it's really so political, so non-historical, and it really shows the bias behind the whole remake.
00:08:26.180One of the things that struck me when I was in the house was the lack of detail about McDonald's' many accomplishments.
00:08:34.520You would think that that would be, you know, front and center of the house, but there really wasn't much of that.
00:08:39.580And, 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
00:08:48.400and were playing videos, as you mentioned in the article, about, you know, indigenous history and things that had nothing to do with them.
00:08:54.640So there really isn't, it really isn't trying to recreate the house that McDonald lived in.
00:08:59.760As you point out, and I think, you know, you can probably explain this in more detail, this is about pushing the ideological message
00:09:06.540that John A. McDonald is someone that we should be ashamed of in this country and not at all someone that deserves recognition.
00:09:13.300It's almost as if Bellevue House itself, the structure, you know, is sort of a problem for the historical rewriters at Parks Canada.
00:09:23.960And so they decided to fill it with all of this anti-McDonald and what I believe to be anti-Canadian messaging.
00:09:34.760There is such a remarkable lack of historical fact and so much opinion, and it's almost all negative.
00:09:40.980I 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.
00:09:47.120I mean, for example, the fact that most indigenous kids went to day schools.
00:10:13.540They're letting them drop out after one year because if they weren't interested, they didn't think it was worth keeping them there.
00:10:18.380Now, the reality of the residential schools is they became very much foster homes because alcoholism, et cetera, on Native reserves is so bad.
00:10:25.940There 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.
00:10:38.920And no one discusses that, but the reality is these kids were not, there was no genocide going on, no cultural genocide.
00:10:48.060I mean, here's an interesting factoid.
00:10:49.960In 1915, the Americans sent a commissioner up to study the Canadian Indian school system.
00:10:54.820And 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.
00:11:05.160We weren't thinking we'd had schools for 200 years.
00:11:07.740A few of them, they're all privately run by charities.
00:11:10.820But they were mostly teaching academic type material, reading, writing, arithmetic.
00:11:15.640The Americans were more into trades, and we thought that would be a great idea.
00:11:18.580And 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.
00:11:25.660But 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.
00:11:41.140I mean, it's shocking if you hear that today and hear what people say about the schools.
00:11:45.500The Americans thought we were doing a great job because the Indians were preserving their culture.
00:11:49.700And in some of our schools, of course, they converted the Christmas carols into the indigenous language.
00:11:55.400The kids were allowed to use indigenous language in certain parts of the school.
00:11:58.500But they were there primarily, remember, and they're only there for a few years, as I just explained.
00:12:03.400They're there primarily to learn basic reading, writing, arithmetic, and one of the official languages, English or French.
00:12:10.760So they have some hope of a job of succeeding in the modern society.
00:12:16.420And the movement to build residential schools happened around the same time as the movement for public schools.
00:12:21.540There weren't public schools before 1870.
00:12:28.600Then 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.
00:12:37.140That was around 1872 in Ontario, became compulsory.
00:12:40.100Most kids didn't, still lots of kids didn't go to school.
00:12:53.000People thought they needed the same skill set if they were to have any hope of surviving.
00:12:57.760And not just prospering, but just surviving because there's all kinds of skellywags running around wanting to exploit indigenous people's innocence.
00:13:04.880You know, sell them liquor, sell them stuff that mispriced values and things like that.
00:13:11.760So everybody felt indigenous kids like every other kid should have some basic skills.
00:13:16.280You know, as you point out and several other historians point out that, you know, this was not a program of genocide.
00:13:24.540The residential school system was not a program of genocide.
00:13:27.140However, the entire House of Commons unanimously passed a motion saying that the residential school system was genocide.
00:13:34.980And the federal government said that the missing and murdered indigenous women program is a genocide back in 2016.
00:13:43.000I don't believe history should be political, but clearly there are many that do.
00:13:48.180What 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?
00:14:03.260And 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.
00:14:12.540But 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.
00:14:24.420I 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.
00:14:32.060But without those facts, you're at a loss.
00:14:35.040I think many people intuitively know at least, I guess I may be giving kids too much credit.
00:15:05.820Every 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.
00:15:19.180So they got the stats on how many kids were in school, what percentage were attending for grade one, grade two, grade three.
00:15:25.820This information was widely disseminated.
00:15:57.460But one of the tasks of the Indian agent, every area of the country had an Indian agent.
00:16:01.660One 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.
00:16:11.480And the government had a simple financial interest in that.
00:16:26.440And yet some of the most radical historians, if we can even call them that, I mean, they call themselves historians.
00:16:34.520But some of these people that claim to be historians but are really just, you know, really just trying to erase history,
00:16:40.880they claim that figures like MacDonald and Egerton Ryerson were killers and set up and were architects of a system of genocide.
00:16:48.980You've written in the National Post, Johnny MacDonald saved more indigenous lives than any other Canadian prime minister.
00:16:55.020And while I don't disagree with the subject of the headline and the article itself, you know, it is quite a provocative headline.
00:17:02.180I'd like for you to explain that point because I think, you know, we're having this conversation about MacDonald.
00:17:07.440Let'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.
00:17:13.140So, yeah, how do you come to that conclusion that he saved more indigenous lives than any other Canadian prime minister?
00:17:19.500Well, let's start with a simple program that he ran from before Canada existed.
00:17:24.700We had Upper and Lower Canada and then the United Province of Canada.
00:17:28.260And he was premier of the United Province of Canada about 1865, 1866.
00:17:35.500And he began running, and the British had done some of this before him,
00:17:38.360they began running a smallpox vaccination program to vaccinate every indigenous Canadian.
00:17:43.140Smallpox was a terrible disease at that time, a terrible scourge.
00:17:47.420Fortunately, a very insightful British physician had figured out that if you infected people with cowpox,
00:17:55.260a milder form of the disease, they would not get smallpox.
00:17:59.180And so that was the first vaccination ever discovered.
00:18:02.360And so MacDonald's government, both prior to confederation and then following confederation,
00:18:07.360ran a program to vaccinate every indigenous Canadian.
00:18:10.940And some years, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 would die of smallpox in the pre-confederation days.
00:18:17.460After the vaccination program had been running for a number of years, there was an interesting contrast.
00:18:23.040The smallpox epidemic broke out in Montreal.
00:18:25.920Montrealers, for religious reasons, were averse to getting vaccinated.
00:18:29.200And so Montreal was more exposed to the risk of smallpox.
00:18:33.9605,000 people died in Montreal, just across the river.
00:18:37.660It was only like a 30-minute paddle across the river to the big reserve at Kahnawakee.
00:18:42.840There were no deaths because all of the Indians had been vaccinated against it.
00:18:46.940So just as an example, that program saved many, many thousands of lives, tens of thousands easily.
00:18:51.600The second program of MacDonald's government, and he gets criticized for it, and we'll touch on why he's criticized for it,
00:18:57.880was the collapse of the buffalo population.
00:19:00.360So the buffalo were herds of millions that roamed across the American plains and up into the part of Canada on the plains.
00:19:07.820And there were a number of tribal groups that had depended on those buffalo for their food for thousands of years probably.
00:19:15.400And the herds came around once or twice a year, and they'd harvest the herd and get food.
00:19:22.180Well, the intrusion of settlers, there was some climate change going on.
00:19:28.460There's a lot of reasons scientists haven't concluded exactly why the herds collapsed.
00:19:31.880They were being overhunted, but they were huge.
00:19:34.080The overhunting probably wasn't the main problem.
00:19:36.520Climate change might have been for competition with cattle who are now roaming the same plains, huge herds of cattle.
00:19:41.740The buffalo population collapsed, and it had been expected for about 10 years, but it suddenly happened about 1879.
00:19:48.680MacDonald had to immediately launch easily the biggest relief program in Canadian history.
00:20:04.460Had to ship them down through the states, partly on railways, partly on boats, partly by wagon train to get the food to western Canada.
00:20:11.980At 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.
00:20:22.940And after a year or two, things started to settle down a bit more.
00:20:27.320People started to adopt other ways of living.
00:20:31.280But 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.
00:20:46.800And 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.
00:20:57.240And estimates are that about 60,000 Indians were killed and about 40,000 settlers and American soldiers were killed in those Indian wars.
00:21:05.360Canada wanted to avoid that, and Britain wanted to avoid that, and MacDonald's policy was to enact treaties with all the western tribes.
00:21:14.780Remember, all of western Canada was picked up when we bought Rupert's Land.
00:21:18.280That had been a British problem previously.
00:21:19.780So his program was to get treaties in place before he allowed any settlement of western Canada.
00:21:27.660He did that, and there were no Indian wars in Canada.
00:21:31.480And we had a good track record before that because the British policy generally was to avoid Indian wars as well.
00:21:37.000So throughout Canada's history, there were essentially no Indian wars.
00:21:39.740So we didn't have 100,000 deaths on the Indian side.
00:21:43.700We didn't have 60,000 deaths on the settler side.
00:21:45.860So 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.
00:22:00.900And not one of those facts, I believe, made it to Bellevue House.
00:22:04.700There 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.
00:22:14.740And, 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.
00:22:22.940Mr. Piazetsky, we thank you so much for joining us on the show.
00:22:26.120If 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,
00:22:35.300Parks 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.
00:22:42.260So, once again, Mr. Piazetsky, thank you so much for joining us.