Juno News - Why Toronto is wrong about Henry Dundas

00:00:00.000 I wanted to pivot from British Columbia to Toronto here.

00:00:13.240 So if you've been following this saga,

00:00:15.580 Young Dundas Square is the like weird Canadian imitation of Times Square.

00:00:21.360 It's a lot smaller.

00:00:22.160 It's a lot less happening,

00:00:22.980 but now you can't call it Young Dundas Square.

00:00:25.820 The city is renaming it to quote unquote Sankofa Square.

00:00:30.000 And as True North talked about in the past,

00:00:32.560 the word Sankofa has its own little sordid history

00:00:35.880 that we'll talk about in just a couple of moments.

00:00:38.620 This week, the executive committee of Toronto City Council got together

00:00:42.560 and they are basically trying to figure out how much money this is going to cost.

00:00:47.560 And they think they need more money to do it,

00:00:49.280 to change the signs and update all of this stuff.

00:00:51.900 But it's all based on a premise that is just fundamentally wrong.

00:00:57.500 The premise that Henry Dundas is a figure in history worthy of cancellation.

00:01:03.000 And anyone familiar with his history, with Canada's history, with the UK's history,

00:01:07.380 would know that this is absolutely not the case.

00:01:10.060 But clearly there are people that don't understand that.

00:01:12.220 So we thought we'd give a bit of a history lesson here on the show.

00:01:15.540 It's our delight to welcome back Lynn McDonald,

00:01:18.060 who is a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph,

00:01:20.800 and also a former member of Parliament and someone who is not prepared to accept

00:01:25.760 the unfair maligning of Henry Dundas and his legacy here.

00:01:29.380 Lynn, good to talk to you again.

00:01:30.520 Thanks so much for coming on today.

00:01:32.720 Glad to be with you for the show.

00:01:35.180 So obviously there's, from a municipal taxpayer perspective,

00:01:38.860 lots that can be discussed about this,

00:01:40.500 just in terms of how much the City of Toronto is trying to spend on this.

00:01:44.400 But when it comes down to it, the issue that I have,

00:01:47.140 and the one that you've raised in a rather lovely piece in the National Post this week,

00:01:51.160 is that we're doing this all based on this faulty premise,

00:01:54.440 this idea that Dundas is this figure from which we should be running

00:01:58.860 as far as historic legacy is concerned.

00:02:01.120 And let me just begin by asking you right there,

00:02:03.580 for people that haven't familiarized themselves with this issue as much,

00:02:06.980 why is Dundas being so unfairly, in your view, maligned?

00:02:11.120 It's hard to understand why it's happening,

00:02:14.120 because it's so obviously wrong to blame him.

00:02:17.360 Now, what happened is it came up in Edinburgh,

00:02:20.360 because Henry Dundas was from Edinburgh,

00:02:22.640 and there's a Melville statue and so on,

00:02:24.420 and the Edinburgh City Council went after him,

00:02:26.580 and plenty of Scottish historians said how wrong they were.

00:02:30.160 So this was contested in Edinburgh before it happened here.

00:02:34.180 And then here, and how Olivia Chow,

00:02:36.900 who herself was a member of Parliament,

00:02:38.880 how she could get it wrong is just nuts.

00:02:41.540 The supposed delaying of the abolition of slavery that Dundas was accused of

00:02:50.540 was never a law that he got delayed.

00:02:54.400 It was only a motion, which is an opinion.

00:02:57.820 And the abolition of slavery at the time that Wilberforce had,

00:03:02.320 he had introduced it in 1791.

00:03:04.320 In 1792, Dundas was there,

00:03:06.860 and he moved an amendment to make it gradual.

00:03:09.880 Well, it hadn't passed.

00:03:11.000 It didn't come close to passing

00:03:12.500 when it was full abolition immediate the year before.

00:03:17.020 It didn't have a hope of getting through the House of Lords.

00:03:19.420 It wasn't a bill.

00:03:20.700 It wouldn't become a law.

00:03:21.680 It was only an opinion.

00:03:22.960 So he didn't delay anything.

00:03:24.520 And he was a committed abolitionist.

00:03:26.920 Even before that, he had gotten slavery abolished in Scotland

00:03:31.240 by taking a law case on appeal.

00:03:34.160 It went to the law lords,

00:03:35.760 and the law lords decided there could be no slavery in Scotland,

00:03:39.220 thanks to his arguments.

00:03:40.360 So he already had a very strong reputation for being pro-abolition.

00:03:47.200 Yeah, and it's so easy to find, too.

00:03:50.380 We're not talking about a legacy that has been all that obscured.

00:03:54.840 And Simcoe is another example of someone who was an abolitionist,

00:04:00.160 and he's criticized in some parts because he took an incremental view,

00:04:04.620 which he did because he was so committed to abolition.

00:04:07.540 He wanted it to work.

00:04:08.520 And in Dundas' case, that even doesn't really apply here

00:04:12.320 because he did move ahead, as you note, in Scotland.

00:04:14.840 And I'm left with the hypothesis here

00:04:17.980 that he is guilty of just being alive in history

00:04:21.240 and that no one is really able to emerge from that period.

00:04:26.320 Well, Dundas understood that it would take time

00:04:30.480 and that there'd have to be negotiations,

00:04:32.280 and you'd have to buy off the slave owners in the West Indies, 0.86

00:04:36.820 the plantation owners.

00:04:38.020 He understood that.

00:04:39.000 He was more realistic.

00:04:39.820 But even he did not have any idea how long it would take.

00:04:44.860 And people are disgusted when eventually slavery was abolished

00:04:47.780 and the legislation finally passed in 1833 to apply in 1834.

00:04:53.040 And this supposed delay of Dundas, this is 1792.

00:04:58.660 So it's years since that it's coming forward again.

00:05:02.820 And it's just, Dundas just didn't know how long it would take.

00:05:09.400 And even when the bill went through in 1834,

00:05:12.120 it didn't get applied properly because slave owners, 0.99

00:05:17.280 they could keep buying slaves

00:05:18.860 because you could make money in the slave trade, and people did.

00:05:22.740 So you have a law that finally said,

00:05:25.280 that one was passed in 1807,

00:05:26.940 that the slave trade was abolished by the British Parliament.

00:05:30.000 Well, it isn't abolished if slave traders are out there 0.87

00:05:33.620 and no one can catch them.

00:05:35.100 The Atlantic Ocean is a very large ocean.

00:05:38.700 So let me ask you about the attitude behind this,

00:05:43.160 because it should be noted,

00:05:44.500 you were, when you served in Parliament, a new Democrat.

00:05:47.080 You've been committed your entire career

00:05:48.740 to the principles of social justice.

00:05:50.700 So you're not coming at this from a place

00:05:52.440 that some people might inherently accuse critics

00:05:55.140 of this historic revisionism from,

00:05:57.160 and that you're not sensitive to racial concerns.

00:06:00.160 You're not sensitive to social justice.

00:06:01.880 But many of the people who are committed to this idea

00:06:04.900 of purging Dundas's name believe they are doing so

00:06:08.760 because they're trying to be anti-racist.

00:06:11.520 And what is it they're getting wrong?

00:06:13.960 Well, I agree with you.

00:06:15.320 They think they're doing the right thing.

00:06:17.300 And of course, there is racism, no doubt about it.

00:06:21.180 Black people, indigenous people are discriminated against,

00:06:24.640 no doubt about that.

00:06:26.360 But what people like Dundas and Wilberforce

00:06:30.740 were trying to do was right,

00:06:32.640 but was going to take a very long time.

00:06:35.060 And the idea of using the Sankofa Square,

00:06:38.520 oh, it's a Ghanaian term, it's African.

00:06:40.940 And so somehow that makes it more virtuous.

00:06:43.360 But if you look at Ghana, 0.65

00:06:45.540 the new name for the old Gold Coast,

00:06:47.900 it was a slave society. 0.99

00:06:50.000 Well, slaves were all over Africa

00:06:51.720 and in most of the world, for that matter.

00:06:54.300 They were there.

00:06:55.580 But Ghana had a particularly horrible version of slavery 1.00

00:07:00.340 in which the slaves of a chief who died

00:07:03.900 would be beheaded

00:07:05.540 so that they could serve him in the afterlife.

00:07:08.480 So Ghana is even worse. 1.00

00:07:09.860 So here we have, we in Ontario,

00:07:12.560 our ancestors got, thanks to Simcoe,

00:07:17.040 got a bill through in 1793, gradual,

00:07:20.580 but it started.

00:07:22.040 And here, the material I have turned up

00:07:26.000 shows how horrible the practice of slavery is in Ghana.

00:07:29.300 And that's in 1847,

00:07:31.420 after slavery had been abolished in the British Empire,

00:07:34.700 but it's still going strong in Ghana.

00:07:37.080 Yeah, and when you mentioned that history,

00:07:38.920 and we had reported on that a while ago,

00:07:40.880 the origins of the word Sankofa,

00:07:43.300 which they're trying to rename Young Dundas Square to,

00:07:45.840 and the meaning of it is learning from the past,

00:07:49.380 which is, you know, delightfully ironic

00:07:51.020 for people committed to a racing history,

00:07:52.820 but that's neither here nor there.

00:07:55.020 You know, what people often forget about slavery,

00:07:57.260 and this is by no means to both sides it

00:08:00.460 or talk about one group being better than another,

00:08:02.700 but it was fueled not just by white colonialists.

00:08:07.000 There were people in Africa that were selling

00:08:09.020 other people from Africa into the Atlantic slave trade.

00:08:12.620 And you are right to point out that in Ghana,

00:08:14.600 this particular pocket,

00:08:15.700 that was a particularly insidious practice,

00:08:18.600 slaves that were being shipped across the Atlantic

00:08:20.920 and slaves that were being used and traded within Africa.

00:08:23.860 Yes, indeed.

00:08:25.680 I mean, slavery was there.

00:08:26.840 The slave traders who came in to the ports 0.99

00:08:29.880 in Ghana and other places,

00:08:31.960 they didn't have to go out looking for slaves.

00:08:34.200 They were brought right to the port by slave traders.

00:08:37.580 And some of the people would already have been slaves,

00:08:40.180 so they weren't just enslaved at that point.

00:08:42.600 Some of them would have been,

00:08:43.700 but some of them were simply kidnapped,

00:08:45.900 and they were brought to the port and sold.

00:08:47.940 It was a commerce,

00:08:49.420 and Ghanaian leaders made money from the slave trade

00:08:52.600 at the expense of ordinary Ghanaians

00:08:58.280 or slave Ghanaians, 0.93

00:09:00.420 but people who were free,

00:09:02.200 who were then kidnapped and sold into slavery.

00:09:05.660 So to bring this back to the Toronto context,

00:09:08.960 I mean, when I started learning about the origins

00:09:11.520 of the word Sankofa and the tribe

00:09:13.940 that had minted that word,

00:09:15.940 I had some schadenfreude about it

00:09:18.460 because I was expecting that,

00:09:19.960 okay, all of these people

00:09:20.820 that were pushing the eraser of the name Dundas

00:09:23.900 would find that they now had to come up with another name.

00:09:26.360 But as we've seen,

00:09:27.100 they just disregard these concerns and move on.

00:09:30.260 I mean, ideally, we'd get to the point

00:09:31.980 where as a society,

00:09:32.920 we could take a step back

00:09:34.140 and have an honest discussion about history,

00:09:36.220 the good, the bad, and the ugly,

00:09:38.000 and talk about how we learn from it.

00:09:40.240 And I'm wondering, within the field of history,

00:09:43.000 you were a professor for quite some time

00:09:45.600 at the University of Guelph.

00:09:46.780 How are historians dealing with this?

00:09:48.680 Because any that I've spoken to

00:09:50.120 have really just been shaking their heads

00:09:52.520 because they feel they can't actually talk

00:09:54.480 about history anymore

00:09:55.500 in a way that is honoring

00:09:57.680 and respecting the discipline of it

00:09:59.840 and historiography.

00:10:01.580 Yep.

00:10:01.900 Well, historians are,

00:10:03.540 well, some of them are causing the problem,

00:10:06.240 but a lot of them just throw up their hands in despair.

00:10:09.160 It's a very, very sad situation.

00:10:11.780 And in the case of my own city councillor,

00:10:14.860 Chris Boyce,

00:10:15.700 offered to give him a briefing.

00:10:17.120 He didn't want a briefing, you see,

00:10:19.060 and then tried to get a meeting set up

00:10:23.560 at Innes College.

00:10:25.140 Well, Innes College was quite happy

00:10:26.560 to have a meeting about Tandeth,

00:10:28.060 but had to have the other side.

00:10:29.760 Well, the other side wouldn't appear.

00:10:31.600 They didn't want to debate with us.

00:10:33.620 I think perhaps they understand

00:10:35.340 that they've been putting out a lot of bullshit, 0.74

00:10:37.300 and it would come out in a scholarly exchange,

00:10:41.860 a panel at Innes College.

00:10:43.840 So shall we say that the people

00:10:47.220 who have been very forceful about it

00:10:49.160 aren't willing to meet on a panel,

00:10:51.240 don't want a briefing,

00:10:52.380 and aren't willing to debate the issue.

00:10:55.380 So when you look at the way this is going here,

00:10:59.080 obviously Jennifer Dundas,

00:11:01.000 who's a descendant of Dundas himself,

00:11:03.280 has been incredibly outspoken on this,

00:11:05.160 and you have other people who are,

00:11:07.440 but it's not even like you and Jennifer

00:11:10.500 are losing the argument.

00:11:12.140 As you know, no one even wants

00:11:13.360 to have the discussion.

00:11:14.800 The city council has had such little interest

00:11:17.640 in genuinely interrogating the facts here.

00:11:20.600 Have they?

00:11:21.020 Or have I missed some grand dialogue

00:11:23.840 that Olivia Chow presided over about this?

00:11:27.300 Well, it's just shameful.

00:11:30.240 The expense is that what's gotten

00:11:32.520 so many people riled up,

00:11:33.920 and that's a legitimate concern.

00:11:35.520 Also the process.

00:11:37.020 How many people were consulted about it?

00:11:39.080 And certainly we know that

00:11:40.420 the changing of the name of Dundas Street merchants

00:11:42.880 and all kinds of people would be inconvenienced.

00:11:45.760 So city council backed down on that.

00:11:47.960 But the young Dundas Square,

00:11:49.440 and the ironic thing is,

00:11:50.840 young really was a scoundrel.

00:11:52.620 He actually did some good things in his life too.

00:11:55.140 But later in life,

00:11:56.600 he actually made money out of the slave trade.

00:11:59.080 And so here we have Dundas gets attacked,

00:12:01.780 and young doesn't get attacked,

00:12:03.280 although Dundas was solidly pro-abolition,

00:12:07.740 and of course, young was not.

00:12:09.800 Now I'm not suggesting that we should rename

00:12:11.960 Young Street, very long street it is too,

00:12:14.600 because too much Ontario history has gone on it.

00:12:18.720 But young Dundas Square is a terrible place.

00:12:21.560 It's a lousy square.

00:12:23.040 I'd like to see the money spent,

00:12:24.720 not on renaming it, but improving it.

00:12:27.780 Yeah, and this is where we go back to the cost of it.

00:12:30.640 And in some ways,

00:12:31.660 government spending a few hundred thousand here,

00:12:33.680 a few hundred thousand there,

00:12:34.820 it seems like pocket change

00:12:36.360 with what they spend on everything else.

00:12:37.960 But you're right.

00:12:38.640 I don't think anyone who walks around downtown Toronto

00:12:41.000 would say that the most pressing concern

00:12:43.140 is the name on the sign.

00:12:44.400 It's the people on the streets.

00:12:45.640 It's the drug issues.

00:12:46.640 It's the derelict buildings that you see

00:12:49.180 and parts of that.

00:12:50.280 And all of that is lower on the priority list

00:12:53.280 than maligning this historic figure.

00:12:57.020 Yes.

00:12:57.600 Now, interestingly,

00:12:59.600 young Dundas Square happens to be just a block away.

00:13:02.980 That's east-west and a block north-south away

00:13:05.500 from the old St. James' Square.

00:13:07.680 The name no longer exists.

00:13:09.160 But that's where Edgerton Ryerson,

00:13:11.680 when he bought for the government,

00:13:13.180 six acres of swampy ground.

00:13:16.340 And that became the education department.

00:13:18.520 There hadn't been one before.

00:13:20.060 And the first normal school,

00:13:21.400 which is a teacher's college,

00:13:22.860 teacher training college.

00:13:25.000 And actually a museum,

00:13:26.960 art museum,

00:13:27.640 natural history museum,

00:13:28.800 which later became the Royal Ontario Museum.

00:13:31.500 And there was a lot of space

00:13:33.320 actually for experimental agriculture

00:13:36.040 to check out what crops were hardy enough.

00:13:39.040 And that's basically the origin

00:13:41.300 of the Ontario Agricultural College

00:13:43.280 for years, of course, now based at Guelph.

00:13:47.080 And so here we have,

00:13:48.640 I would like to see,

00:13:49.800 because Edgerton Ryerson is the other person,

00:13:51.740 roughly at the same time people began

00:13:53.260 to denounce Henry Dundas,

00:13:54.780 were also denouncing Edgerton Ryerson.

00:13:57.040 And in both cases,

00:13:58.140 they were dead wrong.

00:13:59.460 Not just a question of partly wrong,

00:14:01.740 partly right.

00:14:02.420 They were dead wrong on it.

00:14:03.780 Dundas was consistently pro-abolition.

00:14:06.340 And Ryerson was consistently pro-Indigenous.

00:14:09.000 Nothing to do with the residential schools.

00:14:10.980 So these are two subjects

00:14:13.000 in which Toronto has got them both wrong.

00:14:15.780 And ironically,

00:14:16.760 Young Dundas Square is only a block away

00:14:19.180 from where Ryerson did some of his best work.

00:14:22.460 I would like to see Young Dundas Square

00:14:24.500 renamed Ryerson Square.

00:14:27.040 But it will take a while before that can happen,

00:14:29.080 because people will have to realize

00:14:30.580 that they really botched up the Ryerson decision.

00:14:33.760 Yeah, and put a big giant plaque up there

00:14:36.360 explaining this whole thing to everyone.

00:14:38.340 And you're right,

00:14:39.480 because there are certain figures in history

00:14:41.040 where you say,

00:14:42.560 okay, this person may have done this great thing,

00:14:44.680 but they also did this terrible thing.

00:14:46.320 And you have to contextualize it.

00:14:48.440 And I understand that.

00:14:49.400 And I'm sympathetic to that.

00:14:50.660 But in these cases,

00:14:51.520 the people you mentioned

00:14:52.640 are not even guilty

00:14:53.500 of what they're accused of doing.

00:14:54.960 So it's not even like

00:14:55.860 they need to be contextualized.

00:14:58.000 And look,

00:14:58.400 anyone who's ever,

00:14:59.180 you know,

00:14:59.920 enjoyed a public education in Ontario

00:15:01.640 should be tremendously grateful

00:15:02.860 for what Ryerson did.

00:15:04.580 Indeed,

00:15:05.120 but people don't realize it.

00:15:06.280 We take it for,

00:15:06.920 I didn't realize it

00:15:07.960 until I just found it out

00:15:09.060 relatively recently.

00:15:10.280 We take it for granted

00:15:11.320 that there's a public school system

00:15:12.880 and that it's a good system.

00:15:14.640 I mean,

00:15:14.820 some people prefer

00:15:16.020 to send their children

00:15:16.980 to private schools

00:15:18.080 and can afford it.

00:15:19.000 But nobody's going to say

00:15:20.200 you'll have to go to a private school

00:15:21.900 because the public schools

00:15:23.040 aren't good enough.

00:15:23.560 Of course,

00:15:23.980 they're good enough.

00:15:25.060 And that just didn't happen.

00:15:27.680 In Ryerson's time,

00:15:28.580 very few children went to school at all.

00:15:30.360 They were all fee paying.

00:15:31.940 There was no teacher training.

00:15:33.800 And he got those things going.

00:15:35.880 When I say he got them going,

00:15:37.040 he was a civil servant.

00:15:38.600 He couldn't legislate them,

00:15:40.420 but he could make recommendations.

00:15:42.380 And he managed to persuade

00:15:43.800 enough people to support him.

00:15:46.000 Interestingly,

00:15:46.720 one of the people

00:15:47.320 who certainly was persuaded

00:15:49.020 and was very helpful

00:15:49.980 was John A. MacDonald.

00:15:51.800 At that time,

00:15:52.940 Mr. John A. MacDonald,

00:15:54.660 not Sir John A.

00:15:55.800 after Confederation.

00:15:57.180 So he had to persuade people

00:15:58.920 in the House of Assembly,

00:16:00.600 MPPs,

00:16:01.200 that is,

00:16:02.120 to support education.

00:16:03.740 And Ontario became a leader,

00:16:05.620 basically thanks to Ryerson's agitation.

00:16:09.780 But they went along.

00:16:11.240 It took legislators

00:16:12.280 to actually do the work

00:16:13.920 and get it done.

00:16:15.060 And it happened.

00:16:17.600 Well, it is a fascinating piece.

00:16:20.120 You touch on important parts

00:16:21.680 of the history of Ghana,

00:16:23.460 the history of Canada,

00:16:24.480 the history of Scotland,

00:16:25.400 and the insanity

00:16:26.720 of Toronto City Council.

00:16:28.100 So you've gone around the world

00:16:29.060 in a way that only you can.

00:16:30.500 Lynn MacDonald,

00:16:31.180 in your piece

00:16:31.840 in the National Post,

00:16:33.200 Toronto's costly push

00:16:34.360 to trade young Dundas

00:16:35.740 for a name more closely

00:16:37.240 associated with slavery.

00:16:38.940 Thank you so much, Lynn.

00:16:39.900 Good to speak to you again.

00:16:40.740 Appreciate it.

00:16:41.820 Thank you.

00:16:42.300 Thanks for listening

00:16:43.360 to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:16:45.060 Support the program

00:16:45.880 by donating to True North

00:16:47.120 at www.tnc.news.

00:16:50.540 www.tnc.news.com

Juno News - June 23, 2024

Why Toronto is wrong about Henry Dundas

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