Sir John Macdonald

Canadian history is crushingly dull.

Imagine anybody screaming, “Peace, order and good government!” while storming the barricades”€”or, for that matter, there being any barricades to storm.

Canada’s leaders are so boring, no one’s ever tried to shoot one. Our flag is a dead leaf.

Stubborn attempts to excite Canadians about their past simply reemphasize our comparative mediocrity. Look! One of the guys who invented Superman lived in Toronto until he was ten! Jackie Robinson played in Montreal for one whole season!

Then last week, Canadian history threatened to take a turn for the fascinating. We were informed that our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a “white supremacist.”

We finally had our very own racist Founding Father to bitch about like those lucky Americans get to do with Thomas Jefferson. For leftists, it’s like finding out we’re finally getting Target stores up here.

Oddly though, the Folsom Street Fair-style festival of white liberal self-flagellation has yet to begin, even though Tim Stanley’s Ottawa Citizen article, “John A. Macdonald wanted an ‘Aryan’ Canada,” couldn’t have been more provocative.

Stanley cited 1885 parliamentary debates on the Electoral Franchise Act, during which Macdonald declared that “if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, ‘the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed.’”

You see, while we’d wisely picked our own cotton, we did get the Chinese to lay the tracks for our national railroad. Inevitably, some of these “sojourners” wanted to become Canadian citizens after we drove the last spike.

Hence Macdonald’s warning that “if the Chinese (who had been in British Columbia as long as Europeans) were allowed to vote, ‘they might control the vote of that whole Province’ and their ‘Chinese representatives’ would foist ‘Asiatic principles,’ ‘immoralities,’ and ‘eccentricities’ on the House ‘which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.’”

Of course, these statements have been part of the public record since the day they were uttered, but the Hansard is neither mandatory nor recreational reading. Stanley says he brought them to the public’s attention now because the Conservative government (boo!) just renamed the Ottawa River Parkway after “Sir John A.”

Stanley coyly pretends to wonder if “we should be naming public monuments after white supremacists.”

As we all know, labels such as “white supremacist” and “racist” are career- and reputation-destroying epithets. The Southern Poverty Law Center has (ironically) grown rich tossing such toxic accusations around freely (like putting David Duke on the same list of “radical right activists” as a New Black Panther leader.)