EDITORIAL: Boxing Macdonald vandalizes history
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An Orwellian level of two-tier law enforcement has erupted in this country.
As Postmedia columnist Joe Warmington reported recently, a Toronto man, Daniel Tate, was recently arrested and charged with mischief under $5,000. His crime? He spray painted the words “Free John” on a crude wooden enclosure built to hide a statue of Canada’s founding Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, in Toronto.
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What makes this more shocking is that around the country, vandals at will have pulled down statues worth millions of dollars. Oddly, no one ever seems to get arrested.
In Winnipeg, a statue of Queen Victoria was destroyed. In Toronto, an elegant statue of Egerton Ryerson, whose “crime” was that he had a vision of free public education for all children, was decapitated. And no one has been called to account.
Demonstrators take to our streets almost every day, it seems, carrying hateful messages about Israel and Jews. They shut down major intersections by praying in public. Shots have been fired at Jewish schools and protesters routinely intimidate worshippers at synagogues. Oddly, there have been few arrests.
Yet, a person who dares to exercise his freedom of speech — the powers that be made a mistake when they crated the statue of a man without whom Canada wouldn’t be a nation — is arrested and charged.
As Warmington asks, “Do you throw the book at the guy? Or do you give him the Order of Canada?”
When you consider Macdonald’s remarkable achievements in forging this nation from sea to sea by building a railroad and staving off assaults from our southern neighbours, it’s astonishing how his legacy has been re-written by woke activists. Macdonald instituted a smallpox vaccine program that saved hundreds of aboriginal lives. He was not, as some would claim, an architect of the residential school system. His government said attendance at such schools was voluntary and they were only placed in First Nations communities that requested one. Most did.
But the iron fist of left-wing cancel culture has declared that Macdonald must be erased from our schools and street names and monuments.
The real vandals here are the people who’ve boxed up his statue in an ugly hoarding without respect to the history or culture of this country.
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