Four years after a statue of Canada’s first prime minister was boarded up to protect it from vandals, a committee of MPPs gathering input on its future has been schooled by a First Nations equity consultant.

Toronto Star: The warning was frank.   

Four years after a Queen’s Park statue of founding prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald was boarded up for protection from vandals, a committee of MPPs slowly gathering input on its future has been scolded and schooled by a First Nations equity consultant. 

It was a delicate moment, symbolic of the challenges of reconciliation, as debate simmers over what’s next for the image of a historic figure whose legacy is tarnished by his role in creating residential schools, where thousands of Indigenous children died in tragic and brutal circumstances. 

“Many protocols have been broken so far about everything that this meeting is about,” Terri-Lynn Brennan, a Mohawk who specializes in cultural planning and engagement, said bluntly as a recent hearing got underway in Kingston.

MPPs had hoped to get Brennan’s ideas on what she would like to see done about the statue, but the hearing quickly headed in a different direction.

She urged a collaborative approach respectful of Indigenous and ceremonial traditions, that would not just seek opinions but offer genuine involvement as partners in the decision-making process. 

“It’s not meant to be a formal grilling when we have conversations,” she added, noting the hearing format felt like “colonial-expectational oppression.”

Brennan explained that’s why an elder known as Grandmother Blue Skies decided the night before not to appear. 

“How you do things is just as important as the questions you ask when you work with Indigenous Peoples not just through your process, but through their process,” she told MPPs. 

“These things are important to know, but as someone who’s not Indigenous, you won’t know them.” 

Ontario’s lone Indigenous MPP, New Democrat Sol Mamakwa (Kiiwetinoong), is not assigned to the standing committee on procedure and house affairs. He has said the statue should remain under wraps because “we are trying to find the remains of our children,” not to mention the continuing indignities such as boil-water advisories in Indigenous communities. 

The dramatic hearing, detailed in a 61-page transcript just released by the legislature’s Hansard service, took place July 25 as the committee briefly set up shop in Kingston. 

MPPs from Premier Doug Ford’s governing Progressive Conservatives, the NDP and Liberals were there to hear how Parks Canada revamped Macdonald’s former home in the city — the Bellevue House National Historic Site — to include Indigenous viewpoints and other concerns.

They also toured the museum, whose website invites visitors to learn more about the “complex legacy” of Macdonald. 

“We’re considering ways in which Indigenous representation and viewpoints can be reflected at the statue,” committee chair Jennifer French, the New Democrat MPP for Oshawa and a former school teacher, told the hearing. 

“We are really glad to hear from the folks who have undertaken different but connected work,” she added in reference to Parks Canada and city of Kingston officials and their extensive consultations over Bellevue House.

Conservative MPP Bob Bailey (Sarnia) suggested Macdonald’s legacy should be viewed in its entirety, including his push for a national railway to the west.

“Has anyone ever addressed the issue of what if that railroad hadn’t been built?” he said. ”(To) my level of knowledge, the Americans had their eyes north into western Canada.”

The statue of Macdonald, which was installed at Queen’s Park in 1894, was hidden behind hoarding in 2020 and more recently roofed to foil an invasion of rodents. French acknowledged progress on deciding what to do with it has been minimal, and described the task as “overwhelming.”

“We are in some ways at the beginning of this process,” she said. “I know that members of the committee and myself are getting a lot of calls from media and interested parties of, ‘Why is it taking so long?’”

The committee is not quite sure how its work fits into an eventual decision likely to be made by the legislature’s board of internal economy, an internal governing body, which has one Progressive Conservative and one NDP member with Speaker Ted Arnott as its non-voting chair.

Because the Liberals and Greens do not have enough MPPs for official party status in the legislature, which would give them seats on the board, it can easily become deadlocked.

“I don’t know that it’s for the committee to make a decision or even, perhaps, a recommendation, but we’re gathering information,” French said. 

Macdonald’s government initiated residential schools in 1883, with the last one closing in 1996. During those years, about 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their homes and forced to attend the schools, and thousands never made it back to their parents. In its landmark 2015 report, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission counted 3,201 deaths in the schools, and a search for graves continues at the sites of former schools across the country. 

The statue, with its commanding presence atop University Avenue, sits at the south end of the legislature’s front lawn, where pairs of tiny shoes have been left in memory of the children who died at residential schools.

Its wooden hoarding is painted sandstone, the same colour as the legislature, in an imperfect attempt to camouflage what is passed by thousands of motorists and pedestrians daily.   

Suggestions have included leaving the statue in place with a counter-memorial and explanatory or interactive and educational materials, putting it in a museum, into storage or moving the statue elsewhere in the legislative precinct, where it would be better protected. 

Brennan’s remarks to the MPPs, including some made in Mohawk, appeared to catch committee members off guard. 

“Thank you for the presentation. It’s really an eye-opener for me … really special,” PC MPP Stéphane Sarrazin told her. 

“I would like to think that what happened today was ignorance … I just want to offer apologies,” said New Democrat MPP Jamie West (Sudbury). “It certainly wasn’t intentional and we’re taking this as an opportunity to learn.”

Brennan responded that she knew it wasn’t intentional.

“My goal is to make others get used to feeling uncomfortable, and then work with that towards your own education and learning,” she said.

Officials from Parks Canada and the city of Kingston told MPPs they took a collaborative approach, involving community and Indigenous members, in deciding how to update the displays and tour offerings at Bellevue House since the process began in 2016.

“What you’re engaging in is a dialogue about identity, about people’s sense of their history and their relationship to this land,” said Jennifer Campbell, commissioner of community services for Kingston — a city that has put its own Macdonald statue in storage because of continuing controversy over it. 

“You cannot simply begin a conversation regarding, for many, one of the most traumatic figures in Canadian history without that being grounded in a true relationship,” she added.

“It is not just a discussion about how we put a plaque adjacent to a statue and call it representative of an entire nation’s perspectives on a prime minister and a government and all the people that came before and after him.”

Rob Ferguson is a Toronto-based reporter covering Ontario politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robferguson1.