The Beheading of Sir John A. Macdonald
11th July 2025
The Vandal Veto finds a home in ‘ C eh? N eh? D eh?’.
Macdonald was a titan, and those who wish to delegitimize Canada must destroy him to do it. Macdonald was, as Patrice Dutil noted in his essential rebuttal to this iconoclasm, remarkably progressive for his period, but activists have scavenged the historical record to cherry-pick quotes that sound racist to modern ears. References to Indigenous peoples as savages, for example, are touted as the measure of the man rather than a summation of the era.
The iconoclasts, however, do not explain why American Indians frequently fled across the border to the safety of Macdonald’s Canada to escape the U.S. Army, and do not mention that the government sent them supplies to ensure their survival on the winter prairies. When rations ran out—Dutil emphasizes Macdonald’s genuine anguish over this—the history is slanderously rewritten as a deliberate attempt to starve Indigenous people to prop up the “genocide” narrative. That, Dutil notes, is simply “not the case.”
Indeed, most Canadians are unaware of the fact that Macdonald made statements in defense of Indigenous rights against genuinely racist opposition and his own political interests, and even advocated for their political enfranchisement.