Chris Selley: Is Sir John A. Macdonald being set up for a fall?
All eyes will be on Toronto later this summer — or they should be, because it could be darkly hilarious. That's when Queen's Park undertakes a bold, interdisciplinary experiment in Canadian history, policing and law: The province is going to let Sir John A. Macdonald's statue out of the plywood prison it has inhabited for five years. The monument had been restored after previous vandalism, only to find itself in a box to prevent future vandalism.
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It is possible, as National Post's Tristin Hopper argued this week, that we may be seeing the end of 'Canada's nationwide purge of historic figures and names' — at least by governments themselves. That'd be nice. But has anyone asked the yobbos who vandalize and tear down statues if they're done with the purge?
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'How are you going to stop the same thing from happening all over again?' was among the questions reporters asked of the people in charge. The answer wasn't entirely convincing.
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'Legislative security will be keeping a close eye on it,' The Canadian Press assured us, based on speaker of the legislature Donna Skelly's remarks. Legislative security and the Ontario Provincial Police, who patrol the legislature grounds (with assistance from the Toronto Police Service), had better be keeping a close eye on it, because Skelly even invited the Macdonald-haters to come to the as-yet-unscheduled unveiling.
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'People have the right to protest here. As long as no one is hurt, and you don't break the rules or the law, you're welcome,' said Skelly (a Progressive Conservative MPP), before taking it even further: 'This is where you should be protesting.'
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Of course, it's unlikely anyone would try to splatter, behead or topple Macdonald during an official event. So one hopes the Queen's Park security aces at least have a camera or two trained on the statue, if not to actually prevent any vandalism then at least to apprehend and charge the offenders.
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But then, this is a city where a certain traffic speed-enforcement camera has been taken down five times by vandals in six months — and in one case, subsequently thrown in a pond — and apparently no one has thought to install a camera that might record people doing it. We are not imaginative people.
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Montreal police never found the gang that beheaded Macdonald's statue in Place du Canada in 2020; instead, the city just decided not to reinstall it, since it was constantly getting vandalized. Problem solved! Why waste police time over some old dead bronze guy?
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In 2021, something calling itself an Indigenous Unity Rally hauled down the statue of Macdonald in Gore Park in Hamilton, Ont. City police investigated in earnest, by the sounds of it, and laid charges against a 56-year-old suspect. Then, prosecutors stayed the charges.
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