CANADA HAS NEW BARBARIANS TOO.

I never fully understood Mark Steyn's status as a proud Canadian citizen but nevertheless one whose plan in life involves being an legal immigrant in the US of A, but even though he lives in New Hampshire and apparently loves it, I suppose his heart must bleed, for leftist loons have removed the statue of Alexander Macdonald from its place at the entrance of Victoria City Hall.



Who was Sir John Alexander Macdonald (11 January 1815 – 6 June 1891)? He was Canada's first Prime Minister, serving two terms (1867–1873 and 1878–1891). Born in Scotland, this immigrant boy whose parents came to Kingston (then in the Province of Upper Canada) trained as a lawyer and became politically active early on so that in 1844 he was elected to the legislature of the then Province of Canada.

He and his main political rival, George Brown, united their parties in a Grand Coalition to expedite the forming of a federation. In the subsequent political machinations he emerged as the strongest and ablest leader so that after the British North America Act and the birth of Canada as a nation on July 1st, 1867, he became the new state's first PM.

Though his career was not entirely free of scandals and controversies, any historian worth his salt will agree that Macdonald proved an excellent steward for the newest Dominion, setting it on the path to a successful industrialized nation - which by necessity required a decent railroad network, in a country of that size and with Mother Nature imposing sizeable challenges, no mean feat.

Indeed, historical rankings have resulted in Sir Macdonal's being rated as one of the best Prime Ministers in Canada's history.

And now leftist lunatics have removed a statue of Macdonald from outside Victoria City Hall, "as part of the city's program for reconciliation with local First Nations", as mayor Lisa Helps helpfully explains:







Steyn:

"... I'm with Blatch - the great Christie Blatchford, my esteemed colleague from the glory days of The National Post. She's had enough of it, and so have I - whether it's the toppling of Field Marshal Smuts in Cambridge, President McKinley in California, Sir John A Macdonald in Victoria. The urge to erase the past is totalitarian. Yet what Pol Pot did, by re-making the world and proclaiming Year Zero, is now the default setting of every social-justice nitwit. Here's what Christie says:


I don't know about anyone else, but I have a bad case of revisionist-history/apology fatigue. I am pretty much done.

The Langevin Block in Ottawa is gone, now cursed with the gormless title of The Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council. The Langevin Bridge in Calgary is gone, now the Reconciliation Bridge. Both were changed because the Langevin in question, Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation, was also a supporter of the residential school system.

At the time of the decision to rename the bridge, one of the Calgary city councillors in favour of it promised that the plaque that would be placed on the bridge some day (it still doesn't appear to be there) "won't be vilifying" Langevin.

Well, when the City of Victoria packed up the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald last weekend and replaced it with a plaque, said plaque explained that the removal was done to "show progress on the path of reconciliation" while "the City, the Nations and the wider community grapple with Macdonald's complex history as both the first Prime Minister of Canada and a leader of violence against Indigenous Peoples."

That's close enough to vilification for me.


Agreed, agreed, agreed. I'm sick of replacing something - "the Langevin Block", "the Langevin Bridge" - with nothing - "the Office of the Prime Minister and the Privy Council", "the Reconciliation Bridge". The latter is just fatuous pap, and the former is not a name but merely a description of what's taking place inside the building. But that's all we can do, because we can't even take the risk of re-naming the joint. Because today's hero-of-the-day - the first transgender nominee for Governor of Vermont, say - will inevitably be revealed in thirty years' time to have been unsound on intersexual Muslima cloning or whatever. Because getting "woke" is one thing, but staying "woke" and "woke"-to-the-minute is all but impossible:

'Queer Eye' Star Jonathan Van Ness Under Fire After Saying 'Not All Republicans Are Racist'

The "leaders of violence" are those engaged in a systematic assault on not just national history but our entire civilizational inheritance. And the wimp conservatives who string along with this are merely licensing the next provocation. In Canada, much of this drivel derives from fainthearted ninnies twenty years ago who meekly accepted charges of "cultural genocide" - which is exactly like genocide, except for the peripheral detail of not requiring any actual corpses. Here's me two decades ago:


Only a generation or two back, governments thought they were doing native children a favour by teaching them the English language and the principles of common law and the great sweep of imperial history, that by doing so they were bringing young Indians and Inuit 'within the circle of civilised conditions'. It's only 40 years ago, but that's one memory the government of Canada will never recover. No civilised society legislates retrospective- ly: if you pass a seat-belt law in 1990, you don't prosecute people who were driving without them in 1980. Likewise, we should not sue the past for non-compliance with the orthodoxies of the present.


But we did. So surrendering on "residential schools" led to the re-classification of Canada's first prime minister as "a leader of violence" by the City of Victoria. And, if Sir John is a leader of violence, how can the very city be named for the Queen who knighted him and sent a wreath to his funeral? Shouldn't Victoria be renamed Reconciliationville? Or, per the Langevin Block, "the City of the Office of the Mayor and the Municipal Council"?

And what about Casimir Gzowski, who laid Her Majesty's wreath upon the "leader of violence"'s coffin? Shouldn't his busts and memorials be removed, too? And Sir Casimir Gzowski Park in Toronto be renamed Transgender Bathroom Park?

And what about Sir Casimir's great-great-grandson, beloved Canadian radio host Peter Gzowski? Shouldn't he be removed from the CBC archives? Or at any rate shouldn't Gzowski College at Trent University and the Gzowski branch of Georgina public libraries be renamed just in case somebody is triggered by the thought that they might be named not after Peter but after the great-great-grandpa who had the effrontery to lay the queen of violence's wreath of violence on the leader of violence's grave or violence?

This is not an assault on historical figures; this is an assault on history itself - on the very idea that ancient societies have a past, or roots, or historical continuity, or anything other than the fashions of the moment.

I'm with Blatch: Enough. Even if you accept every slur hurled at McKinley, Macdonald, Smuts and whoever's next, the cure is worse than the disease. To demolish the past means to live in a dictatorship of the present tense. To hell with that."

And here is Ezra Levant's take:





I tried to check out Lisa Helps' bio but it seems the mayor is 'intensely noncommunicative' about her private life. But all alarm lights indicating climate loonism, self hatred, feminazism, LGBTQWERTY aficionadoism or whatchamacallit, terminal do gooderism etc etc etc are bright red and their buzzers are doing overtime.

I hope this c*nt gets the boot at the next elections and a political figure of far greater stature and importance gets his rightful place back. One keeps wondering how this creature could ever become mayor in the first place. But then one can say the same about the idiot running the entire country. These are sad times.


MFBB.