The cancellation crowd comes for an 1840 Governor General

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The forces of “decolonization” claimed another historic victim last week in Oshawa, Ont. That’s where the city council decided to rename Bagot Street, which it believes – but isn’t even entirely certain – was named in honor of this street. Charles Bagotthe Governor General of the United Province of Canada from 1841 to 1843.

The city says Bagot must leave because of his ties to the creation of residential schools for indigenous people. The case mirrors that of Egerton Ryerson – defended from positions of honor over highly questionable claims about his alleged links to the schools. The Bagot case is about as weak. The evidence in Bagot’s case is that during his tenure in British North America, Bagot established a commission to investigate the “affairs of the Indians of Canada” and that his appointed commissioners, among other things, called for boarding school education.

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The fact that this report did not directly lead to any specific government funding of residential schools in Canada does not seem to be particularly important to the critics. Also, the seekers of historical purity do not seem particularly interested in the fact that many indigenous peoples themselves demanded education at this time. The factual details of the 1845 report and its historical context are, as usual, irrelevant.

Poor Charles Bagot.

Bagot was a career diplomat with a distinguished record. As ambassador to the United States, he put his name to a treaty that helped demilitarize the Great Lakes. He was elected to Canada in the aftermath of the uprisings in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838. The governor had to be someone who could show both backbone and sympathy – and respect for cultural duality (something Bagot had already shown in his role in separating Belgium from the Netherlands) .

Bagot inherited a bit of a shambles after the infamous Lord Durham left in a huff in 1838. Durham’s replacement, Charles Thomson (later Lord Sydenham) forced through the union of the two Canadas, held a ridiculously corrupt election and then convinced everyone that he had established a stable government when in fact he had not. When Thomson fell from a horse and died, Bagot entered the mess and put it back together. He did a decent job and risked his career by bringing into government a large group of French reformers, including Louis Lafontaine, even though his British overseers were far from eager to allow former rebel sympathizers into the government. to leave. It did little good for Bagot. His health had deteriorated throughout his stay in Canada and he died at the Governor General’s residence in the then capital Kingston.

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And this is now how we remember him – and our history – by tearing his name from one of the few public places where he is still honored.

The Oshawa process has followed a now all too familiar trajectory. The first demand for change came in the summer of 2021 in the wake of the still unsubstantiated claims of “mass graves” and unmarked graves at former residential schools.

Then came what is now becoming a routine three-phase process. Let’s first assume that people are actually “harmed” by street names – even streets named after long-forgotten historical figures – even streets that we’re not sure are named after those figures.

Once you’re done with this hyper-sensitive Geiger counter of emotional damage, conduct a public consultation. But don’t consult everyone. Instead, select a racially specific group of people who you know are likely to agree with the decision you’ve already made. In this case, the city’s public consultation appears intended to ask the few property owners along the tiny street and then conduct extensive consultation with virtually every conceivable indigenous group within a 100-mile radius.

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Did the city ask residents who have lived in Oshawa all their lives? It seems not. Did they ask anyone still connected to Bagot or his family? What about historians who know something about British North American history from the 1840s? Again, it doesn’t appear that this was the case. Instead, Oshawa, like other cities, seems to think that in these circumstances all you have to do is go through a race-based deliberative process, where the votes of some groups count more than others.

Once you are involved in this process of empathetic racism – defended, of course, by the need to decolonize – you can go ahead and propose a new name change. No amount of irony seems too much.

Oshawa is going an Orwellian route. The new name is “Debwewin Miikan” – a Anishinaabemowin term meaning ‘Truth Way’. Yes, that’s right: truth.

This is to demonstrate the city’s support for Truth and Reconciliation. But there is, as usual, very little interest in the actual complications of historical truth and in the fact that Bagot had little or no connection with boarding school education.

In multicultural countries like Canada, it is not surprising that historical figures are celebrated by some groups and vilified by others. There shouldn’t be a shock – or even a problem. Of all regions, Oshawa should know this. It is in the Durham region, and Durham is the classic Canadian example.

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Lord Durham is seen in Quebec as a villain – someone who wanted to assimilate French-Canadians – who, as some would put it today, recommended a cultural genocide. Yet Durham was also a liberal reformer who promoted for British North Americans the advent of what we would come to call responsible government. He is rightly celebrated as playing a pivotal role in the birth of Canadian democracy. Both things can be true at the same time.

Now imagine that you decide to rename the Region of Durham, where you create a consultative process that privileges the voices of Quebec nationalists, and set your transgression meter to “hyper-sensitive” based on what that group considers “problematic.”

That’s basically what Oshawa did here.

What Oshawa could do is choose native names for new streets or new schools (something it seems to have). already done) and leaves the figures from our colonial past who have already been honored in their place. This doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, pitting one group against another.

What do you call it when people pick out the most negative aspects of a cultural group? What about making decisions about that group’s culture but not consulting them and instead using a race-based consultation that specifically excludes them? I was sure we used to have a word for this kind of insensitivity towards a certain group.

National Post

Christopher Dummitt is a historian of Canadian culture and politics at Trent University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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