The time has come for Canadians to re-envision Sir John, not by grandly reinstalling him atop a plinth but by placing him on the scales of our national history and weighing him as a man not without serious fault and tragic flaws but nonetheless a man of primordial influence in our history. In recent years, Canada has witnessed a battle for narrative dominance in its history, a confrontation that has pitched Macdonaldian triumphalism against the victimization of our First Nations. For many, this has been conceived as a winner-take-all contest. Posterity, however, never condones such a decisive outcome …
Bio:
Duncan McDowall is a historian based in Kingston. He has written extensively on the history of Canada, Bermuda, and Brazil. His history of Queen’s University in the years 1961–2004 was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2016 under the title Testing Tradition. His latest book, John Lyman’s The Old Bermudas, has just been published by the National Museum of Bermuda Press. His family first came to Kingston in the early 1790s.