That was Then, This is Now
A few years before I retired from practicing law, one of my colleagues got mugged by the Law Society. Beaten up and left for dead. My friend survived, but not without countless sleepless nights and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal defense fees.
And what was his transgression? Well, in one of his 1990s files he had not followed 2000s procedures. You read that right – he had not followed rules which were yet to be made. Doesn’t matter. The politically correct princess in charge of the Law Society file was humorless and determined to make an example.
Readers know I’m pretty progressive in my political and social views, but there is one aspect of over-the-top political correctness that really gets my goat, and that is measuring yesterday’s actions by today’s standards. Toppling statues and renaming streets is carried on with gleeful abandon as if “righting yesterday’s wrongs” was all it took to correct tomorrow’s problems.
Sorry, it doesn’t work that way, and we need to stop being childish about it.
Whether I’d help pull down a statue of Pol Pot or Adolf Hitler is another matter. If I lived on Heinrich Himmler Avenue, I’d be the first name on the petition to change it. There have been some characters who were just plain evil and had few if any redeeming graces. There may even be a few such individuals today in prominent places, and there will be some tomorrow.
But we’re not talking about men (and a few women) of such unadulterated evil. We’re talking about persons who lived in the mainstream of their societies and conducted themselves within the morality of the day which, like the morality of our day, fell somewhat short of the Glory of God.
John A. Macdonald’s government, like most governments of his day, built and staffed residential schools which, no matter how well-meaning the objectives may have been back in the day, turned out exactly as anyone should have suspected, resulting in the misery and deaths of hundreds of children, in particular those of our First Nations. But Macdonald was not a lone despot single-handedly dispensing evil upon children, he was absolutely mainstream as evidenced by his multiple majority election victories. Macdonald’s statues may get torn down and his memory erased, but it was “we the people” who did what happened.
Macdonald had more on the go than the residential schools. He dragged disparate colonies together to form a new nation and built a railway across a continent, among other things. It’s not right that his entire memory be disparaged.
Egerton Ryerson was a noble, decent, humble altruist who essentially built Canada’s education system from scratch. As a clergyman, he worked among the Mississaugas of the Credit, learned their language, and was adopted as one of them. Today we look back in our one-size-fits-all judgment and ascribe wickedness to his vision of native schools, his statues are defaced and torn down, his name and memory erased from schools and parks.
Today I eat beef without a second thought about the environment, I drive a car which belches greenhouse gasses, and I probably send hundreds of kilograms of waste to the landfill every year, trusting someone else to do the sorting. You probably do the same. Will our descendants revile our names because of the legacy we’re leaving them? Perhaps, and we’ll deserve it.
Was slavery evil? Yes, worse than evil. Were the residential schools hell for most of the First Nations kids who suffered there? Absolutely.
Sir Robert Borden still graces our $100 bill and has roads, schools, and hospitals named in his honor all over Canada. Yet he sent 650,000 Canadian boys across the ocean to fight and die in the savagery of WWI. 66,000 never came home, and thousands of “survivors” spent the rest of their lives coughing up their gas-scarred lungs, my great uncles among them.
Was WWI a war of moral principle or a struggle to save freedom and democracy? Not even remotely. It was the last medieval war amongst inbred European royalty, a hissy family snit. None of our business, yet Borden sent 66,000 Canadian boys to their death for the honour of “the Old Country”. Glory on our brave fighters, shame on Borden, who so far is not on the hit list of the politically correct.
I could list a hundred more abominations which don’t draw a mention of the PC crowd, probably because they’re so busy shouting they don’t have time to read history.
Those who deface statutes also drive gas guzzlers along their renamed roads to get to the protest. On the way home they’ll enjoy a burger, and when they’re finished, toss the styrofoam container into mixed trash.
Most of the influencers of political correctness have cushy jobs and pensions funded by tax dollars, tax dollars which arise not only from your T4 filings, but also the significant taxes paid by our petroleum industry. This isn’t to sanitize our petroleum output, simply to point out the inherent hypocrisy of the politically correct.
Don’t we have more important things to do? Let’s spend less energy trying to set right things in the past and more energy ensuring the future of those who come after us.