A statue of the first Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 2010.

A statue of the first Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 2010.

Photo: Alamy Stock Photo

Breadalbane, Prince Edward Island

I moved back to Canada in June after living in the U.S. for 45 years. After planning the move for more than a year, I was thrilled to cross the Confederation Bridge and into the tiny province of Prince Edward Island. Everyone from border guards to health officials was lovely, reinforcing my memory of this region as one of the friendliest parts of the country.

Then I read the newspaper. I was immediately confronted by a scandal that had occupied much of the country’s attention for weeks: the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. And just last week, another 751 unmarked graves were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

Such schools—the last of which closed in 1996—were federally mandated in 1883, and were based on the then-dominant view that indigenous children, for their own good, needed to be removed from their homes, educated and converted to Christianity to assimilate into Western culture. The Canadian government wasn’t alone in this view; it borrowed heavily from U.S. government reports recommending similar practices. They were also common in Australia, where Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes.

The schools, administrated by churches, would have been bad enough had they competently served their purpose. But they turned out to be torturous, as children reportedly faced physical, sexual and psychological abuse. The undocumented remains of the 215 children at the Kamloops school—discovered in May using ground-penetrating radar—triggered a justified national outcry about how the country ought to engage with its harsh treatment of indigenous people.

But the residential-school scandal is also provoking unreasonable responses from progressive activists, including here in Prince Edward Island, one of only two provinces that never housed residential schools. (Neighboring New Brunswick was the other.) Following public protests over the schools, the City Council of Charlottetown—the province’s capital and largest city—voted unanimously on May 31 to remove permanently the statue of Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, from a downtown intersection. It was torn down the next day. Three weeks later, a statue of Macdonald was removed in Kingston, Ontario, and a working group has recommended a similar removal in Toronto. Three city councilors in Ottawa have also called on Canada’s federal government to rename Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway.

The Charlottetown council’s vote mirrors similar moves in the U.S., which have targeted not only Confederate generals and politicians but figures like Washington, Lincoln and Grant. In Macdonald’s case, protesters targeted him because his government commissioned the study that eventually led to the establishment of the residential schools.

Posthumous punishments like these solve nothing, except for satisfying some primal need for payback. They trivialize deep issues by seeking scapegoats and distract from the more important task of seriously considering history and policy.

Every major national leader in the 19th century instituted policies that would be unacceptable even to consider today. Yet whatever Macdonald’s shortcomings, he was the first prime minister of a country that the protesters apparently care enough about to want to improve. Canada’s confederation as a new nation was set in motion by an 1864 conference in Charlottetown; the statue there presumably commemorated Macdonald’s role in this history. Not surprisingly, there have been protests online calling for an end to celebrations of Canada Day, the July 1 celebration of the confederation’s anniversary in 1867. (Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these self-styled anticolonialists the irony of boycotting independence celebrations.)

If we remove every Macdonald statue in Canada—and every holiday that is loosely associated with him—we might as well remove markers for every significant historical figure, so that we can limit such commemorations only to those who acted, governed and spoke in a manner that is consistent with today’s progressive sensibilities—which themselves may not live up to tomorrow’s.

Exposing the cruelty of residential schools is important and should serve as a starting point for a thoughtful discussion about the role of church and state in the lives of indigenous people and all Canadians. But to erase Macdonald’s positive contributions to the country’s founding is to obliterate history, not to understand it better.

Mr. Krauss, a physicist, is president of the Origins Project Foundation. His most recent book is “The Physics of Climate Change.”

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