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A federal board that provides recommendations to Parks Canada has advised against commemorating Canada’s first prime minister with new historic plaques, saying it would be too “polarizing and controversial.”
The Historic Sites and Monuments Board made the recommendation against plaques being erected to honour Sir John A. Macdonald in December 2023, as recorded by minutes of a meeting first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter.
“The Board recommended that Sir John A. Macdonald be commemorated by means of information to be made available on the Parks Canada website and that no plaque be erected,” said minutes of the Dec. 12, 2023, board meeting obtained through an access to information request.
Macdonald was designated a national historic person in 1927. The Historic Sites and Monuments Board reviewed this designation during meetings held in 2022 and 2023 and the board proposed an updated statement of commemoration in 2023, according to the minutes.
While the revised statement acknowledged Macdonald “played a major role” as Canada’s first prime minister, it also condemned him for “suppressing Indigenous resistance in the Northwest, using the disappearance of the bison to force First Nations to take treaties and settle on reserves, disenfranchising Chinese people and attempting to restrict their immigration, and founding a national system of Indian Residential Schools which represented a policy of aggressive assimilation the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as cultural genocide,” the minutes said.
Board members agreed that Macdonald had “become a polarizing and controversial figure in Canadian history” and that his legacies were “complex,” according to the meeting minutes.
Parks Canada says Macdonald’s designation was reviewed in 2024 due to “colonial assumptions and an absence of layers of history” in the commemoration statement. The original plaques were removed and new plaques will not be prepared because “the limited text of a plaque does not allow for adequately communicating this complex history,” Parks Canada said.
Macdonald was originally designated as a national historic person for serving as Canada’s first prime minister, forging a “lasting alliance of British and French Canadians from different political backgrounds under the Liberal-Conservative party banner,” serving as co-premier of the province of Canada from 1856 to 1862, serving as a member of the Great Coalition, and playing a major role in drafting Canada’s first constitution, Parks Canada says.
“The Board discussed the public context of statues being removed and the renaming of buildings, concluding that at this time he was sufficiently commemorated by other means including his gravesite,” the 2023 minutes said.
In a July 3 social media post, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre criticized the board’s decision to recommend against new commemorative plaques.
“It’s very simple: no Macdonald, no Canada,” he wrote.
“No federal board has the right to cancel the first Prime Minister of our country,” Poilievre said. “Sir John A. Macdonald deserves to be clearly recognized for his role in the foundation of the wonderful country we get to call home.”
A group of Canadian historians, consisting of university professors and educators, has published letters objecting to the initiatives in recent years to remove the names and tributes to Canada’s historic figures such as Macdonald, saying the accounts presented vilifying these figures are in many cases not accurate.
“A social progressive in his day; [Macdonald] protected Indigenous populations in Canada’s western regions, resisted political demands for a Chinese head tax, and gave Indigenous Canadians the right to vote,” the Canadian Institute for Historical Education wrote in a Feb. 6, 2025, letter to the Toronto District Public School Board when it was considering removing Macdonald’s name from a school.
“We believe the recent epidemic of historic statue removal and renaming of roads, buildings, and institutions to be on the whole ill-considered and driven more by popular opinion and prejudice than by thorough research and analysis.”
Matthew Horwood and the Canadian Press contributed to this report.
