Those who are so keen to sanitise Canadian history don’t seem to know any

Expensive virtue-signalling often seems based on inaccuracies

For seven days The Telegraph is running a series of exclusive essays from international commentators examining the impact of Canada’s progressive legislation on issues such as drugs, free speech, trans rights, national identity and assisted dying.
Our fifth essay is by writer and clergyman Michael Coren, and looks at the changes in the way that figures from Canadian history are now perceived.
If we’re brutally honest, Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square is extremely disappointing. Ostensibly the heart of the largest city in Canada, it’s architecturally bland and culturally indifferent. Still, as a meeting-place and a reference point it does the job. But not for much longer under its present name, because the city council has voted to expunge the reference to Dundas and rename the place Sankofa Square, from the Twi language in Ghana that means, “to go back and get it.”
There are Dundas streets all over Ontario and even a town with the name because Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, a close ally of Pitt the Younger, was closely connected to the foundation of modern Canada. But supporters of the name change insist that he was also insufficiently opposed to the slave trade. In other words, a racist.
But that’s not strictly true. Dundas was an abolitionist who spoke out against the evils of slavery, but unlike William Wilberforce and his group he advocated a more gradual and arguably more practical approach to achieving the same end. Ironically, the Akan people in Ghana, the people who spoke Twi, were active participants in slavery, and sold African men, women, and children to European slave traders.
But as we’ve seen throughout the debate in Britain and the US as well as in Canada about renaming, removing, and cancelling, historical accuracy isn’t always a factor. Some of those thrown into the dustbin of history obviously deserve it, but to argue nuance or the dangers of anachronism is a risky thing.
Toronto saw this two years ago when Ryerson University, once an urban polytechnic, was rebranded as the incredibly exciting Toronto Metropolitan University. The reason was that the eponymous Egerton Ryerson, a 19th-century religious leader and education reformer, was allegedly a supporter of the notorious residential school system, a policy that even if not always intended to do so, broke up families and led to enormous pain and suffering. That system only officially ended in 1996 and the trauma is felt to this day.
The treatment of indigenous or First Nations people, both historically and currently, is quite rightly an acute issue in Canadian life. But while Ryerson was certainly far from innocent in all this, he was also a progressive thinker and activist who campaigned for universal education, believed that poverty should never be an obstacle to learning, and lived with the Credit Ojibway people for a year, learned their language, and was even given an Ojibway name.
Yet the physical attacks on his statue and the blistering campaign against his name, achievements, and reputation took little if any of this into account. The same is now applied to Henry Dundas, as it has been to a whole regiment of Canadian politicians and public figures who had the audacity to live in a less politically correct age.
The Dundas example is in some way even more jarring because nobody seems to know where the initiative began. Polls reveal that the vast majority of Torontonians are against the move, a petition of 30,000 signatures in opposition achieved nothing, and the cost of the change will be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This at a time when the city homelessness, public transport decay, and drug problem become regularly more severe, and essential services are crying out for increased funding.
They’ll have to get in line because one of Toronto’s relatively few tourist attractions, Black Creek Pioneer Village, a recreation of settler life in colonial Canada, is to be renamed The Village at Black Creek, which makes it sound like some sort of shopping and spa location. The people at the living museum have said that, “for too long the site focused on settlers of European descent, the Village has been working to change the narrative by collaborating with Indigenous scholars, artists, elders, and community members since 2017.” It too comes at a financial cost.
But none of this should come as a particular surprise. Last year the Girl Guides of Canada renamed the “Brownies” the “Embers” because brownie was considered too racially divisive, and, according to Girl Guide leaders, “caused harm and was a barrier to belonging for racialised girls and women”. That came as a surprise to my mixed-race daughters who were once enthusiastic Brownies. They eventually left because, sorry and all that, they just found it all a little dull. Then again, perhaps they were just hiding their inner pain and anguish!