Everything is offensive: Here are Canada’s other politically incorrect place names

A lesson for Ontario teachers who want to strip Sir John A. Macdonald's name from schools; almost nobody from history looks good by modern standards

Tristin Hopper, August 25, 2017, 11:37 AM EDT, http://nationalpost.com/news/c...ncorrect-place-names

The Sir John A. MacDonald statue at Queen's Park Circle at the foot of the Ontario Legislature in Toronto, Ont.Laura Pedersen/National Post

Last week, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario called on all school districts to strip the name of Sir John A. Macdonald from all Ontario public schools, reasoning that he was the “architect of genocide against Indigenous Peoples.” 

They’re not wrong that Macdonald has a pretty dismal record on Indigenous relations, but if Canada is going to be pulling down every name associated with some uncomfortable aspect of history, the purge has only just begun. It turns out that, when judged through the prism of our enlightened era, almost everybody from Canada’s past — from famed reformers to Indigenous icons to notable women — comes off as an extremist maniac.

McGill University (Montreal, Que.)
James McGill was a particularly successful fur trader who founded the university that now hosts a charming statue of him nears its front gates (as well as his grave). McGill also owned six African slaves. Although Canada would ultimately become the first North American jurisdiction to peacefully outlaw slavery, in McGill’s era enslaved black house servants were a common status symbol among Montreal’s merchant elite. Another slave owner? The namesake of Toronto’s Jarvis Street.

McGill University campus. Postmedia File

British Columbia
One of Canada’s most left-leaning provinces also has its most blatantly colonial name. The “Columbia” part is derived from Christopher Columbus, who had barely finished discovering the New World before he started kidnapping Indigenous Cubans. The British part, meanwhile, is a vestige of the province’s days as a far-flung British colony. The B.C. flag even includes a giant sun as a nod to the maxim that the sun never sets on the British Empire.

Brantford, Ont.
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, the namesake of Brantford and Brant County, usually gets cited on lists of “notable Indigenous Canadians.” He’s most remembered for siding with the British during the American Revolutionary War, but his legacy is still controversial among many Mohawk. Brant owned slaves, he murdered his son and he was accused of selling out his own people for personal gain.

Rick Lame of Craig Johnson Restorations puts a wax finish on the statue of Joseph Brant in Brantford’s Victoria Park. Christopher Smith/The Expositor

Victoria, B.C.
The B.C. capital is among the hundreds of Canadian places named after Queen Victoria, including Victoriaville, Que., and Victoria Island in the Arctic. Despite being the most famous woman of her era, though, Queen Victoria was an unabashed sexist. As the women’s suffrage movement took flight under her reign, she accused suffragists of “mad wicked folly” and said they needed a good “whipping.” Women, she added, were a “poor, feeble sex” who “would surely perish without male protection.”

Chateau Laurier (Ottawa, Ont.)
Wilfrid Laurier famously said that in the ethnic mix of Canada “there is no longer any family here but the human family.” But he was remarkably selective about who got to join that family. He opposed Indo-Canadian immigration to Canada, reasoning that they couldn’t handle the cold. Laurier also raised the Chinese Head Tax and saw it as a righteous thing for Canada to settle land taken from “savage nations.”

Ottawa’s Chateau Laurier. Jean Levac

CCGS John G. Diefenbaker
Still under development, the next icebreaker to join the Coast Guard fleet will carry the name of the only Canadian prime minister with a four-syllable last name. John Diefenbaker still has a relatively solid record on civil rights, but he didn’t care for gay people. Under his watch, the RCMP orchestrated a purge of homosexuals from the civil service, and Diefenbaker was an open opponent of Canada’s 1969 decriminalization of homosexuality. “Some say there is no God, that each man should be able to live his own life as he wills as long as he does so in private,” Diefenbaker said at the time. “I do not find any support for that philosophy in the scriptures.”

Jacques Cartier Bridge (Montreal, Que.)
Jacques Cartier mapped much of what would become New France, but his navigation relied an awful lot on kidnaping Indigenous people to be his guides. In one particularly egregious episode, he took a party of 10 Iroquois back to France, where they soon died. When Cartier returned to the St. Lawrence River without the Iroquois, he lied and told the locals they were all “living as great lords; they had married and had no desire to return to their country.”

The Jacques-Cartier bridge seen in 2013. POS1305241304420938 Dario Ayala / The Montreal Gazette

Bell Canada
With a deaf wife and mother, it was Alexander Graham Bell’s research into hearing devices that would profoundly influence his invention of the telephone. But he also had eugenicist leanings, particularly his fear that the hearing impaired would have children and form a kind of deaf fifth column, complete with their own secret language. Although Bell never considered mandatory controls on human breeding, he did press for governments to take steps against what he called the “Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race.”

Anything named after the Famous Five
The Famous Five are a group of Alberta women who spearheaded a 1929 legal appeal to have women recognized as legal “persons” in Canada. Between them, there’s a least a baker’s dozen of schools, streets and libraries named in their honour. But, as energetic activists, they also embraced a host of contemporary causes that seem wrongheaded or even evil by modern standards. This included eugenics, prohibition, bans on non-white immigration and the criminalization of marijuana.

Statue of Famous Five on Parliament Hill. Kelsey Mercier/The Ottawa Citizen

Tommy Douglas Collegiate (Saskatoon, Sask.)
Tommy Douglas was another eugenics supporter. The iconic founder of the NDP wrote his master’s thesis on the “problems of the sub-normal family,” in which he argued that poverty could be solved if mental defectives were weeded out of the gene pool. However, as premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961, Douglas never implemented the eugenics laws adopted by other prairie provinces. The reason was likely a 1936 visit to Nazi Germany in which Douglas saw firsthand the stirrings of history’s greatest eugenics crimes.

Mount Douglas (Victoria, B.C.)
As the son of a black woman, Sir James Douglas attained a staggering degree of success for his era, becoming the influential first governor of what would become British Columbia. His mistake, though, was allowing settlers to flood onto untreatied land — a legal situation that persists to this day. While Douglas signed some early “postage stamp” treaties for small plots of land around Victoria, he had effectively given up by the time gold rushes started to hit the B.C. interior in the mid-1800s.

Sir James Douglas. File

Dalhousie University (Halifax, N.S.)
While Governor-General of Nova Scotia in the early 1800s, Lord Dalhousie objected to accepting an influx of emancipated slaves freed by the War of 1812. “Slaves by habit and education, no longer working under the dread of the lash, their idea of freedom is Idleness and they are altogether incapable of industry,” he wrote to the colonial office in London. It’s that letter, in fact, that prompted Dalhousie University to convene an academic panel to examine their founder’s prejudices and “recommend actions.”

Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Vancouver, B.C.)
The artist Emily Carr has a couple libraries, a handful of public schools and an art college to her name, as well as a prominent statue in Victoria. However, due to the frequent depictions of First Nations totem poles and longhouses in her art, Carr has been accused of stealing Indigenous culture. “I believe that there are elements of cultural violence … in the way Carr effectively seized control over the public representation of the First Nations people and their totem poles of the British Columbian coasts,” wrote B.C. academic Janice Stewart in 2005.

The Emily Carr painting “Yan, Q.C.I.” The Canadian Press/HO-Art Gallery of Ontario

Anything named after Winston Churchill
Alberta, in particular, has named dozens of things after the stalwart leader of Second World War-era Britain, most notably Churchill square in Edmonton. But one doesn’t need to go far to find something dark in Churchill’s long career. He was an unashamed white supremacist, he boasted about personally killing “savages” in Sudan and it was under his government that two million people died in the 1943 Bengal famine.

Louis Riel Day (Manitoba)
While most of the rest of Canada is celebrating Family Day, Manitoba marks Louis Riel Day in honour of the Métis leader whose 1869 rebellion helped to create their province. While Riel’s political exploits are well-remembered, less known is how he viewed himself as a religious prophet divinely ordained to start a new religion. Much like another North American religious prophet, Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Riel believed this religion should include polygamy. Plural marriage would “teach women once again that the only way for them to be pleasing to God and their husbands … is to sincerely practice the virtues of modesty, thriftiness and kindness,” he wrote.

The statue of Louis Riel behind the Manitoba Legislature Postmedia Network

Mount Mackenzie King (British Columbia)
Much like the $50 bill, this B.C. mountain honours Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest serving prime minister. Probably the biggest black mark against King is his anti-semitism. In addition to King’s open admiration for Nazi Germany during the 1930s, he was against admitting Jewish refugees from Europe. “We must nevertheless seek to keep this continent free from unrest and from too great an intermixture of foreign strains of blood,” he wrote in a 1938 diary entry.

Kitchener, Ont.
The city of Kitchener, of course, has already gone through one politically correct name change. In the anti-German fervour of the First World War, the city’s original name of Berlin was stricken from the record and replaced with the most British-sounding word imaginable. But the city’s namesake, Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, has also been called a war criminal. As commander of British forces during the Boer War, he oversaw the establishment of civilian concentration camps to combat the Boer insurgency. More than 26,000 women and children died of disease in the camps.

Lord Kitchener seen in a WWl recruiting poster. File

Lake Champlain (Quebec)
After returning from his first trip up the St. Lawrence River in 1603, French explorer Samuel de Champlain’s account of the voyage was entitled “On Savages.” Later, as the unofficial governor of New France, Champlain followed the typical path of a 17th century colonial governor: Trying to convert the “heathen” natives and helping to spark a wave of local conflicts.

Pearson International Airport (Toronto, Ont.)
Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s record still holds up pretty well; particularly since he is the de facto inventor of peacekeeping. But the committed activist could still tarnish him with this particularly outdated quote from his 1957 Nobel lecture; “we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.”

John A Mcdonald was a racist when it comes to Chinese but when it comes to us East Indians he always looked up to Sikhs as great people.

Prashad posted:

John A Mcdonald was a racist when it comes to Chinese but when it comes to us East Indians he always looked up to Sikhs as great people.

Stop writing garbage, you dumb-ass ! Who is 'us East Indians'; certainly not you; you were dropped head first from the rectum of a jenny ass on to a rough concrete floor !