Legislative Building Queen’s Park Toronto ON M7A 1A1
Dear Mr. Ford
RE: SAVE THE JOHN A. MACDONALD STATUE AT THE FOOT OF QUEEN’S PARK
I am writing to you because I am a patriotic Canadian with a family history in the Toronto area going back six generations. I am concerned about the wanton destruction of our proud history by the political left. I am even more concerned by the apparent compliance of the Progressive Conservative government of Ontario, giving into violent Marxist vandals every time they raise a fuss.
My immigrant ancestor, William Lawson, was a Methodist preacher who came to Toronto in 1829, from Cumberland County, England. He almost certainly would have known Egerton Ryerson personally. In my opinion, Ryerson has been treated in a biased and unfair way by historical revisionists, who are determined to portray him in a negative manner. Following the implementation of Responsible Government in 1848, Ryerson helped to design the education curriculum and his progressive policies were intended to assist the indigenous people, not harm them.
In June of 2021, a group of leftist vandals, including Peruvian national, Miguel Avila Valerde and others, toppled and destroyed the statue of Egerton Ryerson, on Gould Street, at the Ryerson University Campus. The incident occurred after a demonstration to support the alleged 215 indigenous children whose bodies were allegedly found buried in an apple orchard at the site of the former Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia.
In the June 2021 Ryerson campus incident, the police were apparently on site, but they left the site and did NOTHING to stop the statue’s destruction. I subsequently spoke to a number of police from the relevant Division and the response they allude to is that they did not prevent the destruction because they did not have the support of Toronto City Council and other levels of Government and none of the police wanted to be featured apprehending a vandal, on a cell phone video, mounted on YOU TUBE, which might end their careers.
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Miguel Velarde is from Peru. What do you suppose would happen if I went to Peru and proceeded to attack a statue of Simon Bolivar, the founder and liberator of a number of Latin American countries from Spanish colonial rule ? I expect I might be jailed and deported, however an Ecuadorian acquaintance of mine has advised that I would probably be killed by the local people, as they love their country and cherish its founder. This is in contrast to us here in Canada, where children have been brainwashed in schools to hate their country and to despise its founding fathers.. WHY ?
We are witnessing the increased influence of cultural Marxists, who follow a textbook method in the playbook of communist propaganda, which involves always having a narrative of victimization they can promote. They have to have a victim and a villain. If they do not have a convenient villain available, then they will manufacture one by twisting the truth and telling lies. In recent years they have vilified the founder of Halifax, Edward Cornwallis and had his statue taken down, using a stacked committee, set up by Halifax City council. The Marxist historical revisionists then moved on to Egerton Ryerson and then to John A. Macdonald. After they are finished with these two important figures, they will next attack Wilfred Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King. The ultimate goal is the erasure of any important white Anglo-Saxon people from our history books, in order to pave the way for implementation of Globalist-Marxist “utopian” society. This is not the sort of world I want to live in.
People like me will vote for a Conservative government because we want the government to CONSERVE things, to maintain status quo. Increasingly, so called conservative governments in this country very quickly bend to the left, as soon as they get into office, betraying their traditional base in the process. Erin O’Toole is a good example of this.
In a news broadcast, you referred to the “human remains” that were allegedly discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian residential school. In researching this topic, I have spent many hours reviewing various news reports and so called “expert” opinions. My view is also informed by fact that I have a degree in geology, I studied geophysical exploration and I worked in the exploration geophysics department at a large oil company in Calgary. In contrast, Sarah Beaulieu, the woman who conducted the ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey upon which the inflammatory claims of 215 burials are based, is not a trained scientist, nor a professional, rather she is an anthropologist. She also has a conflict of interest, in view of her indigenous background. People with a proper technical background will understand the limitations of the GPR : all it will tell you is where there is a contrast in the soil density, that’s all. In order to conclude that a human burial had taken place, you have to perform a dig. To date NO EXCAVASIONS HAVE TAKEN PLACE AT KAMLOOPS AND THERE IS NO REAL EVIDENCE OF ANY BURIALS. These facts points to the mostly likely reason why : the entire narrative is a rather poorly concocted fraud. THERE NEVER WERE ANY BURIALS in the orchard at Kamloops. The CBC Fifth Estate documentary on this site contains nothing but hearsay, myths and indirect allegations. I spent hours going over that program, which was re-broadcast. The conspirators in this drama know they have a problem, because as soon as the original allegations were questioned, the claims of 215 burials were quickly reduced to “200 potential burials”.
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Federal Minster David Lametti recently has appointed an “interlocutor” (an indigenous women) and provided her with $10 million and two years to produce a report on native grievances and burial sites. She does not have authority to investigate crime. Her job will be to prevent a proper investigation. If the Kamloops orchard had been a real crime scene, the appropriate procedure would be for the RCMP to secure the area and then initiate a forensic examination and organize a dig, in junction with the local coroner’s office (as was the case with the Willie Pickton site, in lower mainland B.C.). The fact that this has not been done speaks volumes. Reports also indicate that the RCMP is reluctant to get involved because it has been politicized. The cops do not want to lose their jobs.
In connection with the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Ottawa in February 2022, you decried what you described as “desecration” of Ottawa monuments and statues, such as the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue. No defacing or lasting damage was done to either of these monuments. Contrast your comments about these Ottawa monuments to the fate suffered by important statues here in Toronto, such as King Edward VII statue (by Brock) in Queen’s Park, the John A. Macdonald statue (by McCarthy) in Queen’s Park South, which is now behind plywood, the Ryerson statue (by McCarthy), which has been destroyed and more recently the Robert Burns statue in Allen Gardens, which has been defaced and is at the center of an illegal native encampment, which the City of Toronto refuses to remove. Why are you not equally outspoken about the latter monuments?
It is unfortunate that the matter of the John A MacDonald statue was not dealt with in a more direct manner and instead it was given to Speaker, Ted Arnott, to deal with. The obsequious words posted on plastic sign on the plywood box are nauseating to read. Caving in to the political left only provides them with more incentive
Just last week, in an apparent repetition of the plywood boarding procedure, the monument to the 1885 North West Rebellion, by Walter Allward, was placed behind a plywood barrier. Putting down the North West Rebellion was a unfortunate incident in Canadian history, however it had to be done. Concern is that this statue will now suffer a fate similar to the one suffered by the statue of Edward Cornwallis, as Liberal stacked committees generally consign such important monuments to the dustbin of history. This is because such monuments get in the way of Marxist propaganda. The Marxists want Ontario children to have little sense of their country’s proud history. In that manner they can more easily be corrupted into Globalist communism. Is that what you want?
PLEASE DO THE RIGHT THING, UNVEIL THE JOHN A. MACDONALD AND OTHER IMPORTANT STATUES AT QUEEN’S PARK ONCE AGAIN. PLACE A GUARD ON DUTY TO PROTECT THEM AND TO DETER FURTHER VANDALISM.
A RESPONSE TO THIS LETTER WILL BE APPRECIATED. THANK YOU.
The Trashing of Canadian History to Help Usher in Our Replacement
The removal or desecration of statues on Canadian historical heroes is part of a psychological attack on the European founding/settler people of this country. The authorities have done little to the wrecking crew. Some cowardly self-haters like the City of Victoria have given in to the wrecking crew and removed the statue of the founder of our country Sir John A. Macdonald. Some will fault find and critique these heroes of the past. Sir John A. was hostile to Chinese immigration. So, too, were most Canadians at the time. Applying today’s politically correct sentiments misses the point. These men and women are being honoured for what they contributed or accomplished, not because they were saints.
Justin Trudeau’s habit of issuing fulsome apologies and buckets of cash to alleged victims of Canada’s past — the Komagata Maru, turning away the Jews on the St. Louis in 1939, etc. — leaves the impression that Old Stock Canada was a morally bereft country AND not worth preserving. If our history was rotten and our heroes all rotters, why should we seek to preserve ourselves and resist being replacement in the carefully organized Great Replacement of Canada’s European founding/settler people through mass Third World immigration
Attached are some random photos I found on the Internet.. Included with them are photos of PERUVIAN NATIONAL, MIGUEL AVILA VELARDE pictured with his local native militant friend, SKYLER WILLIAMS , in which the are gloating after the destruction of the EGERTON RYERSON statue . They destroyed it, with hammers, crowbars and a grinder…. WHY WERE THESE TWO NOT SENT TO JAIL??? THE EVIDENCE IS RIGHT THERE.
VELARDE was later involved in pulling down and damaging the JOHN A MACDONALD STATUE , by WADE,. in HAMILTON…… IF HE HAS BEEN IN JAIL, WHERE HE BELONGS, HE WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO DO THIS. NEXT, VELARDE JUST RAN FOR CITY COUNCIL IN WARD 13 ! This is so strange you could not dream it up ! Why was he not charged? Why is he not forcefully confronted and told, “if you think the country YOU chose to immigrate to is so racist, why did you not stay in Peru?
Doug Ford complained of the “desecration” of the Terry Fox statue in OTTAWA (someone draped a Canadian flag over it during the Freedom Convoy protests). Has he denounced the desecration of other statues or taken steps to protect and re-exhibit the Macdonald statue in Queen’s Park in 2020?It has been encased in plywood. It should be reopened and a permanent guard stationed there.
(The lettering on Mackenzie King is added and based on his quoted statements)….
The statue of the great educator Egerton Ryerson toppled. The foreigner who heads Ryerson University will not restore the statue and has changed the institution’s name to Metropolitan U. MIGUEL AVILA VELARDE with head of demolished statue of Egerton Ryerson
Stand Up to the Mob– The Statue Wreckers & Their Establishment Enablers!
When a mob vandalizes or tears down statues that have been in place for generations of nation-builders, whether statesmen like Sir John A. Macdonald, Father of Confederation and first Prime Minister of the Dominion of Canada, or educators like Egerton Ryerson, one of the chief architects of the Upper Canadian – Ontarian for the hopelessly up-to-date – public school system, back the in days when schools were a credit to their builders rather than a disgrace, this tells us much more about the mob than about the historical figures whose memory they are attacking. It is far easier to tear something down than it is to build something, especially something of lasting benefit. It is also much quicker. What these acts tell us is that the members of these mobs, whether taken individually or collectively, who are howling for the “cancelling” of the memories of men like Macdonald and Ryerson, do not have it in them to achieve a thousandth of what such men accomplished. Driving them down this quick and easy, but ultimately treacherous and deadly, path of desecration and destruction, is the spirit of Envy, which is not mere jealousy, the wish to have what others have, but the hatred of others for being, having, or doing what you do not and cannot be, have, or do yourself. It was traditionally considered among the very worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, second only to Pride. This makes it almost fitting, in a perverse sort of way, that last weekend’s mob assault on the statue of Ryerson at the University that bears his name, took place at the beginning of the month which, to please the alphabet soup people of all the colours of the rainbow, now bears the name of that Sin in addition to the Roman name for the queen of Olympus.
The toppling of the Ryerson statue came at the end of a week in which the Canadian media, evidently tired of the bat flu after a year and a half, found a new dead horse to flog. Late in May, a couple of days after the anniversary of the incident which, after it was distorted and blown out of proportion by the media, sparked last year’s wave of race riots and “Year Zero” Cultural Maoism, and just in time to launch Indigenous History Month, yet another new handle for the month formerly known as June, the Kamloops Indian Band made an announcement. They had hired someone to use some fancy newfangled sonar gizmo to search the grounds of the old Indian Residential School at Kamloops and, lo and behold, they had discovered 215 unmarked graves.
The Canadian mainstream media was quick to label this discovery “shocking”. This speaks extremely poorly about the present state of journalistic integrity in this country. When used as an adjective, the word shocking expresses a negative judgement about that which is so described but it also generally conveys a sense of surprise on the part of the person doing the judging. There was nothing in the Kamloops announcement, however, that ought to have been surprising. It revealed nothing new about the Indian Residential Schools. That there are unmarked graves on the grounds of these schools has been known all along. The fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report is entitled Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. It is 273 pages long and was published in December of 2015. According to this volume the death rate due to such factors as disease – tuberculosis was the big one – and suicide was much higher among aboriginal children at the Residential Schools than among school children in the general population. The TRC attributed this to the inadequacy of government standards and regulations for these schools which fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than the provincial education ministries like other schools, as well as inadequate enforcement of such standards and regulations, and inadequate funding. Had the TRC been the impartial body of inquiry it made itself out to be it would also have compared the death rate among Residential School children to that among aboriginal children who remained at home on the reserves. At any rate, according to the TRC Report, unless the families lived nearby or could afford to have the bodies sent to them, they were generally buried in cemeteries at the schools which were abandoned and fell into disuse and decay after the schools were closed. All that this “new discovery” has added to what is already contained in that volume is the location of 215 of these graves. One could be forgiven for thinking that all the progressives in the mainstream Canadian media who have been spinning the Residential School narrative into a wrecking ball to use against Canada and the men who built her are not actually that familiar with the contents of the TRC Report.
The Canada-bashing progressives have been reading all sorts of ridiculous conclusions into the discovery of these graves that the actual evidence in no way bears out. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was hardly an impartial and unbiased body of inquiry. Its end did not seem to be the first noun in its title so much as painting as unflattering a portrait of the Indian Residential Schools, the Canadian churches, and the Canadian government as was possible. Even still, it did not go so far as to accuse the schools of the mass murder of children. The most brazen of the progressive commentators have now been pointing to the discovery of the graves and making that accusation, and their slightly less brazen colleagues have been reporting the story in such a way as to lead their audiences to that conclusion without their outright saying it. This is irresponsible gutter journalism at its worst. The Kamloops band and its sonar technicians have not discovered anything that the TRC Report had not already told us was there, and bodies have not been exhumed, let alone examined for cause of death. Indeed, they did not even discover a “mass grave” as innumerable media commentators have falsely stated, with some continuing to falsely say this despite the band chief having issued an update in which she explicitly stated “This is not a mass grave”. The significance of this is that it shows that the media has been painting the picture of a far more calloused disposal of bodies than the evidence supports or the band claims.
The media, of course, are not acting in bona fide. This time last year, they were using the death of George Floyd to promote a movement that was inciting race riots all across the United States and even throughout the larger Western world. Coinciding with this was a wave of mob attacks on the monuments of a wide assortment of Western nation-builders, institutional founders, statesmen, and other honoured historical figures. The New York Times, the American trash rag of record, had been laying the foundation for this for months by running Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, a revisionist distortion of American history that interprets everything by viewing it through the lens of slavery, in its Sunday Magazine supplement. What we are seeing up here this year is simply the Canadian left-wing gutter press trying to reproduce its American cousin’s success of last year.
Those who use their influence to support statue-toppling mobs have no business commenting on history whatsoever. By their very actions they demonstrate that they have not learned a fairly basic historical lesson. Movements that seek to tear down a country’s history – her past cannot be torn down, but her history, her “remembered past” to use John Lukacs’ definition, can – never end well but rather in disaster, destruction, and misery for all. The Jacobins attempted this in France in the 1790s when they started history over with their Republic at “Year One”, and endued up with the Reign of Terror. It has been a pretty standard feature of all Communist revolutions since. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, when they took over Cambodia in 1975, declared it to be “Year Zero”. Watch the film “The Killing Fields” or read my friend Reaksa Himm’s memoir The Tears of My Soul to find out what that was like. Anybody who fails to grasp the simple historical fact that these are terrible examples and not ones to be emulated has no business passing judgement on the errors of the historical figures who built countries and institutions, led them through difficult periods, and otherwise did the long and difficult work of construction, enriching future generations, rather than the short and easy work of destruction that can only impoverish them.
There are undoubtedly those who would feel that this comparison of today’s statue-topplers who are now likening our country’s founders to Hitler with the Jacobins, Maoists, Pol Pot and other statue-toppling, country-and-civilization destroyers of the past is unfair. It is entirely appropriate, however. It is one thing to acknowledge that bad things took place at the Indian Residential Schools and to give those who suffered those things a platform and the opportunity to share their story. It is another thing altogether to use those bad things to paint a cartoonish caricature so as to condemn the schools, the churches that administered them, and the country herself, wholesale, and to silence those whose testimony as to their experiences runs contrary to this one-sided, un-nuanced, narrative. It is one thing to acknowledge that admired leaders of the past were human beings and thus full of flaws, or even to point out examples of how they fell short of the standards of their own day or of timeless standards. It is something quite different to use their flaws to discredit and dismiss their tremendous accomplishments and, even worse, to condemn them for failing to hold attitudes that are now all but ubiquitous but which nobody anywhere in the world held until the present generation.
When the so-called Truth and Reconciliation process began – I don’t mean the appointment of the Commission but the proceedings that led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement which brought about the creation of the Commission, so we are talking about two and a half decades ago – the discussion was primarily about physical and sexual abuse that some of the alumni of the schools had suffered there, over which they had initiated the lawsuits that led to the Settlement. With the creation of the TRC, however, the discussion came to be dominated by people with another very different agenda. Their agenda was to condemn the entire Residential Schools system as a project of “cultural genocide”.
The concept of “cultural genocide” is nonsensical. Genocide, a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, means the murder of a “people”, in the sense of a group with a common ancestry and identity. The Holocaust of World War II is the best known example. The mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda towards the end of that country’s civil war in 1994 is a more recent example. The concept of “cultural genocide” was thought up by the same man who coined the term. It refers to efforts to destroy a people’s cultural identity without killing the actual people. Since the equation of something that does not involve killing actual people with mass murder ought to be morally repugnant to any thinking person, the concept should have been condemned and rejected from the moment Lemkin first conceived it. Soon after it was conceived, however, the leaders of certain Jewish groups began using it as a club against Christianity. Christianity teaches that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Messiah, the Redeemer prophesied in the Old Testament Who established the promised New Covenant through His death and Resurrection and Who is the only way to God for Jews and Gentiles alike. Christianity’s primary mission from Jesus Christ is evangelism – telling the world the Gospel, the Good News about Who Jesus is and what He has done. While not everybody believes the Gospel when they hear it and it is not our mission to compel anybody to believe, obviously the desired end of evangelism is for everybody to believe. Since rabbinic Judaism has long taught that a Jew who converts to Christianity ceases to be a Jew, the Jewish leaders in question argued that evangelism amounts to cultural genocide – if all the Jews believed the Gospel, there would be no Jews any more. On the basis of this kind of reasoning they began pressuring Christian Churches to change their doctrines and liturgical practices as they pertain to the evangelism of Jews. Sadly, far too many Church leaders proved to be weak in the face of this kind of pressure.
Canada’s Laurentian political class showed a similar lack of backbone when it came to defending our country against the smear that the Residential Schools were designed to wipe out Native Indian cultural identities. Indeed, their attitude throughout the entire “Truth and Reconciliation” process was to accept the blame for whatever accusations were thrown against Canada and to refuse to hold the accusers accountable to even the most basic standards of courtroom justice. Imagine a trial where the judge allows only the prosecutor to call witnesses, denies the defense the right to cross examine, and refuses to allow the defense to make a case. That will give you a picture of what the trial of Canada by the TRC over the Residential Schools was like.
The reality is that had Canada wanted to erase Native Indian cultural identity she would have abolished the reserves, torn up the treaties and declared the Indians to be ordinary citizens like everyone else, insisted that they all live among other Canadians, and that their children go to the same public schools as everybody else. In other words, she would have done the exact opposite of what she actually did. The Canadian government’s policy was clearly to preserve Indian cultural identity, not to eradicate it. Had they wanted to do the latter, residential schools would have been particularly ill-suited to the task. The TRC maintains that the idea was to break Indian cultural identity by taking children away from the cultural influence of their parents. If this was the case one would think the government would have had all Indian children sent to these schools. In actuality, however, in the approximately a century and a half that these schools operated, only a minority of Indian children were sent there. This was a very small minority in the early days of the Dominion when Sir John A. Macdonald, whom the TRC et al seem more interested in vilifying than anyone else, was Prime Minister. The government also ran day schools on the reserves and in those days the government only forced children to go to the residential schools when their parents persistently neglected to send them to the day schools. The Dominion had made it mandatory for all Indian children within a certain age range to attend school – just as the provinces had made it mandatory for all other children within the same age range to attend school. It was much later in Canadian history, after the government decided to make the schools serve the second function of being foster group homes for children removed from unsafe homes by social workers that a majority of Indian children were sent to the residential schools. Even then, the eradication of Indian cultural identity is hardly a reasonable interpretation of the government’s intent.
The TRC, in the absence of serious challenge from either Canada’s political class or the fourth estate, created a narrative indicting our country and its founders for “cultural genocide”, featuring a one-sided caricature of the Indian Residential Schools. Now, after a discovery that adds nothing that was not already contained in the TRC Report, left-wing radicals egged on by the mendacious and meretricious media, have gone far beyond the TRC in their defamatory accusations of murder against the schools and their Pol Potish demands that we “cancel” our country, her history, and her historical figures. It is about time that we stood up to these thugs who in their envy and hatred of those who did what they themselves could never do by building our country wish to tear it all down. It is slightly encouraging that the Conservatives were able to stop the motion by Jimmy Dhaliwal’s Canada-hating socialist party to have Parliament declare the Residential Schools to have been a genocide. I didn’t think they had the kives – the Finnish word for “stones” the bearing of which as a last name by a local reporter brings to mind how the biggest man in Robin Hood’s band of Merry Men was called “Little John” – to do so.
Since the progressive wackos are calling for Canada Day to be cancelled, I encourage you this July 1st to fly the old Red Ensign, sing “God Save the Queen” and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, raise your glass to Sir John and celebrate Dominion Day with gusto. The only thing we need to be ashamed of in Canada is the way we have let these ninnies who are constantly apologizing for everything Canada has been and done in the past walk all over us. While I seldom recommend emulating Americans in this case I say that it is time we forget about our customary politeness and take up the attitude of old Merle, who sang “When they’re runnin’ down my country, man, They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me”. — Gerry T. Neal
