Sir John A MacDonald is credited with being the dominant architect of Canadian Confederation.
He is perhaps less known for his May 1883 words spoken before the House of Commons referring to the state’s relationship to Indigenous peoples: “When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write … [T]he Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”
“The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.”
Under his watch as prime minister his racial animus, in addition to supporting the residential school system , extended to the execution of Metis leader Louis Riel, the head tax on Chinese workers and virulent anti black sentiments.
Historian Constance Backhouse has written that Macdonald appealed to anti-black racism and anti-Americanism to justify retaining the death penalty for rape, though unenforced since the early 1840s. She cited a letter to the Chief Justice of Nova Scotia in which Macdonald stated that it was “expedient” to keep it on the books “principally on account of the influx of blackguards of all kinds from the United States”, and “on account of the frequency of rape committed by negroes, of whom we have too many in Upper Canada. They are very prone to felonious assaults on white women”.[177][178] He stated that were the penalties not severe, “there would be great dread of the people taking the law into their own hands”.[178] The assertion of the frequency with which black men raped white women is not borne out by the criminal statistics,[179] and the charade of judges passing death sentences for rape that were always commuted by the Minister of Justice in Ottawa (Macdonald himself, for five years) was ended by an act passed under PM Alexander Mackenzie.[17
Sources: Wikipedia and other.
