Kayla Sutherland stands on the plinth after protesters pulled down the statue of Egerton Ryerson in Toronto on June 6, 2021.The Canadian Press
Trust the TDSB.
As our world was melting down last week, a committee of the Toronto District School Board decided that what was really important was erasing the names of three long-dead historical figures from TDSB schools. It approved a staff recommendation to rename Dundas Junior Public School, Ryerson Community School and Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute.
Henry Dundas, Egerton Ryerson and Sir John A. have all come under scrutiny in the past few years. Dundas was accused of delaying the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Ryerson of being the intellectual forefather of residential schools and Macdonald of founding them.
Dundas had his name removed from Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas (now Sankofa) Square and Ryerson from the downtown university now called Toronto Metropolitan University. Macdonald’s statue in front of the provincial legislature at Queen’s Park is imprisoned in plywood to protect it from vandals while timorous legislators dither over whether it should ever see the light of day again.
Their defenders say all three have been slandered. Dundas was a devoted abolitionist who as a lawyer once represented a runaway slave and Ryerson an educational reformer who supported an Indigenous land claim. Macdonald’s backward views about Indigenous peoples were sadly typical of his day and his failures have to be set against his accomplishments, which include the building of the transcontinental railroad and the creation of the Canada we know today.
None of this seems to have made the slightest impression on the TDSB, Canada’s biggest school board. A report that went to the board’s governance and policy committee on Jan. 27 noted that, under a section of the “Revised Naming Schools, Teams and Special-Purpose Area Procedure,” the TDSB was undertaking a “proactive critical review of school names.” Dundas, Ryerson and Macdonald are the first three to be sentenced to deletion.
The report says that for some students, the names might act as “a potentially harmful microaggression.” It goes on: “Having to enter school buildings commemorating such individuals may even contribute to mental-health triggers which negatively impact students, staff or families’ ability to effectively participate in the school environment.”
It may not occur to the kids rushing to gym class in Dundas Junior Public that they are the victims of microaggression (if they even know who Dundas was), but the TDSB is going to protect them from it all the same.
As for the cost of making new signs, plaques and team jerseys with whatever name is chosen to replace the three forbidden ones, well, not to worry. The report says that the changes “will be implemented within the existing budget framework.”
What the board seems to have missed is that the climate on historical erasure is changing. Most people don’t much like being called settlers in their own country, even if they accept that great crimes were committed against its original inhabitants in the process of settlement.
A reaction against all this is one reason that Pierre Poilievre of the Conservatives has been leading in the opinion polls and that the abysmal Donald Trump is in the White House again.
Decent countries acknowledge their past sins while also celebrating their virtues. It is a balancing act, hard to get right. Schools are a good place to learn it. They should be teaching students about residential schools and slavery, Expo 67 and Terry Fox. They should be showing them that history is more than a simple story of heroes and villains. They should be asking them to debate the record of names like Dundas, Ryerson and Macdonald, gathering all the evidence and weighing the good against the bad.
What they should not be doing is stripping those names from their front doors.