LILLEY: Where was the outrage as Canadians renamed our own history?
· Toronto Sun
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Canadians are furious that Donald Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario. Funny how quiet we were while renaming our own history for a decade.
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The decision by Donald Trump to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America is dumb, juvenile and designed to provoke a response. On that last front, Trump succeeded, as Canadians reacted to this outrageous decision with their own vitriol and bluster.
The irony is that Canada has spent the better part of a decade doing something remarkably similar, stripping the names of historical figures from schools, roads, public buildings and more. None of this means that the renaming of Lake Ontario isn’t serious. It’s just that we are getting angry at Trump being a naming vandal when that’s what we’ve been doing to ourselves.
All weekend, Trump fed into this with posts like the animated video of Canadian geese with Trump-style hairdos and AR-15 rifles, dubbed Donald’s Ducks, patrolling the shores of Lake Ontario, or as Trump now calls it, Lake America.
Should we be outraged?
Yes, but reacting the way that we have as a country just gives Trump what he wants. I was always taught to stand up to bullies, but I was also taught not to let them get a rise out of me.
As a country, we’d be wise to learn that.
Outrage with a side of amnesia
My question for all the people screaming about the renaming of Lake Ontario is: where were they as we renamed schools, roads and more once named for Sir John A. Macdonald? Where were they as we removed our history by pulling down statues dedicated to our first prime minister?
Schools in Nova Scotia and Ontario had Sir John A.’s name dropped from them. Statues in Montreal, Kingston, Regina, Victoria and elsewhere were taken down.
In Saskatoon, John A. Macdonald Road was renamed miyo-wâhkôhtowin, a Cree word meaning “good relationships.” In Ottawa, a federally controlled road, the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, was renamed under the Trudeau government to Kichi Zībī Mīkan, an Algonquin phrase meaning Great River Road.
Where was the outrage over this by the people now furious about Donald Trump changing the name of Lake Ontario? Where was their national pride? Where was their demand that our history be respected?
What about when Egerton Ryerson had his statue torn down, his name taken off the university long associated with him over false claims of connections to residential schools?
Where was the outrage when Edward Cornwallis had his name and image stripped from our public spaces? When Justin Trudeau unilaterally took the name of Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation, off the building that housed the Prime Minister’s Office, why did these same people not step up and raise their voices?
Tearing down our own history
Here in Toronto, we recently renamed Yonge-Dundas Square to Sankofa Square on the false claim that Henry Dundas supported and extended slavery in the British Empire. Sankofa is a Ghanaian word, taken from the language of the people on the west coast of Africa who sold most of the slaves into the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
We have spent close to a decade stripping away our own history, being vandals to our own heritage, and most of the public has been silent.
Now, with a vandal south of the border in Washington doing to us what we have done to ourselves, we are suddenly outraged as a country.
That’s the right reaction, but being outraged at our own actions would have been the right reaction as well.
That’s what makes the double standard so obvious.
The double standard on display
Instead, we had politicians speaking in support, while most of our media soft-pedalled the false claims being made to support these changes.
Be angry at Trump for being a naming vandal. Just don’t pretend we haven’t been doing the same thing to ourselves for a decade — with a lot less outrage and a lot more applause.