Comment
Action, not symbols
It was a poor process. A handful of folks (Working Group) making a recommendation to another small group of folks (Prince Edward Heritage Advisory Committee), making a recommendation to another small group (Council) to decide on a consequential community matter.
When exactly are the folks who live here permitted to express their view? It is an important question. For what is the message if the result of a cloistered process, involving a couple of dozen folks, is to decide what is offensive in our community? And what is our story? These are big issues. They require a bigger discussion.
Alas, the process is the problem. A small clutch of anointed folk has recommended removing the Holding Court sculpture, depicting Sir John A. Macdonald as a young man, from public view on Picton’s Main Street. They believe they are doing this for our own good, or at least for the good of the broader community. For as University of Manitoba teacher Sean Carleton underlined in his presentation to the working group, the rest of us are just not smart enough, not aware enough, nor sensitive enough to make this decision on our own. We need the prescriptive editing of history to correct our collective thinking. As a result, this small group of wise folks seem prepared to make this decision on our behalf. For they know best. And, in this way, we will all be made better people for their wisdom.
In fairness, the individuals making this recommendation are doing what was asked of them. The fault is not theirs. Rather it underlines the fact that it was a failed process from the outset. Furthermore, council must work to seek a broader consensus on the fate of the Holding Court sculpture. For the issues at stake are much greater than this sculpture. Bigger than Sir John A.
We exist in a time of unblinking clarity. Of enlightenment. Of absolutes. Right and wrong is obvious and uncontested. We are on the side of right— and only the evil, corrupt, selfish or stupid exist on the other side. This condition is evident in near-constant outrage.
We are being ushered, with greater urgency, to huddle with like-minded folks. Social media facilitates this sorting, enabling us to wall ourselves off from other viewpoints. We don’t have to hear another voice that varies with that of our tribe.
In this polarized atmosphere, we see only the failings of democracy. The fragility of one person, one vote. For not everyone is as enlightened as our group—therefore, we must seek ways to magnify our influence and diminish the impact of the other. The everyman has become a threat. To be thwarted and marginalized.
Council can veer from this dangerous path. It can instead commit to a thorough and comprehensive public consultation process. One that facilitates a conversation of Macdonald’s legacy and the impact on Indigenous people. It can commit to a process that respects fundamental democratic principles. It can choose to trust its citizens.
Or it may simply accept and implement the recommendations of its two divided committees. Then what? Who shall be served if council decides to delete Sir John A. Macdonald from Main Street based upon these recommendations?
How does this work? Addition by subtraction? Forgive me, but it all seems so shortsighted, a bit narcissistic and utterly patronizing. Imagine we were to succeed in this consciousness-raising project and we managed to root out and expunge every symbol or vestige of our nation’s first prime minister. How does this get clean water in Attawapiskat? How does it eradicate systemic racism in policing and justice institutions in this country? How does the erasure of Macdonald from our collective memory improve the lives of our Indigenous neighbours in any measurable way?
Even if we concede that these ills have their roots in our colonial past, is our time and energy not better spent addressing those ills directly? Or shall we spend the next decade or so obliterating our history in the hope that these very real problems simply go away?
Ultimately removing Holding Court seems an empty and hollow gesture. Merely the latest in a long tradition of empty gestures between our communities.
I believe most Canadians and most County residents are hungry to improve the relationship with our Indigenous neighbours. Let us marshal that goodwill to do meaningful things. Measurable things. Council can facilitate this with a proper public consultation that looks beyond the fate of a couple of hundred pounds of bronze on Main Street.
Dear Rick,
YOU, and all of the Quinte and County journalists that have been supporting Canada’s crimes against humanity in indigenous Canada for centuries with your collective silence, have lost your traditional privileges to dominate Canadian thinking with more political lies and deceptions. Your Time for lying is over. Our Time for Truth telling has come.
It’s time to destroy the official delusions of British Christian supremacy that harmed, destroyed, and continue to destroy millions of innocent indigenous lives, especially young and vulnerable lives. The child suicide rates on native reserves are reaching epidemic levels.
Since 1867, the Canadian press had countless opportunities for Glasnot, or political truth telling, yet it failed to take the first steps toward an ethical Canada that would be governed by truth, instead of racial and class domination and hatred.
Thanks to our Canadian press, Canada has been a dark and repugnant hole where human lives were devalued by Christian politics, and no one knew what was really happening. The Canadian press was part of British Christian conspiracy to hide its evil sins against humanity, which the Truth and Reconciliation Report blew out of the water and exposed.
The Times have changed, and now it’s Time to hold the villains to account. One thousand protestors marched on Picton’s Main Street last June during Black Lives Matter week to launch an era of Glasnot.
I started the process in PEC years ago, and it’s good to see that the spark has not died.
The way Corey has been selectively excluding, censoring, and shaping County and national news in the Times, makes it look like the County now has another Zionist publication to create more political darkness in PEC, and control our thinking, just like the Postmedia weekly that fails to serve the County as an ethical publication.
Rick condemned The Times when he wrote: “And what is our story? These are big issues. They require a bigger discussion.” His cheap and empty cliches are self serving only, and piled on top of a mountain of lies, deceptions, and distortions known as Canada’s false narrative, co-created by a racially hateful Canadian press that continues to support colonial and post colonial crimes against humanity, committed by British and French Christian terrorists in indigenous Canada.
The Dominion of Canada was build on criminal foundations constructed with colonial terrorism, defined as: “the use of violence and threats of violence to gain political control over indigenous people and their land wealth.” The root definition is from a Canadian Edition of Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary, printed in 1963, before the Bush organization bastardized the term “terrorism” to provide political cover for American terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Haiti, and Israel. American tax dollars pay for Israel’s military colonization of Palestine.
Corey has refused to publish my LTE, in which I expose local, and international colonial terrorism of every kind, in response to David Frum’s attempts to downplay the destructive horrors of colonialism that was imposed on indigenous Canada. Frum continues to protect and grow criminal colonialism, that started in Jericho when Yahweh is reported to have committed his first holocaust, when he slaughtered and burned every living thing left behind by Joshua, as a sacrifice to himself. Yahweh led and inspired Israel’s colonial terrorism, and would go on to inspire Constantine to create the colonizing religion which he called Roman Christianity.
Classical colonialism can be traced back to Roman Despot Constantine in 325 BCE, who invented Roman Christianity to control the hearts and minds of Rome’s slaves and defeated nations with a fake pacifying religion. He created enslaving legislation that was copied by British nobles, and use to enslave the indigenous worlds.
The entire process of determining the future of “Holding Court” seems unfortunately to have gone off the rails. What was intended to be an exercise of reconciliation has become an exercise in divisiveness. The effort to decide the fate of the statue has become like trying to decide what lines to paint on the field before we decide what game we want to play. I would suggest that we need to step back from an adversarial approach and take the time to figure out as a whole community what we really want our relationship with the indigenous peoples to be and vice versa. This discussion would require their full input along with all the rest of us who call the County home. It is time for us to focus on the future, to see how good we can be together. Perhaps when we figure that out, the decision on Holding Court will be much easier.
The public was more than thoroughly consulted, and anyway, the voice of the majority is irrelevant when considering the rights of an oppressed minority… what’s right is right, end of. This editorial is ridiculous and says more about who runs this paper than anybody else. Byeee
The Macdonald caricature on Main Street, represents the hateful social delusion called British Christian Supremacy, that took Canada with classical colonial terrorism, that produced endless crimes against humanity through Canada’s so called post-colonial period when it became a nation of child abusers.
The ongoing social delusion known as British Christian Supremacy destroyed millions of indigenous lives, and continues to destroy more lives on Indian reservations where the child suicide rate has reached epidemic proportions.
I think that anyone who reads the Truth and Reconciliation with ethical eyes, will quickly transcend the cultural conditioning that shaped Canadians, and blinded to the crimes against humanity being committed in indigenous Canada by British and French Christian terrorists, who were paid to terrorize hundreds of thousands of native children with physical, emotional, and spiritual terrorism. There is no ethical defence
for these crimes against children.
Poor process, or not…the truth is that if that piece isn’t put safely into a museum…it’s going to be destroyed by the vandals who want it gone. Pretty sure we all can guess who that is. Put John in a museum…for his own safety.
Hehehe, you got ratio’ed, on your own editorial, for your own paper, in your little isolated tiny corner of the world on a bbs board, 2o minutes before lunch. I’d try your hand at delivering papers for a while not writing them.
You lament the lack of public consultation. How much consultation was there to bring the statue to Picton in the first place? I don’t remember any!
Yes it won’t bring relief to Indigenous peoples in any tangible way, except symbolically. But symbols are important!
Use your imagination to think about how Indigenous people feel when they pass that statue every day when they drive through Picton.
I personally am sick of looking at statues of men, as though they are the only persons to make contributions to our society.
There was plenty of public consultation via the “Have your say platform” (which is manned by the municipality) in addition to countless deputations from the community and surrounding communities. Representation on the working group committee was diverse and they put in an incredible amount of work and time (all volunteered) to make a recommendation. Saying that it was a flawed process and implying that the members of the working group were just randomly selecting people is disrespectful to the work and task they undertook. Please look into the actual process and the work that was put forth before making such generalizations.
Sorry but actual members of the Working Group stated that it was flawed, contentious and had strong bias. They ommitted Chief Maracles words in their report where he stated tearing down solves nothing. This is an outstanding article that welcomes thought. Sir John looks fine where he stands. We should never succumb to a Cancel Culture group or to criminal vandals who hide but attempt to push their agenda upon us.
Yet another ridiculous, uninformed diatribe. The public was thoroughly consulted.