This summer, Wilmot, Ontario council voted to bring back its statues of Canada’s former prime ministers, which had been sent to storage after being considered too controversial. Author and historian J.D.M. Stewart details the township’s 12-year-long history war and how he thinks Canadians can both celebrate and critique its historical figures.
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Program Transcript
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HARRISON LOWMAN: Welcome to Hub Hits. I’m Harrison Lowman, managing editor of the Hub. This summer the township of Wilmot, Ontario near Waterloo unanimously voted to reinstate the Prime Minister’s path. It’s an art installation that was meant for Canada’s 150th birthday. Consisting of statues of nine of Canada’s former leaders, the vote marked the final battle of a 12 year long history war. Only four years previously, after the Sir John A statue was vandalized, council had voted for to put all the statues in storage and end the project completely. Today I’m joined by author and historian J.D.M. Stewart who sits across from me. His new book coming out next month is the Prime Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped. He’s taught history for some 30 years and he wrote a piece for us that looked at this historical saga. J.D.M., thank you so much for joining us in studio today. How are you?
J.D.M. STEWART: Good to be here, Harrison? I’m great. How are you?
HARRISON LOWMAN: I’m good, I’m good. I. A little birdie told me that you were at the very meeting that then had the vote, the council vote that led to the decision to bring back these statues. You spoke at that meeting advocating for the decision that eventually occurred. This was four years after council there had voted to scrap the project. What was the mood in the room like? What was it like being there?
J.D.M. STEWART: It was great to be there and the mood, I mean the mayor herself noted that there were quite a few people in the chambers that day for the issue because I think it had attracted quite a bit of attention over the last few years in the community. So there were a lot of supporters for the reinstatement of the Prime Minister’s path. And I’d say the energy was high minded. Civic engagement.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Could you hear a pendulum swinging behind you as you spoke?
J.D.M. STEWART: Pendulums are usually pretty quiet, but I could feel that one was swinging. And I think if you look at what’s happened at Queen’s park where the Ontario legislature is and they’ve unveiled the Sir John A. MacDonald statue there once more and now we see what’s happening in Wilmot Township. I think there is a pendulum that is swinging in terms of perhaps a bit more of a reasonable and nuanced look at Canadian history.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Talk about a nuanced look, what’s happening now. So what comes out of this vote? What are the next steps?
J.D.M. STEWART: So what will happen now is the, the council will bring the statues out of storage and they’re going to appoint a steering committee which will be another committee.
HARRISON LOWMAN: another committee.
J.D.M. STEWART: But a series of a committee of volunteers who will decide how the statues will be placed and what the future of the project will be, which will not involve any public money. So this steering committee, I think will have its hands full to steer the project through over the next few years. But if they get the right people on the committee and there are like minded other people who are interested in this project, I think it has a pretty good future.
HARRISON LOWMAN: So nine statues, four that still have to be revealed. I think it’s the Prime Minister’s. What do they call them again? The Terrible Four?
J.D.M. STEWART: No, the Lost Four. The Lost Four, I think they call them. And Those are the four prime ministers who served after Sir John A. Macdonald died in 1891. So you had John Abbott and you had John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell and Charles Tupper.
HARRISON LOWMAN: There we go, quiz right here.
J.D.M. STEWART: Right, trivia pursuit questions.
HARRISON LOWMAN: And Sir John A. Who was removed in 2020, you can see him behind us. There was some vandalism that occurred, the rest removed in 2021. He’s gonna be there, but pardon the pun, he’ll be off the beaten path because apparently they don’t want people to be confronted by his presence as they walk along the path. You have to choose to see him, is that what you’re thinking?
J.D.M. STEWART: I think this was a concession to those who didn’t want to see the statues out at all and where John A. MacDonald had been taking the brunt of that disagreement. And so in a concession, I would say the council said, well, we’ll make John A. MacDonald to be sort of in a place a little bit further away where you have to make an intentional decision to go see him. Now, when I wrote in my piece in The Hub, I still said this seems like, you know, a bit of protectionism that we don’t need in history. I think people are fully able to handle Canada’s history and face it head on, whether they agree with policies of one person or another or they disagree with the policy. So I wasn’t really in favor of that position of the council. But this is all part of putting a little bit of water in your wine to get things done I think.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Just before we move forward with a greater historical conversation. You mentioned price. Some $162,000 in government money was spent from 2020 to the end of 2024 on consultation with First Nation groups. Removal, storage, what do you make of that price tag? And it seems like now they’re not going to be using taxpayer dollars anymore moving forward. Is that the thinking?
J.D.M. STEWART: Right. So I think some councillors spoke about this at the meeting on the 28th. And I think the feeling in the township is they’re tired of spending taxpayers money on seemingly endless historical squabbles. So they’ve decided that there will be no more public money in this affair, which I guess makes some sense. Although personally I think public money can go towards historical education, art installations and things like this. But in this particular situation, I think the citizens, the taxpayers of Wilmot Township were tired of the money that was going towards this project. And it just seemed to be people squabbling about history and things. They’d had enough of it.
HARRISON LOWMAN: What do you make of those that come back and they say, you know, these aren’t squabbles, this is glorifying folks that were outright racists and you’re putting them on plinths and like, where’s your mind at in terms of responding to those folks? And did you see them at these meetings?
J.D.M. STEWART: There were some people who were opposed to the reinstatement of the Prime Minister’s path at the meeting, but they were outnumbered by those who were supporting it. That said, this particular Prime Minister’s path was purposely designed not to glorify historical figures. They’re not on plinths, they are life sized. In some cases the statues, the personages done are seated. For example, the statue of Lester B. Pearson, he’s sitting down so. Well, that’s Mackenzie King, but again Mackenzie King, he’s seated as well. So it’s not about glorification. And that’s I think one of the problems that this is a bit of misinformation that gets out there. These statues and this particular project, the Prime Minister’s path is not about glorification, it’s about education. And that’s a really important point to drive home.
HARRISON LOWMAN: What’s the happy medium we had endless talk the last few years ago about. And I guess they’re doing this at Queen’s Park. You mentioned Sir John A. Was in a box there for some five years. Is this. Should it be accompanied by a plaque that explains more? Should it be accompanied by a competing statue that plays off of what can be perceived as mistakes made by these leaders when they were in power? What do you think the right mix is? It’s additive. Obviously at this point the consensus seems to be it’s additive as opposed to subtracting things. What are the additions?
J.D.M. STEWART: So in terms of Wilmot Township, that’s up to the steering committee to decide how they’re going to proceed and how they want to portray the statues. But I think they, their plan is to make sure that whoever interacts with those statues that they will come away with an understanding both of the achievements of the Prime Minister, but also of the things we might redo in history. So it’s not going to be one side of the story. It will be a balanced perspective of the Prime Minister’s legacy, which is how it should be in terms of other statues going forward. And I think one of the questions now is what about the other statues that are in storage of Sir John A. MacDonald in Prince Edward county, in Victoria, in Hamilton, in Charlottetown.
So I think we’re at a point where we can bring those. I would advocate to bring those statues out of storage. I would advocate for education to be further up front with statues. And I don’t think we’ve done that before, but that would be a way to move forward. And I don’t think it really. We’re not really a glorifying kind of country. We don’t put statues up of people necessarily to glorify them. We more chop them down. So I think it’s time to bring those statues, but educate people. And then remember Karen Restuole, who is a contributor to the Hub, she put out a great tweet. She’s Indigenous too, and she is. And she said, look, one of the things to do is let’s have our statues of Sir John MacDonald or other people that have been there, but let’s be adding future statues and get more statues up of somebody like Tom Longboat, Frederick Loft, Tecumseh, other Indigenous people. So, you know, we can do this and we just need to. Our concept of the country is always evolving and we’re at a point here where we should be and we can be adding statues of other people whom we really respect.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Do your sources say out in the field that we will see movement as it relates to these statues? You mentioned Charlottetown, Hamilton, where I remember, sorry, Kingston, where, you know, Sir John A’s hometown, where I remember council voting 12 to 1 about his statue being moved, I think to the cemetery where his grave is. But there’s been no movement there. It seems like that one’s also in storage. Prince Edward County, Charlottetown, Victoria. Is this, you know, is this gonna set a precedent?
J.D.M. STEWART: Well, there’s still pressure that needs to be applied. And I’m on the advisory council of an organization called the Canadian Institute for Historical Education. And we’re very much in favor of seeing these statues come out. And we continue to lobby and educate for why those statues should come out of storage. There’s another Toronto Lawyer and former candidate for parliament named Mark Johnson, who runs an organization called Save Our History. And he has also been a very strong advocate for getting these statues out of storage. So there are people who believe that it’s time to pull them out because why are we hiding our history in storage units? Surely we can have the debates about them. And I think four years ago the feeling was quite different from now. There was a lot of anger, there was a lot of fear, there was a lot of emotion involved with the Truth and Reconciliation Report, the supposed discovery of unmarked graves in Kamloops, which we still don’t know the status of those. And so people were really searching and acting very emotionally. It’s time now for a bit more rationality, I would say.
HARRISON LOWMAN: At the time, I think you used the term generational chauvinism. Can you define what that means?
J.D.M. STEWART: I don’t know. Did I use that term?
HARRISON LOWMAN: It certainly was the name of one of your talks. I don’t know if you wrote it or someone else.
J.D.M. STEWART: Right. I think it really goes back to what I was saying earlier, that we need to have a better understanding of our past and we live in an age where it’s very difficult to have good conversations about history. And I used this example in another interview I was doing. And I said in a history classroom we would have all kinds of airings of views and we would exchange our ideas based on evidence. But in the social media world, the quick hit world where people are just reacting, it’s very, it’s a lot harder to do that. But that’s what we should be doing is having those kinds of conversations with not a lot of emotion brought into them with evidence. Thoughtful. I listen to you, you listen to me. The kind of respectful dialogue that is the hallmark of a civil society.
HARRISON LOWMAN: The trouble I think J.D.M. is not so much that people have misinformed views when it comes to history, it’s often that they’re under informed. I don’t know how many Canadians are actually engaging with their history. I don’t know how many have read a history book that is. Then you know, they’ve read that and maybe they’ve read something else and then they find their opinion somewhere in the middle.
J.D.M. STEWART: Right.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Is a huge problem here. You know, additionally that just Canadians are not engaging or consumers of our history at all?
J.D.M. STEWART: It’s true for sure. And that’s been the cause of my life is to teach and talk about Canadian history and try to get a better informed country. So we don’t teach a lot of history. First of all, in our school system. So that is one place we could fix. But also, I think the more we talk about Canadian history, the more we can. That’s probably the one good thing about these controversies, is that at least it gets people talking about Canadian history. When I was at the Wilmot Township, I said this is such a great example for students to see that history is very much alive and debated. And so it’s good to have those debates.
But I wish that people were. I wish that governments were taking their history more seriously so that we were funding the library and archives properly, that we did have history taught in high school across the country where every kid had to graduate from high school with a credit in Canadian history. That’s not the case right now. So we’ve been fighting that battle for decades, Harrison. And all I can say is that we have to keep fighting it.
HARRISON LOWMAN: I sometimes wish when I take my subway ride to work and pass Runnymede station, I hope that other people around me look at the name and perhaps wonder what the word means, history behind that. But maybe I might be too optimistic. Do you have a sense of the Carney government if their approach to all this has changed? There was a lot of protests on the right about how the Trudeau government had a certain view of history. Is the Carney government perhaps more open to a nuanced approach?
J.D.M. STEWART: I haven’t seen the evidence of that yet. We’ll see what happens when the budget comes out in the fall if what they’ve done in terms of funding various institutions that support Canadian history. But surely the Carney government would understand that in this critical moment where Canadian identity is the essence of Canada is under attack and that Canadians are looking for those causes and threads that unite the country. Surely they will understand that therefore Canadian history is a part of. Of the underpinning of Canadian identity. And they’ll put the money where it needs to go to support institutions that promote and disseminate our Canadian history.
HARRISON LOWMAN: This quote from one of the councillors in Wilmot I really liked. These councilors seem very well spoken.
J.D.M. STEWART: Are you quoting Chris Wilkinson right now? Is that who you’re quoting.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Dunstall. Who says history does not repeat itself by accident. It repeats because we forget, we rewrite, or we just don’t want to face the fact that history is human and it is shaped by the fear and the flawed decisions. I thought that was a nice one.
J.D.M. STEWART: Yeah. That’s Councilor Lillian Dunstan. I think it is.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Dunstall.
J.D.M. STEWART: Yeah, Dunstall. She was great. And actually, I would encourage viewers to Take a look at the council meeting that took place there because Dunstall was a great speaker, but so was Chris Wilkinson. And the statement issued by the mayor, Natasha Solonen after was also very, very nuanced, very measured and very Canadian, I would say, in its way of looking at the issue without, you know, without coming down really hard on one side or the other. It was a very sort of Laurier like compromise and bit of tolerance and looking for common ground, which I think is really important. We seem to be forgetting in this country that there is a common ground. There is a lot of common ground in Canada, and we need to be searching for that and pointing it out more often than we are. And I think that’s really something we could do in the country to help us moving forward.
HARRISON LOWMAN: So are we going to be seeing new prime ministers added to this project? Will I see a bronze Stephen Harper, A copper prime minister Justin Trudeau? Like, what’s, how long is this path?
J.D.M. STEWART: I mean, anything’s possible. I know that there are thoughts of other statues being added into the mix sooner than later. So a lot of this will depend on how the steering committee moves forward. But I know that there is support for more statues out there.
HARRISON LOWMAN: Okay, well, we might have to visit Wilmot, Ontario in coming weeks. You’ll have to point it out on a map for me.
J.D.M. STEWART: It’s going to be the Coopers town of prime ministers Harrison. There’s a chance.
HARRISON LOWMAN: That’s author and historian J.D.M. Stewart. His book comes out, I believe, September 30th. So look at bookshelves, find bookstores everywhere for that.
