Ottawa finally deletes online profile of John A. Macdonald that made no mention of residential schools

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This article was published 07/06/2021 (1334 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A biography of John A. Macdonald was removed from a government website over the weekend, eight months after the Star first reported that it contained no mention of the role of Canada’s first prime minister in creating the country’s residential school system for Indigenous children.

The Macdonald page on the Library and Archives Canada website was showing an “error 404” message on Monday.

The website was altered following publication of a second Star story on Friday that revealed internal discussions had taken place at Library and Archives Canada about what one email called a “deliberate, systematic exclusion of Indigenous and non-white communities and perspectives” on the national library’s Confederation web pages.

The main page of the Confederation section has now been replaced by a “sign-in” prompt, though other pages — which were described in an internal email as having “systematically obscured” the existence of Indigenous populations in Canada — were still accessible via Google on Monday.

Following the publication of the first story last October, Indigenous scholars were sharply critical of the government website for omitting any mention of Macdonald’s role in the creation of an education system that saw thousands of Indigenous children forcibly taken from their homes, many of whom died at the schools.

There was no explanation on the website Monday for why the content had been removed. Library and Archives Canada and the office of Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

Library and Archives Canada told the Star last week that the Confederation web pages and prime minister biographies were “planned to be decommissioned” this month, but did not respond to questions about why it kept the material posted for so long after questions were raised last fall, or who made the decision to keep it online.

Macdonald’s legacy has come under renewed scrutiny following the discovery of 215 children’s unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

“What I have found this whole last week is caring Canadians are way out in front of the government. They’re ready to hear the truth, and are looking for places to go,” said Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, in an interview Saturday.

“And for the government to not be there — as one of the offenders in this whole regime — to not even have done the basic work of putting accurate information on there when it has it in its hands, is another sign of disrespect to those children and Canadians.”

The national library needs to acknowledge it was wrong to have kept the material online for so long, apologize, and outline what it plans to do going forward, said Heather McPherson, NDP critic for Canadian heritage.

“I think it was very wrong of the LAC to keep the documents up for such a long time and I think they owe Indigenous peoples across Canada an apology,” said McPherson said in an interview Monday.

She said that an explanation for why the content has been removed would “be much more appropriate” on the LAC website than simply an error message.

“Eight months is too long,” McPherson said. “When something is flagged, there needs to be a mechanism in place, and the minister needs to put a process in place so that we don’t run into this again.”

While the biographies of Macdonald and other prime ministers have now been removed from the LAC website, other problematic pages remain.

They include the biography of Hector-Louis Langevin, a Father of Confederation who was also involved in the creation of the residential school system — a fact not mentioned in his profile, which remained online as of Monday.

In 2017, the federal government stripped Langevin’s name from the Ottawa building that houses the Prime Minister’s Office.

Jacques Gallant is a Toronto-based reporter covering politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @JacquesGallant