Why Mark Carney Is Comparing Himself to John A. Macdonald

Canada's prime minister is invoking history to explain his own policies, but glossing over the harms of the past.
By Rachel Gilmore.
Sitting in a carefully lit room, with the top button of his shirt undone and the demeanour of a father speaking to his children after a long day at the office, Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed Canadians this week amid escalating trade tensions with the United States.
In doing so, he turned to Canadian history to explain his own policies.
"Our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, recognized the threat of an expansionist United States for what it was and raced to unite this land," Carney calmly and slowly told Canadians in the YouTube video.
"Canada needed an economic and military corridor that could connect our peoples from east to west. And so, at an incredible human and financial cost, Canadians took what was a country on paper and made it real. They built an iron spine."
Carney continued to extol the virtues of Macdonald's major project.
"Almost 5,000 kilometres of railroad track from east to west, the Canadian Pacific Railway stitched together our country and made our presence undeniable and unbreakable," he said.
While Macdonald's rail project was undeniably momentous for Canada, Carney's decision to invoke this particular man, framing him as one who "raced to unite this land," was revealing — particularly given who paid the price for this unification.
Macdonald was such a virulent anti-Indigenous and anti-Chinese racist (even for the time, as historians have noted) that his statues have been pulled down and his name struck off of institutions across the country in recent years. Not only that, but the very project Carney extolled — the Canadian Pacific Railway — was achieved only because those same prejudices were put into action with the exploitation of Chinese labourers and the violent displacement of Indigenous people.
Carney has repeatedly proven to be someone who chooses his words carefully, from his use of the term "transformational" in his meeting with Donald Trump to his Davos speech heard around the world.
In this case, Carney chose to paint the history of a major project as one that may have had some vague "human and financial cost," but that this cost was necessary in order to "unite this land" in the face of U.S. aggression.
It's the same false compromise he's asking Canadians to make in the face of Trump, while Carney relentlessly pursues an extractive agenda that impresses corporate investors but largely ignores Indigenous opposition and dooms future generations to climate catastrophe.
The implications of invoking Macdonald's name
Macdonald is a controversial name for Carney to have invoked at all.
"What on earth does Sir John A. Macdonald have to do with Donald Trump? I mean, if you're going to mention struggles in Canada's creation, you literally cannot leave out the massive genocide committed against Indigenous Peoples," said Pam Palmater, a Mi'kmaq lawyer.
In recent years, his statues have been removed and some institutions named after Macdonald have been renamed, given his key role as an architect of the deadly, racist residential school system.
A right-wing backlash followed these events — one that has increasingly seen Macdonald adopted as a key figure by both mainstream and far-right movements.
In May, the Dominion Society of Canada, a racist far-right group that advocates the mass deportation from the country of millions of largely non-white people, held a rally calling for the city of Hamilton to restore a statue of Macdonald. The group also quotes Macdonald on the home page of its website. For many of these far-right figures, the push for an honest conversation about Macdonald's true legacy is emblematic of the kind of social progress they oppose.
Even for more mainstream right-wing figures, the reference Carney made to Macdonald in his recent video had significant meaning.
"It's an inflection point: the end of the quasi-official cancellation of our fou...