When my wife and I were students at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in 1978, we often spent our weekends enjoying the city’s many delightful amenities, including sailing on Lake Ontario and visiting local historic sites. Among the places we frequented was Bellevue House, the one-time home of Kingston’s most famous resident and Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.
Built in 1840 by a wealthy local merchant and rented to Macdonald and his wife Isabella in 1848-1849, the house is a striking example of the Italianate style of architecture that was new at the time and quickly became popular among the well-to-do. With expectations that Kingston might soon become the capital of Canada, the ambitious Macdonald settled into the glamourous residence as a recently-elected legislator for Canada West (present-day Ontario) in pre-Confederation Canada.
It was not a happy time for the young family, unfortunately. The rent on the house was beyond their modest means and their first son, John Jr., died there as an infant. The Macdonalds left Bellevue House shortly afterwards. The house remained a private residence until the federal government purchased it in 1964 and turned it into an historic park as part of Canada’s 1967 Centennial celebrations; it was designated a national historic site in 1995. When we first visited, Bellevue House looked every one of its 138 years.
Despite its fascinating backstory, Bellevue House in 1978 was a rather dreary experience. There was no bright and airy visitor centre on the grounds to welcome guests, as there is now. The house itself was poorly lit and signage inside said little about Macdonald or his many accomplishments. (Perhaps because most visitors learned all about him in school.) Several of the upstairs rooms were closed to the public and the washrooms were located in a grim basement. The surrounding gardens were also quite spartan. Visitors mostly came to admire the architecture and period furnishings (or what they could make out in the gloom) and pay homage to Canada’s founding father.
Major renovations were carried out in the 1980s, including construction of a reception centre where the carriage house used to be. Two upstairs rooms were re-opened as period bedrooms and the basement was returned to its original role as a scullery; the public washrooms were moved to the new visitor centre. Despite the improvements, however, the house’s aging infrastructure – floors, wiring, roof, and so on – remained largely untouched and slowly rotted away during the ensuing years.
Given the impressive modernization effort, Bellevue House is arguably in better shape today than when it was first built.
In 2012, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government dramatically reduced Parks Canada funding as part of its plan to return the federal budget to balance. Along with many other historic sites across the country, Bellevue House had its opening hours and staff sharply reduced. Necessary structural repairs were also put off. By 2017 it was in such bad shape that it was closed year-round. This past May it was finally reopened to the public. According to Parks Canada, which oversees Canada’s historic sites, the “extensive renewal” of Bellevue House now “tells broader, more inclusive stories about Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.” It’s a good news/bad news situation.
First the Good News
This summer my wife and I returned to Bellevue House for the first time since our student days. We are pleased to report it looks fantastic. The new stucco, moulding, panelling, paint and roof work have the place literally gleaming. The gardens have been enlarged and are now well-suited to a leisurely ramble. A spacious parking area has also been added since we last visited. The well-lit rooms are packed with decorative and practical articles from Macdonald’s era. And a team of eager young staff seem well-informed and keen to engage with visitors, although they’ll leave you alone if you prefer to wander at your own pace.
Given the impressive modernization effort, Bellevue House is arguably in better shape today than when it was first built. And that is important. While Macdonald’s short stay at Bellevue House was not a particularly happy one, the building itself is clearly part of Canada’s political and historical heritage. It certainly has a stronger claim on our patrimony than the many colonial-era inns throughout New England that boast “George Washington once slept here” have on America’s past. As Canada’s most important historical figure, part of Macdonald’s legacy is embodied in this house. And now it has been returned to the state of its glory days in the 1840s when Kingston was a city of destiny and Macdonald a young politician on the move. That alone is a very good thing.
Then the Bad News
Unfortunately, Bellevue House has become yet another battlefield in the federal Liberal’s war against what are sneeringly referred to as “dead white males” and the alleged evils of colonialism. As such, it reflects the lamentable decline in historical competency throughout Parks Canada’s portfolio. Bellevue House further reveals the apparent requirement under the Justin Trudeau government’s sweeping policy of “reconciliation” that Indigenous opinion be inserted into all possible government activities and institutions, regardless of relevancy or accuracy. As such, no opportunity is missed to paint our first prime minister in as unfavourable a light as possible. The goal, it appears, is to cancel Macdonald in his own house. This makes for a rather odd visitor experience.
After making one’s way through the welcome centre, guests are confronted with a variety of messages along the path to Bellevue House. Purportedly garnered from comments by earlier visitors, the messages range from entirely factual, such as, “We wouldn’t have Canada without him,” to the deliberately unsetting “He was a monster.” Without any context for this commentary, visitors – and especially impressionable young schoolchildren – will quickly figure out which responses comprise the “proper” view of the man.
The federal government’s plan to tell “broader and more inclusive stories” about Macdonald is as subtle as a sledgehammer. According to its opening-day press release, Parks Canada “formed working groups with Indigenous partners, culturally diverse members of Kingston and area communities…to share stories and develop new exhibit content.” Native Canadians may have plenty of stories to tell about Macdonald (although no Indigenous person alive today knew Macdonald personally or had any direct experience of him). But are they historically true and relevant to his time at Bellevue?
As visitors make their way through the house, they will notice nearly every room has some sort of aboriginal artifact on display. Some additions are modest and easily overlooked. On the main floor, for example, a dining room filled with Victorian-era dishes, candelabra and other knick-knacks also holds a side table with a collection of indigenous herbs such as sweetgrass, tobacco and sage; there are also books of native art on the shelves. It seems unlikely any of this would have been here when Macdonald rented the house. Then again, nearly all the items on display have no direct connection to Macdonald.
Upstairs the mood turns far more serious. A nursery with cradle (possibly the only authentic Macdonald artifact in the entire house) evokes a somber mood given the death of John Jr. On display in the same room, however, is a cradleboard used to secure an aboriginal infant to her mother’s back. And on the walls are excerpts from Macdonald’s speeches in the House of Commons promoting residential schools as the means to assimilate native children into Canadian society.
The obvious goal is to remind visitors of the impact residential schools had on aboriginal children in the very bedroom where Macdonald’s own child died. If visitors still don’t get the message, a video screen blares out interviews with residential school “survivors” on an endless loop. Children as young as four-years old, guests are informed, were forcibly removed from their families and sent to such schools, perpetrating “violent assimilation and abuse”. We are meant to have no sympathy for Macdonald’s own tragic loss.
In other second floor rooms, informative panels variously describe Macdonald the man, the politician and nation builder. These achievements – saving the Canadian colonies from being swallowed up by the United States, bringing them together into Confederation and binding the country with a transcontinental railway, among other feats of statesmanship – will be familiar to anyone who has read one of the many biographies of Macdonald, including Richard Gwyn’s magnificent two-volume work.
But wherever Macdonald’s very real achievements are mentioned, they are always married with some sort of attack on his policies, personal character or the era in which he lived. Besides residential schools, this includes the starvation of Indigenous tribes on the Prairies in the 1890s, the Chinese head tax and on and on. “His vision for Canada did not include everyone,” states one sign, deliberately undercutting his commitment to Canadian democracy. A lexicon helpfully defines key terms visitors will encounter repeatedly throughout the house: colonialism, genocide, racism et cetera.
“Stories” in Abundance, Truth in Short Supply
At Bellevue House’s reopening ceremonies in May, Rodrick Donald Maracle, Chief of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, exclaimed, “Macdonald supported oppression of Indigenous Peoples’ identity; their language, spirituality, the places they came from were stripped from them…The new exhibits at Bellevue House provide a place where truths about Macdonald are able to be fully discussed.”
Parks Canada controls the narrative by choosing which ‘facts’ to present and which to omit. Indeed, it deliberately misses numerous opportunities to provide visitors with crucial ‘non-biased’ facts about Macdonald’s actual accomplishments and beliefs.
Maracle’s unrestrained antipathy towards Macdonald is clearly the prime example of the “broader and more inclusive stories” Parks Canada wants Bellevue House to tell. Despite its explicit mandate to “protect and present nationally significant examples of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage and foster public understanding,” Parks Canada makes no effort to let visitors know which stories are legitimate and which are pure fiction.
In an interview with a travel writer for The Globe and Mail, Tamara van Dyk, Bellevue’s Visitor Experience Manager, said, “We can’t tell [visitors] how to feel about this history. But we can help them to understand this history…we share facts, non-biased facts.” This is a transparent cop-out; Parks Canada controls the narrative by choosing which “facts” to present and which to omit. Indeed, it deliberately misses numerous opportunities to provide visitors with crucial “non-biased” facts about Macdonald’s actual accomplishments and beliefs. (The Globe article is also noteworthy for its grotesque error in claiming the “confirmation, in 2021, of hundreds of unmarked graves discovered on the grounds of Canada’s residential schools.” There was never any such “confirmation” and, where excavations at suspected grave sites have been subsequently performed, no human remains have been unearthed.)
Among the ample exculpatory evidence about Macdonald missing from Bellevue House’s numerous information plaques and displays is that most Indigenous students during Macdonald’s era went to day schools, not residential schools. Further, between 1891, when Macdonald died, and 1950, half of all residential school students dropped out after grade 1, hardly indicative of a program of “violent assimilation”. Children at residential schools were also sent home to their parents for a two-month summer holiday every year and, if practical, for the Christmas and Easter holidays as well. These facts – verifiable and true – are entirely inconsistent with the suggestion Macdonald deliberately plotted genocide, cultural or otherwise.
Also unmentioned is the Macdonald government’s extremely successful smallpox vaccination campaign for native Canadians. Over a period of more than 20 years, the Government of Canada sought to inoculate every Indigenous resident. Some natives were inoculated twice and, in at least one instance, a group of natives received their shots before local white residents did. If genocide was Macdonald’s goal, why go to such trouble to save so many Indigenous people from disease?
Similarly, despite the surfeit of Indigenous content in nearly every room, no mention is ever made of Macdonald’s many friendships with prominent aboriginal Canadians. This includes Oronhyatekha (aka Burning Cloud), a member of the Six Nations Confederacy who attended the Mohawk Institute Residential School and later graduated from the universities of Toronto and Oxford. Oronhyatekha campaigned for Macdonald in the 1872 election and later named his first child after him.
Another close contact was Kahkewaquonaby (aka Peter Jones), the head chief of the Mississauga of New Credit, who received his medical degree from Queen’s University in 1866 and acted as a political organizer for Macdonald. He was also consulted on changes to the federal Electoral Franchise Act in 1885, an effort by Macdonald to give all native Canadians the vote, but which was stymied by his political opponents.
As to the Chinese head tax, the historical record shows Macdonald was a consistent foe of the idea; his instincts were always to defend minority rights. It was his political adversaries, largely anti-immigrant nativists in British Columbia, who forced Macdonald’s hand on the matter. When head tax proponents first demanded a $100-per-person tax, he appointed a Commission that countered with a very modest $10. And while Macdonald’s government eventually settled on $50, the tax had no appreciable impact on Chinese immigration. It was Macdonald’s Liberal successor, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who hiked it to an unaffordable $500, effectively shutting down Chinese immigration for many years.
The Summing Up
Parks Canada’s revitalization of Bellevue House presents an opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the debate about Macdonald’s place in our country’s history at a time when his reputation has come under assault from many sides. Clearly, this effort is not entirely successful. A magnificent renovation and modernization project has been marred by decolonization faddism. But is the good of its physical make-over outweighed by the bad of the historical nonsense?
Putting myself in a judge’s seat and based on my experiences at the property in 1978 and today, I find the changes to Bellevue House are, on balance, a benefit to Canada. The haphazard insertion of Indigenous artifacts in the room displays and the validation of untrue or hopelessly biased “stories” about Macdonald is certainly disconcerting and distracting at times. Yet many of these additions are so irrelevant or harmless – the native herbs in the dining room, a red ribbon dress in Macdonald’s own dressing room – that the visitor can easily disregard them.
Bellevue House ought to be seen as a physical manifestation of Macdonald and his enduring importance to Canada. And that alone is reason for hope.
Other additions are harder to overlook: a sign proclaiming Canada’s first prime minister to have been a monster, the video and audio barrage inside the house as well as the repeated efforts at undercutting Macdonald’s many political accomplishments. Every room upstairs makes some claim to this effect. And while initially grating, over time it all becomes rather silly. What calumny will they come up with next? The cumulative effect is so incongruous and contextually out-of-place that eventually one becomes numb to it – the way our brains tune out an unpleasant smell. And having done that, all that’s left is the house itself: a magnificent example of colonial-era British Canada.
Parks Canada’s attempted cancellation of Macdonald in his own residence was always an absurd mission. Unlike the erasure of his name from various schools or other buildings and landmarks across the country, or the toppling of his statues, Bellevue House has not been removed as a physical presence. It still stands. Remember, the only reason Ottawa owns the house in the first place and then spent so long fixing it up is, as its national historic site designation states, because “it is associated with Sir John A. Macdonald, a Father of Confederation and Canada’s first Prime Minister.” Visitors to the site are not drawn there by a desire to learn more about his personal flaws or to view a random collection of Indigenous bits and pieces. Rather the magnetic force is and always has been Macdonald’s own unparalleled significance as a national figure. And with most of these actual historical achievements given at least grudging acknowledgement throughout the house, any discerning visitor should be able to separate the numerous grains of truth from the vast bushels of chaff.
For all time: Macdonald’s significance as Canada’s pre-eminent statesman is what draws visitors to Bellevue House. And this record of achievement is sturdy enough to survive any attempt to cancel him, even by the current federal government. Shown, Macdonald, standing at centre, in Robert Harris’ famous painting Fathers of Confederation, circa 1884. Bellevue House ought to be seen as a physical manifestation of Macdonald and his enduring importance to Canada. And that alone is reason for hope. Given the quality and scale of the renovations, the site will easily outlast our current Liberal government and, one can assume, society’s recent ahistorical convulsions as well. Video screens, red dresses and wall plaques are easily removed. But the house itself is going no where. After many perilous and grim years, Bellevue House is back better than ever. The same will eventually hold true for Macdonald himself. Cultural fads and social hysterics come and go, but his legacy – the legacy of Canada as an improbable country that became one of the world’s most successful and stable democracies – is here to stay. Like his house, it just needs a little sprucing up.
Greg Piasetzki is an intellectual property lawyer with an interest in Canadian history. He lives in Toronto and is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario.
Source of main image: Bellevue House National Historic Site/Facebook.
