Activists push TDSB to Change School Names

But significant resistance may indicate the appetite for the activists’ ideology is waning

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By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

According to media reports, the TDSB has voted 11 to 7 to change the names of three schools: Dundas Junior Public School, Ryerson Community School and Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate Institute. Evidently, a process will now start to choose a new name at each school. We shall see what they end up with, hopefully something better than “Sankofa”, which is the new name for Dundas Square, and has absolutely nothing to do with Canada.

There is nothing wrong, in principle, with changing a school name. Times change, and school names may need to change to reflect changing times. I attended a school which was named after a school board trustee who had served many decades prior to my time at that school. Would it make sense to change the name to that of a person who lived more recently and had a bigger impact on the community? Maybe schools should not be named after people at all, but rather should get their name from some more enduring aspect of the community, city, province, or country? These are fair questions.

But in these three TDSB cases, the reasons being given for the changes are part and parcel of an overall strategy by the activists running the school system to rewrite history according to their narrative of colonial oppression and the victimhood of Indigenous people and “people of colour”.

Were these three men actually evil colonial overlords who perpetuated slavery or carried out genocide?

Henry Dundas

Henry Dundas was born April 28, 1742, Arniston, Midlothian, Scotland and died May 28, 1811, Edinburgh, Scotland. Dundas was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The reason given for removing Dundas’ name from the school is that he was the author of an amendment to a motion for abolition of the Atlantic slave trade which suggested gradual abolition whereas the leaders of the abolitionist movement at the time wanted an immediate end to it. It is worth noting that certain interest groups opposed any abolition at all.

The Encyclopedia Britannica entry for Dundas does not mention anything whatsoever about the slave trade, while Wikipedia contains the following entry:

On 2 April 1792, abolitionist William Wilberforce sponsored a motion in the House of Commons "that the trade carried on by British subjects, for the purpose of obtaining slaves on the coast of Africa, ought to be abolished." He had introduced a similar motion in 1791, which was soundly defeated by MPs, with a vote of 163 opposed, 88 in favour.^[17] Dundas was not present for that vote, but when it was again before MPs in 1792, Dundas tabled a petition from Edinburgh residents who supported abolition.^[18] He then went on to affirm his agreement in principle with Wilberforce's motion: "My opinion has been always against the Slave Trade." He argued, however, that a vote for immediate abolition would be ineffective, as it would drive the slave trade underground or into the hands of foreign nations, beyond Britain's control. He stated: "this trade must be ultimately abolished, but by moderate measures".^[19] He suggested that slavery and the slave trade should be abolished together, and proposed an end to hereditary slavery, which would have enabled the children born to present-day slaves to become free persons upon reaching adulthood.^[18] He then introduced an amendment that would add the word "gradual" to the Wilberforce motion. The amendment was adopted, and the motion passed with a vote of 230–85.^[20] For the first time, the House of Commons voted to end the slave trade.

Based on this account, it is clearly a mischaracterization to say that Dundas delayed the end of the Atlantic Slave Trade. On the contrary, his efforts to find a compromise, given the disparate interests and resulting deadlock that existed at the time, allowed the legislation to pass, paving the way for an eventual abolishment of the Slave Trade in the British Empire. Too bad Africans were so keen on perpetuating it. Thousands of British Sailors lost their lives enforcing abolition as Africans continued to round up their fellow Africans and sell them to unscrupulous illegal European slave traders for decades.

The fact is that Dundas did not have much to do with Ontario (Upper Canada) and his name appears so frequently due to his friendship with historical figures who did, such as John Graves Simcoe, Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. An argument for the school name change could certainly be made on that basis. But the contention that the Atlantic Slave trade went on longer than it otherwise would have due to Dundas’ actions is baseless and constitutes slander against him- a lifelong abolitionist, and his descendants, some of whom still live in Ontario.

Egerton Ryerson

Ryerson’s name is being removed from a school because he has been accused of being an architect of the Indian Residential School System (IRS).

Egerton Ryerson (24 March 1803 – 19 February 1882) arguably had the greatest impact on the establishment of public education in Ontario (Upper Canada) of anyone living there in the 19th century. It is truly shameful that his name is being dragged through the mud by opportunistic politicians and activists who jump to the conclusion that any leading white person who lived in the past was an evil colonial racist.

Ryerson’s name is well known because the local university formerly named after him was recently insipidly renamed Toronto Metropolitan University. People alleged that Ryerson was connected to the former Indian Residential School system which is not at all accurate.

Ryerson was not directly involved in IRS setup or running. In 1847, at the request of George Vardon, the British Assistant Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, he wrote a report outlining his ideas about what effective education to help Indigenous people integrate into the economic system of the time (mostly agriculture) would look like. Ryerson died before much of the IRS system was built and, in any case, his focus was always on the development of the Ontario public school system.

In the case of Ryerson University, a committee struck to study the name change concluded that Ryerson had not done anything wrong and was actually a great friend to many Indigenous leaders of his time and an admirable exponent of public education, but recommended the name be changed anyway because so many people think he had helped design and set up the IRS system. Today, in our postmodern reality, what people wrongly think, and thus how they feel, trumps facts.

Sir John A. Macdonald

The activists want our illustrious first Prime Minister’s name off a school because they say he knowingly, willfully, and intentionally starved Indigenous people in the Prairies.

This starvation narrative was popularized by James Daschuck’s 2014 book Clearing the Plains but this harsh indictment of Macdonald does not stand up to scrutiny, as his government actually spent more on famine relief for the Indigenous people in 1884 than on national defense.

Additionally, the Canadian approach to avoiding war through treaties doubtless saved tens of thousands of Indigenous (and no small number of settlers) lives, as a look south of the border, where upwards of 60 000 died in such wars at the time, will attest.

Macdonald’s government created the Northwest Police Force (later renamed the RCMP) to protect the native (and settler) population from American raids and slaughter, and Indigenous leaders at the time expressed their gratitude for it. He provided vaccination against smallpox to thousands of Indigenous people too.

It should also be mentioned that the catch-all complaint about Macdonald being somehow responsible for forcing Indigenous kids to attend IRS schools is baseless. Such schools were built at the request of Indigenous leaders according to treaties with the Crown and attendance was entirely voluntary during Macdonald’s lifetime. Indeed, mandatory school attendance only became mandatory along with such a requirement for all Canadian children in the early 20th century.

As mentioned at the opening of this article, 7 of 18 TDSB trustees voted “no” to the name changes. This is an encouraging sign that presenting a simplistic and misleading account of Canada’s past, and the people who shaped our history, in the service of affirming a putrid and deceitful narrative of oppressors Vs. victims in Canada is starting to lose its credibility. People are starting to demand a more comprehensive, nuanced, and accurate account of what really happened, and why. Yes, mistakes were made, and there were some bad actors, but by and large our history is one to be exceedingly proud of. We can learn from our mistakes and be an even greater country in the future.

But that is not the message kids are getting in those three schools. They are being taught that their school was named after an evil person for a long time, and that, by extension, Canada has been an evil country for a very long time and we need to listen to the activists and do what they say in order to fix it.

Now that is something worth pushing back against.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Lincoln Alexander Hailed as “Black Hero” by Activists

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