By Dorchester Review Staff
In 2002 Parliament designated Jan. 11 as Sir John A. Macdonald Day. The date is commonly accepted as the great man’s birthday. It follows close on the heels of Christmas on the calendar but perhaps long enough after to justify splicing the mainbrace in memory of the Old Man.
There was always some doubt about the the date. Ten years ago, Robert D. Watt, former Chief Herald of Canada, went in search of documentation. What he found is that Sir John was born on Jan. 10, as recorded in an old parish register:
Glasgow, January 1815.-
McDonald Hugh McDonald Agent & Helen Shaw a Law:[ful] Son John Alexander born 10th, Witn[esses] Donald & James McDonald.
The exact location of his birth long remained the subject of dispute, some favouring a site south of the Clyde River, others on the north in an area around Trongate, the commercial heart of Glasgow in the early 19th century.
The record was marked 644/01 from the central parish of High Kirk, which is indeed north of the Clyde, in an area also called Merchant City. It included Brunswick Lane.
We don’t want to take away from the work of Edinburgh University Ph.D. candidate Malin Sandell, who “found Kirk Parish Records placing John Alexander’s birth in Glasgow Parish,” etc. (BBC News, Jan. 13, 2015). But Watt did get there at least a year earlier.
At the time, reporter Randy Boswell had recently discovered a photograph in an 1891 Toronto Empire album, three months after Macdonald’s death. (“Pub could be Macdonald’s birthplace,” Postmedia, Sep. 12, 2014). It showed “Brunswick Place,” a likely match with the parish record. Efforts to preserve the extant structure failed and in 2017 it was demolished.
The demolition job continues.
When Sir John’s birthday was recognized by Parliament, they also designated Nov. 20 in the same bill as “Sir Wilfrid Laurier Day.” It was a nice gesture of bipartisanship by the Jean Chrétien government.
Oddly enough, Laurier’s day has gone missing from the list of “Important and commemorative days” on the Canadian Heritage website. Macdonald Day is still there. Has Laurier been defenestrated, and by a Liberal government no less?
A little searching reveals that in 2020 the Government of Canada declared — suddenly and by press release (no vote in Parliament this time) — that Nov. 20 is now “Transgender Day of Remembrance.”
“We began marking this day in 1999,” quoth Minister Chagger, “in response to the brutal killing of Rita Hester, a Black Trans woman” in an unsolved murder.
It’s revisionist history to say the least. The “day” was promoted by American identity activists, and not seen much in Canada. There’s no evidence that Ottawa observed it before 2020. Indeed bureaucrats (or political staff) seem to have picked it up off U.S. television (e.g. “Her [sic] death sparked Transgender Day of Remembrance,” NBC, Jul. 15, 2020).
No mention is made in the press release of bumping aside Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who was born on Nov. 20, 1841 and who originated the “Sunny Ways” slogan later appropriated by one of his least distinguished successors.
Odder still is that Canadian Heritage also designates Nov. 20 as “National Child Day,” invoking the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, etc. etc. To add to the confusion, it’s the first day of “Canada History Week” too.
But Sir Wilfrid's birthday has vanished.
We think the Trudeau Government got hopelessly muddled by its own pandering. They took Canada on a miserable downward slope from sublime commemorations of real milestones such as the Bicentennial of the War of 1812 and the birth of Macdonald in 2015, “Canada 150” and the 100th anniversary of Vimy in 2017 — things Canadians really need to know more about in order to appreciate their country and its heritage properly — to the buffoonery and flag-lowering for which the 2020s will be remembered; an imposition of half-baked Gen-X social justice illusions and virtue-signalling.
Adapted from a Notes & Topics box in the Winter 2024 print edition.