Political Management professor and historian Stephen Azzi debates Richard Gwyn, Toronto Star journalist and award-winning biographer of Sir John A. Macdonald, in the pages of the Ottawa Citizen.
In a recent Citizen opinion piece, author Tim Stanley branded Canada’s first prime minister a racist for amending the Franchise Act to deny the vote to Chinese Canadians. Gwyn criticized Macdonald for doing so in the second volume of his biography, Nation-Maker, but responded to Stanley in the Citizen, arguing that to apply the standards of the present to actions taken in the wholly different context of the past is to commit an historiographic error, and that in any case “On most matters concerning race and ethnicity, Macdonald was far ahead of his times.”
Azzi, whose research interests include prime ministerial leadership, joined the debate, arguing that “Even by the standards of his day, Macdonald was unenlightened on racial matters,” and contrasted Macdonald’s attitudes to those of his contemporaries George Brown and Wilfrid Laurier.