The federal government has chosen to designate Agnes Maule Machar as a person of national historic significance in recognition of her many contributions. As a prolific writer and proud nationalist in the late Victorian age, Agnes Maule Machar was a dominant and influential female voice in Canada.

Agnes Maule Machar was witness to the birth of Canada, and with many of her works she strove to inspire the public, especially young people. Accomplished in fiction, poetry, biography and histories, her writings covered a large range of subjects including social conditions, science and religion. Much of her poetry was inspired by her strong patriotic commitment to the fledgling country. Machar’s body of work reflects the exciting period of Confederation and the years that followed.

Along with writing, Machar had a passion for the social condition of others, particularly women and children. A strong advocate for education for women, in 1896, she presented a resolution to the National Council of Women calling for legislation to improve the conditions of work for women and children in shops and factories and adequate pay for women was a theme in her works.

Quick Facts

• Agnes Maule Machar began her prolific career writing religious and Sunday school material and later progressed to reform literature.
• As a deeply religious, upper middle class woman, Machar bowed to family pressure to avoid fame and first wrote under the pseudonym “Fidelis,” and in time became well known under this name.
• Her poetry was often anthologized in Canadian textbooks and generations of schoolchildren were exposed to her work.
• Machar loved the outdoors and nature and hosted fellow writers at Ferncliff, her summer home in Gananoque near what is now Thousand Islands National Park.
• Parks Canada manages a nationwide network of 167 national historic sites, 44 national parks and four national marine conservation areas that make up the rich tapestry of Canada’s cultural and natural heritage.

Name one African Canadian you admire.

Jean Augustine. As a Liberal MP, back in 1995, she introduced the first motion, passed unanimously in the House of Commons, to recognize Black History Month across Canada. In her time as an MP she also served the constituents of Etobicoke-Lakeshore so admirably that she has always been (an) example to follow.

What does Black History mean to you?

Black History Month is not just a chance to recognize some of the Canadians who serve as an inspiration to all of us – great figures in our history like Judge George Carter, Lincoln Alexander and Ferguson Jenkins – it is also an opportunity to celebrate and encourage the contributions of young black Canadians who are going to play a leading role in defining the Canada of tomorrow.  To honour their hopes and aspirations is what the Liberal vision for this country is all about.

What does Black History Month mean to you?

Black History Month is a wonderful opportunity for Canadians across the country to celebrate the history and accomplishments of the members of the Black community in our country and around the world. This is also an occasion to thank the African-Canadian community for the vital contributions they’ve made to improve Canadian society for everyone.

As we honour and salute the role the community has played in Canada, it is important to recognize that there is a long road ahead before we can truly claim victory over racism and discrimination. It is the duty of every Canadian to promote fairness and unity for all. One of the ways we can break down barriers and work together is by learning more about one other and the history we all share.

Who is the one African Canadian that you admire or admired the most?

I have many heroes but one I consider near the top of my list is Rosemary Brown – Canada’s first Black woman elected to in the BC legislature. She also became the first Black woman to run for the leadership of our party – the New Democratic Party of Canada. I take great pride in the fact that she was a pioneer in her community and a pioneer in our party.

During this month, I urge all Canadians to participate in community activities and to learn more about the rich history of Black people in Canada.

Who is the black person you admire most?

This is a very difficult – impossible — question. Only one person — when the influences in my life have included so many.

I was a girl when Martin Luther King organized to end segregation in the US. I grew up in Connecticut, in a home where working for civil rights was a daily event in our lives. Dr. King’s words shaped my life. The closest I ever got to hearing him in person was on a peace march in New York City I attended with my parents. He was a speaker at the rally, but the streets were so clogged with fellow marchers that we could not get close enough to see him.

We had a transistor radio and everyone around us had one so we could hear him — loud and clear – from a spot four blocks away. Hearing his words and knowing I was present with him in solidarity was hugely important. His assassination, when I was 13, was one of the most painful and traumatic incidences of my youth.

Indeed. Any Canadian you remember and reflect most on Black History Month?

My friend, the Nova Scotia trailblazer whom I love like a sister — Clotilda Yakimchuk. Clotilda was the daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean, drawn to Cape Breton to work in the steel mill. Clotilda wanted to be a nurse and faced racism and barriers. She was the first black graduate of the Nova Scotia School of Nursing in 1954. Clotilda also became the first, and only to date, black president of the Nova Scotia Nurses Association.

After graduation, as a young wife, she moved to Grenada with her first husband and ran the mental health hospital there. Returning to Cape Breton as a single mom, years later with kids in tow, she found it hard to rent an apartment, except in the black neighbourhood of Whitney Pier – far from her nursing job at the hospital.

The toxic pollution from the mill and coking ovens were worse in Whitney Pier than anywhere else in industrial Cape Breton, but it was the only place where, as a black woman, she could find an apartment. It is shocking that racism was endemic in the early 1970s. Her work in black community development led to a wonderful enduring relationship with her current husband, retired steel worker, and then City Councillor, Dan Yakimchuk.

I got to know Clo when working to get a cleanup of the Sydney tar ponds and neighbourhoods of Whitney Pier. In 2003, she was awarded the Order of Canada. I admire her enormously for her depths of compassion, consummate grace, elegance and strength of purpose.

Defeated in the election of 1874, Macdonald decided to move to Toronto with his family to fix his life, his health and his finances and purchased the beautiful house at 63 St. George in 1875. After renovations, he, Lady Agnes Macdonald and their daughter, Mary Margaret, lived there from 1876 until he was returned to power in the election of 1878.

It was in this home where he conceived the National Policy.

The home was originally built in 1872 in the French Second Empire style by Nathaniel Dickey, a Toronto businessman. Macdonald owned the property until 1886 and it was occupied by his son, Hugh John, from 1879 to 1882. Oliver Mowat, premier of Ontario, bought the house in 1888 and retained ownership until 1902. The property was leased in 1897-98 to Premier Arthur S. Hardy, who had succeeded Mowat.

It was sold to Knox College in 1910 and the University of Toronto, which has been its custodian ever since. The School of Graduate Studies is housed in Sir John A.’s former home.

The Sir John A. Macdonald Bicentennial Committee of Toronto has launched a fundraising campaign to help restore the home to its nineteenth century elegance: the focus is to replace the windows, fix the vestibule, and repair Sir John A.’s office.

In honour of Sir John A. Macdonald’s 200th birthday, the committee is asking for funds to support the restoration of one of University of Toronto’s’ most prominent landmarks by making a contribution.

To make your gift online, visit here. By phone, call Ms. Jasvir Nijjar at 416-978-5708. For more information about the house, contact Professor Patrice Dutil, [email protected] or Dean Locke Rowe, School of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto: [email protected]

THANK YOU!

In the many letters and articles I read about Sir John A. Macdonald from Canadians in the last week, on the occasion of what would have been the former prime minister’s 200th birthday, the one that stood out most for me was the letter written by a person named Mohamed el Haram.

This was in response to an article written by Macdonald’s biographer, Richard Gwyn, in The Toronto Star. The letter stated:

“Although it’s difficult, we must keep history in perspective and judge good and bad by their contemporary, contextual standards. Of course, we must strive to improve our society, keep the good, drop the bad and not make the same mistakes of history. To judge every historical figure, policy or event by modern mores would leave us with no one to respect and admire — only condemnation for all.”

In all of the 22 Canadian prime ministers we have had in our confederation, there is no one prime minster that has best defined us, united us, and envisioned the Canada that we know today as much as our very first PM. That is a fact. The double standard placed on him is both unfair and disingenuous.

If we were to place the same standard on other leaders of the past, the reality is that we might not have anyone to celebrate and emulate. Take Canada’s most admired former NDP leaders, Tommy Douglas.

Before he became one of the most influential politicians in Canada, he held some of the most horrible views on human reproduction. His graduate thesis at McMaster University linked poverty to “subnormal families, ones that are mentally inadequate — “anywhere from high-grade moron to mentally defective — of low moral character and/or a burden on the public purse.”

As a solution, he advocated for “sterilization of those deemed mentally defective or incurably diseased, arguing it is ‘consummate folly’ to let subnormal families “bring in to the world large numbers of individuals to fill our jails and mental institutions and to live upon charity.” If that fails, he offered a solution of “segregation of sub-normal families, and medical certification to ensure someone is mentally and physically fit before getting married.”

His words were not written as a high school student, to be excused as adolescent intellectual folly, but as a 28 year old soon-to-be  politician on the verge of launching a political career with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), what would later on become the NDP.

However, again and again, Canadians have looked beyond those words and judged him based on his era, with his contemporaries, and gave much weight to his signature public service contribution as the father of Medicare. If we were to look at him by the standard we hold today, his reputation would not survive the scrutiny.

Sure, many of his defenders might argue the fact that his were mere words and Macdonald’s actions toward indigenous Canadians were actions, and that is true. However, it’s almost like defending the current actions of some male Dalhousie University dentistry school students, whose only alleged crimes, until now, have been writing sexually violent words on a Facebook group about their female classmates. By today’s standard, even inappropriate words that are hostile to others are grossly wrong. That is why those students are rightfully facing the consequences.

By today’s standard, both Macdonald and Douglas, would be considered wrong. So would many of Canada’s famous important icons of the past, such as the Famous Five who contributed to women’s rights in Canada but held controversial views on race and religion. Even the most successful Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who once remarked “the people of Canada want to have a white country,” and strongly discouraged American blacks from immigrating to Canada would have been considered a fringe voice.

Yet, we celebrate their pre-eminent leadership roles in Canada’s past, try to understand their shortcomings, and judge them accordingly. In their lived lives, we attempt to find our own citizenship and find a role to have our country reflect the better part of our collective public ideals.

As the 200th birthday of Macdonald fell this week, I cannot help but reflect how much he meant for Canada and Canadians. He was the key architect of this nation, growing it from Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and then expanding it to British Columbia, the great Northwest Territories and PEI. His vision for a uniting railway that brought the new new nation together was inspiring, as were his views on the rightful status of our French-Canadian population. He defended the role of women in the new country and he now stands tall as our first prime minister, among the 21 others that would follow.

When it seemed Quebec was about to separate from Canada in 1995, former U.S. President Bill Clinton said “In a world darkened by ethnic conflicts that tear nations apart, Canada stands as a model of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace, prosperity, and mutual respect.”

That model is still the envy of a brutal and even dangerous world. It is indeed thanks to the vision and foundation laid by Canada’s remarkable first prime minister.

He was the prime minister of Canada a total 7,829 days, a record that’s unlikely to ever be broken.

Our nation’s historians consistently rank him as either our first, second or third best prime minister ever, along with John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier.

He looks out at us from the $50 bill.

All in all, not bad for a kid from Kitchener.

And yet, William Lyon Mackenzie King seems not to be well celebrated in his home town.

Yes, there’s an elementary school in Kitchener that carries his name. There’s a statue of him as a boy just outside the front doors of Kitchener-Waterloo Collegiate, the high school King attended. And the square surrounding the Region of Waterloo offices on Frederick Street is named in his honour, although there’s no clear indication of it.

His boyhood home on Wellington Street is a national historic site, owned and operated by Parks Canada – although the highway signs sending us in that direction give us no clue as to why Woodside should be a national historic site. And the home’s hours of operation were cut back drastically over the past year.

Actually, King never really lived in ‘Kitchener.’ At the time he left to study at the University of Toronto, the city was still then known as Berlin – at least before the outbreak of the First World War. The city changed its name in 1916 at the height of anti-German sentiment.

He was born in a house on Benton Street on Dec. 17, 1874, just across from the current location of the Kitchener Oktoberfest offices. His father, John King, was a lawyer. His doting mother was the daughter of William Lyon Mackenize, the firebrand radical and leader of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. King grew up listening to his mother’s sermons on his grandfather’s heroism and ideals, and was nurtured by her desire that he rise to the highest levels of politics.

After the University of Toronto, he studied at Harvard University. Then, elected to parliament from the riding of Waterloo North, he served under Wilfrid Laurier as Canada’s first ever labour minister. After the Laurier government’s defeat in 1911, he went south of the border to work for the ultra wealthy Rockefeller family as a labour arbitrator, all the while proposing somewhat radical socialist solutions to society’s problems. It was during his time in the U.S. that he formed a friendship with political up-and-comer, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

King won the Liberal party leadership in 1919, and led the party into government two years later. After a brief stint in opposition in 1926, the voters returned him to power later in the year. He lost the 1930 election, but was back on top in 1935. He held the top job until retiring in 1948.

Certainly, King had his personal flaws and eccentricities — many, many eccentricities, not the least of which was his obsession, through psychic mediums, to speak with his long-deceased mother and his dead dog.

Still, his record speaks clearly of political achievement.

He is the prime minister who re-defined Canada’s role in the British Empire. In fact, in his assertion that Canada would not necessarily follow the dictates of the government in London, King, more than anyone else, brought about the rebranding of the empire into the international organization we now refer to as the British Commonwealth. (All the while going toe to toe against strident British imperialist Winston Churchill, a man he would later align himself with and come to greatly admire.)

King’s government introduced Canada’s first old age pension, thanks in large part to pressure from the CCF, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party.

He is the prime minister who led Canada out of the Great Depression, although more by good luck than good management. King’s journals reveal that he had no answers to the economic calamity that had gripped the nation, yet when the winds of political change brought about King’s defeat in the 1930 federal election it was his Conservative rival, R.B. Bennett, who took the blame.

Re-elected prime minister in 1935, he led Canada into and out of the Second World War, giving free rein to his “minister of everything,” C.D Howe, a workaholic and organizational genius who transformed Canada from an agricultural backwater into an industrial nation capable of fighting a modern war. Behind the scenes, King stage-managed the initial meetings between Churchill and his old friend Roosevelt.

The war over and won, King ushered Canada into the nuclear age, into the Cold War, and into the NATO alliance.

He died in 1950, leaving a legacy that is yet unmatched.

– Dave Pink is a Kitchener-based freelance journalist and a founding member of the Mackenzie King Kitchener-Waterloo Legacy Network.

To celebrate Sir John A. Macdonald’s 200^th birthday, the Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of the Environment and Minister responsible for Parks Canada, invites Canadians to visit Bellevue House National Historic Site for special celebrations this month. As a Father of Confederation and Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald is one of the most influential political figures in Canada’s history.

Bellevue House in Kingston, Ontario, was once the home of Sir John A. Macdonald and his family. Now a national historic site, Bellevue House will open for special dates in January, with free admission, for many special events and activities to celebrate and honour the birth of Macdonald. The site will be open with free admission on January 3 and 4, and January 7 to 11, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

During the special celebration opening dates, visitors will have a chance to see new exhibits on Sir John A. Macdonald, his political legacy and the Fathers of Confederation. There will be special presentations and entertaining activities for the whole family, including special birthday celebrations on January 10. In addition, on January 10 and January 11, visitors will have the chance to share their national dream through an interactive digital exhibit, A Country of Dreams. Their creative ideas will be the source for a new exhibit as part of Canada’s 150^th celebrations in 2017.

As Canada nears its 150^th birthday in 2017, the Government invites Canadians to learn more about the major events and people that have shaped the country’s history.

Quick Facts

• Sir John A. Macdonald was born in Scotland in 1815, the son of Hugh and Helen Macdonald. His family came to Canada in 1820 and settled in Kingston.
• John and Isabella Macdonald lived in Bellevue House from 1848-1849.
• Sir John A. Macdonald attended all three conferences (Charlottetown, Quebec and London) that lead to the creation of Canada, and on July 1, 1867, became our country’s first Prime Minister.
• Macdonald is the second-longest serving Prime Minister in Canadian history, having served almost 19 years in the role.
• Macdonald was knighted by Queen Victoria as a mark of appreciation for his role in bringing about Confederation.
• Macdonald’s accomplishments as Prime Minister were summarized by another great politician, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in these words: “As to his statesmanship, it is written in the history of Canada. It may be said without any exaggeration whatever, that the life of Sir John A. Macdonald … is the history of Canada.”

A Toronto man is looking to raise $50,000 through crowdfunding to refurbish a bus station in Ethiopia in the birthplace of his grandfather. Samuel Getachew wants to honour the Canadian politician who he watched play a leading role in combatting the devastating famine that crippled his native homeland – former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

Getachew – an occasional columnist for Leaders and Legacies — wants to celebrate Mr. Mulroney’s leadership by collecting the necessary resources to upgrade a bus station in Debre Tsige. The small village south of the capital city, Addis Ababa, is nicknamed ‘Little Canada.’

Mr. Mulroney was barely in power a few weeks in 1984 when the devastating images from Ethiopia began to pour in. He consulted his new United Nations Ambassador, Stephen Lewis, who agreed they should act immediately. Lewis gave a barnburner speech to the UN general assembly, galvanizing member nations into action. Mr. Mulroney then re-routed his foreign minister, Joe Clark, from India to Ethiopia. Mr. Clark was the first senior western politician to be on the ground and was said to be shaken to the core by what he witnessed.

The politicians’ work to get the famine on the radar of Canadians and the world had a cascade effect, as Brian Stewart reported on CBC News.

“Almost overnight, Canadian farmers stepped up, offering to donate large parts of their harvest to a relief fund; children began raising money at schools; labour unions set up special funds; and the government was literally overwhelmed by the wave of support from ordinary Canadians. To prime the pump, Ottawa had promised to match private donations and now it found itself pouring in tens of millions of dollars just to keep up…By December, an astonishing two-thirds of Canadians were contributing money or supplies to African famine relief. In the end, this country…was probably responsible for saving in excess of 700,000 lives.”

Getachew tells Leaders and Legacies that a number of Debre Tsige residents immigrated to Canada “following the drought and a period of civil unrest.”

“Their continued connection with the village, through family members still living there and packages mailed back home, is largely why it’s referred to as Little Canada,” he adds.

Getachew says he is convinced Mr. Mulroney was an exceptional leader.

He “exemplified the best within Canada and abroad.”

“For most of us future immigrants, he was our first introduction to a Canada we would eventually call home.”

Getachew says that the bus station is in a high traffic area, so many people – especially the young people who may have forgotten the Canadian politician’s legacy – will learn about him.

“I hope the bus station, which is frequently used by the area residents, will give many people a glimpse of Canada and Canadians at our best.”

Getachew notes that once the worst of the Ethiopian famine subsided, Mr. Mulroney kept aid levels to Africa at a rate never seen before, or since. After that, he turned his attention to apartheid in South Africa, continuing his activist international stance.

“Nelson Mandela had no better friend in the western world than Brian Mulroney,” says Getachew.

“Mulroney then made the freedom of Mandela…Canada’s top agenda.”

Getachew says he hopes the bus station will serve as an ongoing reminder to Ethiopians about Canada’s role during the terrible famine, and Mulroney’s efforts as leader.

“It is my hope that future and current citizens, at home and abroad, will remember the exceptional Canadian he is, as he helped us all celebrate our international citizenship.”

To donate to the cause and read more about the plans for Little Canada, visit here.