Some business owners in downtown Charlottetown are refusing to use promotional material featuring John A. Macdonald that’s aimed at helping the Confederation Centre of the Arts raise money for renovations.
Laura Noel owns The 5th Wave Espresso & Tea Bar, just blocks away from the cultural centre.
At first she was happy to agree to help raise money for the centre, but when she opened a package of promotional coffee sleeves, she quickly had concerns.
“The sleeve is pure orange with a white wording and there are two faces on the sleeve. One is John A. Macdonald,” Noel said.
Macdonald was Canada’s first prime minister, who is credited with being one of the main Fathers of Confederation for his persuasive skills at the Charlottetown Conference in September 1864.
He went on to play a key role in the implementation of the residential schools in the 19th century. More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children across the country were forced to attend church-run, government-funded residential schools between the 1870s and 1997.
In the last few years, there have been many movements across the country to have Canadians acknowledge the harm that effort did to Indigenous communities and families. One is the Every Child Matters campaign, which is associated with the colour orange.
“I just know orange and him do not go together,” Noel said. “The colour orange is not problematic. John A. Macdonald’s history to me is a history; you can call it problematic if you like. However, when you put the two together is when it becomes an issue.
“Separately, this is all things we can have a discussion about, but together it’s going to trigger people. It’s going backwards in what we’re trying to do in reconciliation.”
Noel has Indigenous family members and wouldn’t want to put a sleeve featuring Macdonald’s face on their coffee cups, she said.
“It could definitely trigger someone who has had negative experiences with the residential schools, with politics, with the history of Canada.”
Noel notes that the City of Charlottetown removed the Macdonald statue that sat on Queen Street for years after it was vandalized multiple times.
The P.E.I. Brewing Company also stopped using Macdonald branding on its honey wheat ale.
Responding to the concerns on Wednesday, Confederation Centre of the Arts CEO Steve Bellamy pointed out that the centre is Canada’s national monument to the founding fathers of the country — and any such list has to include Macdonald.
“Of course, we’ve been focused on the challenges in that in the last couple of decades, working on truth and reconciliation and acknowledging that while Canada is a wonderful country, it was not founded in the best way,” he said.
The goal of the campaign was meant to be part of truth and reconciliation efforts, by acknowledging that people such as Macdonald had already had their say about how the country should be organized, Bellamy said.
“Now it’s everyone else’s turn. So we’re trying to acknowledge the past and invite everyone to take part in building the country that we should be.”
History can repeat itself if we don’t acknowledge the past, Bellamy said, adding that some Indigenous leaders with whom he has spoken suggest that erasing history or taking down statues might not be the best way to move forward.
“We need to acknowledge the past. We need to recognize who these significant important figures were in the past so we can move forward. It’s the truth part of truth and reconciliation.”
Bellamy also pointed out that the colour orange has been used for promotional material for the cultural centre since it was opened in 1964. Despite that, he said he does understand why some Islanders could be concerned about this campaign, which he said would be short-lived.
“If this was an oversight, we definitely apologize for this, and didn’t intend to imply any connection whatsoever to the very important Orange Shirt Day — which we participate in — and the campaign around Every Child Matters,” he said.
“I can understand that people are seeing those two things paired together and making that connection… I do feel badly that people made that connection between the two. It was definitely not, of course, intended.”
As for Noel, she said she doesn’t want to “cancel” the centre: “I think it was just a fumble that maybe got out of hand. Too many eyes have passed for it to not have been brought up.”
