Commentary
Many Canadians were understandably frustrated when the twin scourges of cancel culture and wokeness erupted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet few probably remember an announcement that just preceded the pandemic and, surprisingly, fit with this negative tone of what was to come.
The Bank of Canada unexpectedly
announced a plan in early 2020 to remove Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s image from the $5 bill. The nation’s seventh prime minister had been a familiar feature on the bank note for almost 50 years. Barely a word of displeasure had ever been uttered. Yet Canadians would participate in deciding his replacement.
“It’s kind of a new and groundbreaking thing that they’re doing a public consultation process about this,” Steven Bell, president of the Banknote Certification Service,
told CTV news on Jan. 14, 2020. “Let alone simply changing it to an iconic Canadian.”
A shortlist of individuals from Canadian history was
released in Nov. 2020. It included Inuit artist Pitseolak Ashoona, Siksika First Nation Chief Issapomahksika (Crowfoot), and activist athlete Terry Fox.
Then it all went silent. Ottawa focused more heavily on the pandemic, and trivial matters like this one fell by the wayside.
It was recently announced the bank’s plan has been put
on hold for the time being. “The current $5 note with depictions of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Canadarm2 and Dextre (Canadian robotics innovations in space) will continue to circulate for some time,” a Bank of Canada spokesperson told CBC News on July 14. “As banknote portrait subjects are the minister of finance’s decision, we are not in a position to comment further.”
Did Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland put the kibosh on this discussion? If so, she deserves credit for making the right decision about a historically important Canadian prime minister.
Laurier was a Liberal by political persuasion, but a classical liberal in ideological terms. He recognized the importance of small government, low taxes, economic growth, and individual rights and freedoms in helping create a healthy democracy. He respected traditional institutions and wanted to preserve Canada’s historical bond with Great Britain. He was a proud nationalist, and an even prouder nation-builder.
He played a critical role in shaping our country, too.
Laurier was the first PM to propose reciprocity (or free trade) with the United States. It was the Liberals, not the Conservatives, who originally understood the economic advantage of expanding free markets and international trade. “We wish to open our markets to you on the condition that you open yours to us,” Laurier
told then president William Howard Taft in 1910. “It would be to our mutual advantage. We produce more of certain things than we can consume; on the other hand, our production is below capacity, such that we have commodities to export and import.”
Laurier’s dream of reciprocity led to his political downfall in the 1911 federal election. Nevertheless, it served as an important source of inspiration for modern Conservatives. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney
acknowledged that “the politics of free trade were always much more daunting—as Sir Wilfred Laurier learned first hand,” and he learned from his predecessor’s missteps. He successfully charted a different economic path for Canada, which led to the 1987 Free Trade Agreement with the United States and the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement that included Mexico.
To be sure, Laurier had many political successes.
He resolved the Manitoba Schools Question that had hampered the province’s publicly funded Roman Catholic and Protestant separate schools. He
signed a compromise with then Manitoba premier Thomas Greenway in 1896 that allowed for religious instruction of Catholic education for 30 minutes daily, and French to be taught in classrooms, both under certain conditions. A Catholic school board without public funding was also enacted as part of this arrangement.
Laurier
oversaw the extension of the railroads from coast to coast, and approved the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway project in 1903. He
added two new provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, to Confederation in 1905. He championed immigration, which led to the
arrival of over 3 million people to Canada between 1897 and 1914.
It’s for these historical reasons, and others, that it would have been an enormous mistake for the Bank of Canada to have removed Laurier from the $5 bill.
Was Laurier perfect? Far from it. His leadership was “a story of confidence, national optimism, and success,” historian Arthur Milnes wrote in “Canada Always: The Defining Speeches of Sir Wilfrid Laurier” (2016), but he was also “continually buffeted by racial and religious intolerance from French and English, Protestant and Catholic.” Like every prime minister before him, he faced and dealt with problems.
Yet, after several long years of cancel culture, wokeness, and political correctness gone amuck, it’s time to start honouring and respecting the achievements of great Canadians in spite of their personal and political flaws. Sir Wilfrid Laurier is, and has always been, one of them.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
