The head of the Thames Valley chapter of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario says renaming schools named after Canada's first prime minister won't solve any of the issues facing Ontario schools.
While not minimizing the reasons for an ETFO motion that asks school boards to rename schools named after Sir John A. MacDonald, Craig Smith worries that the debate is a "distraction."
Last week, a motion passed at ETFO's annual meeting referred to MacDonald being an "architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples, the impact this has on the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, parents, and educators, and the ways in which his namesake buildings can contribute to an unsafe space to learn and work."
Smith says most of the 26 delegates from the Thames Valley local did not support the motion. But he rejects any suggestion that doing so indicates a lack of support for concerns about Canada's historical and current treatment of Indigenous people.
"It's not that anyone disagrees that there are issues with great societal importance to us as a country pertaining to Indigenous peoples and, frankly from a teacher's perspective, Indigenous students," he says. "But I think the question becomes, is this helpful in our efforts to address those concerns? From our perspective, it really wasn't."
Rather than changing the name of a school, Smith says he'd rather see the province do more to address more pressing issues that have a direct impact on the education experience for students, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. He points to increasing acts of violence in schools, as well as what he calls governments that pay lip service to public education and their underfunding of Ontario's most vulnerable students.
He says that can be done, while at the same time, being cognizant of concerns about the relationship between our first prime minister and Canada's Indigenous people.
"Our past certainly has a big role to play in where we are now. The concern is, here is where we are, and what are we going to do to move things forward to build a better future? I don't mean to dismiss this as unimportant, but it's an aspect of the conversation that papers over the real and more deeper issues which are hard to deal with. No one is going to deny that we have challenges that we collectively face and that there are historical wrongs that need to be righted. But I don't think we do that by changing names and erasing the past. I think we need to own the past to inform the present," he says.
There is a school in the Thames Valley District School Board named after MacDonald. Sir John A MacDonald Public School is located at 1150 Landor St. in London.
