[...]
1. During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865),
Montreal served as refuge to Confederates — southern Americans who wanted to keep slavery and secede from the United States union.
The Southern slavers found a friend in John A. Macdonald.
From
historian Stanley Ryerson we learn of the political sympathies towards the southern Confederacy of John A. Macdonald. Macdonald was the hired advocate for an organization of vigilantes committed to "peace" through support for the South. One of these Copperhead conspirators, a man named Headley [...], set fire to a dozen large hotels in November of 1864, hoping to create panic in the North and divert military efforts. In his memoirs, Headley writes:
[...]
Macdonald justified taking the vote away from anyone "of Mongolian or Chinese race" in the Electoral Franchise Act — he called it "my greatest achievement."
4.
John A. Macdonald was way more racist than his contemporaries.
For John A. Macdonald, Canada was to be the country that restored a pure Aryan race to its past glory.
Lest it be thought that Macdonald was merely expressing the prejudices of the age, it should be noted that his were among the most extreme views of his era. According to
Timothy J. Stanley's research, he was the only politician in the parliamentary debates to refer to Canada as "Aryan" and to justify legalized racism on the basis not of alleged cultural practices but on the grounds that "Chinese" and "Aryans" were separate species.
5.
John A. Macdonald's policies of forced starvation helped clear First Nations from the prairies in order to build the railway, according to James Daschuk of University of Regina. An excerpt from his book,
Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life:
For years, government officials withheld food from aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.
[...and so on...]
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