Skip to content

Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

John A. Macdonald and “presentism”

While allowing that the first prime minister’s “policy toward the Chinese cannot be defended” and that “his exclusion from the vote of those living here was an act of explicit discrimination,” Richard Gwyn, the author of a two-volume biography of John A. Macdonald, attempts to counter Timothy Stanley’s position that Macdonald was a “white supremacist.”

On the run

Included among the hundreds of films now online from the National Film Board is History on the Run, an entirely fascinating documentary about the media and the 1979 federal election that climaxes with a technical explanation of how best to light Joe Clark’s chin.