Patrice Dutil's new book paints Macdonald as a man confronted on all sides trying to quell rebellion and discontent

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In the conclusion to his magisterial new book, “Sir. John A. Macdonald and the Apocalyptic Year 1885,” historian Patrice Dutil laments the posthumous fate of Canada’s founding prime minister John A. Macdonald. “It’s hard to imagine,” Dutil says, “a reputation being trashed so hatefully, so suddenly and so thoroughly.”

And yet, this is exactly what has happened. Across the country, cities have removed Macdonald’s statues, and mobs regularly deface those that remain. Whether it is the names of pubs or law schools — those in authority have decided to dishonour John A. Macdonald — to remove him from a place of public prominence.

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What’s most striking for a historian to see in these attacks — in the fierce anger of the crowds or the more toned-down sombre apologies of the officials — is the extent to which these attacks all depend on a disturbing trio of traits: parochialism, ignorance and ideological zeal.

The case against Macdonald largely requires you not to care about the intricate details of the past and, if you do, to interpret them only as would a crown prosecutor, not someone who was genuinely trying to understand life in that foreign country that is history. It requires you to look largely at only Canada, and, even then, to not contemplate the values and norms of his era. And the moralizing prosecution is carried out most strenuously by radicals who would find fault with just about anything done by someone they see as just another dead white man.

Patrice Dutil’s new book takes an entirely different approach. He wants us to walk in the shoes of Macdonald through one pivotal year: 1885.

It was a consequential year in ways both familiar and forgotten. It was the year of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”; of Louis Pasteur first vaccinating a child against rabies; of the establishment of Greenwich........

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