J.D.M. Stewart of Toronto has spent his life promoting the study of the lives and legacies of Canada’s Prime Ministers. His 2025 book, The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped, stands as the best survey of the nation’s Prime Ministers in the last 50 years.
On this date in 2021, Stewart took Library and Archives Canada to task after the federal government institution deleted one of its on-line features, First Among Equals, that was dedicated to the Canadian premiership and the 23 men and one woman who have held the all-important post dating back to Sir John A. Macdonald himself.
Stewart did so in a column published on-line by the Hub, a well-respected publication that features discussions of interest to anyone involved in public policy co-founded by my friend (and fellow Sir Charles Tupper and Arthur Meighen fan!), Sean Speer.
“The website has been unceremoniously scrubbed,” Stewart told Hub readers. “Students, teachers, and the wider public are no longer able to access the website... Incredibly, there is no plan to replace the deleted site. Marie-Ève Doucet, the senior communications advisor at LAC, said that, ‘in the short term, we plan to update the PM web page with quick links to all of the PM archives found in Collection Search.’
That translates as: ‘There will be no new website dedicated to the country’s prime ministers, but we will have links directing you to find the primary documents on your own.’
Stewart then continued. “What is also quite clear in this sorry episode is that the real target of the memory hole was Sir John A. Macdonald, whose page neglected to mention the shameful legacy of residential schools. A second stand-alone exhibit on him (Canada’s Patriot Statesman) was also deleted. Did the pages on Lester B. Pearson and Arthur Meighen also no longer reflect the “current understanding of history?” And how much understanding of the history of Canadian prime ministers will there be now that the entire website has been deleted?”
And J.D.M. Stewart wasn’t done yet. “This latest Orwellian deletion of important history is not limited to prime ministers, however. LAC also vanished a website dedicated to the War of 1812 and Canadian Confederation. Elsewhere, other historical figures are being airbrushed from the national story.”
You can read Stewart’s entire column at this link: https://thehub.ca/2021/07/14/j-d-m-stewart-history-should-be-debated-not-expunged/
Today, five years after Stewart’s commentary came out, it is worthy of note that Prime Minister Mark Carney has started to openly express pride in historical events and persons from Canada’s past that were hidden away – and often demeaned – in recent years.
It also needs to be said that the hard-working archivists at LAC (many of whom I have known dating back to the 1990s) operate at the policy direction of the government of the day. All researchers seeking information about our rich political history in the LAC’s collections recognize that fact.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.