Canadians only: Should Canada have an official day for John A. MacDonald?
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Today, January 11, is officially John A. Macdonald Day.
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@evan Is that the guy who had a farm?
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@evan Is that the guy who had a farm?
@aurochs c'mon.
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Today, January 11, is officially John A. Macdonald Day.
@evan I answered "No, but" ā but I misunderstood your question as proposing that we should have a holiday.
Yes, we should have an official day honouring Sir John A. (No, we should not have a statutory holiday for any of our PMs.)
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@evan I answered "No, but" ā but I misunderstood your question as proposing that we should have a holiday.
Yes, we should have an official day honouring Sir John A. (No, we should not have a statutory holiday for any of our PMs.)
@mpjgregoire I don't think the Act calls it a statutory holiday.
https://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/AnnualStatutes/2002_2/page-1.html
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undefined evan@cosocial.ca shared this topic on
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@evan I think honouring him does a disservice to history. In general I think days honouring politicians are fraught as these kinds of honours tend to mask the ugly parts of their history.
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John A. Macdonald:
āThe executions of the Indians ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governsā
(1885)Should Canada have an official day for John A. Macdonald?
This is a ridiculous question on many levels. Here are some reasons why.https://educ.queensu.ca/sites/educwww/files/uploaded_files/JAM%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
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John A. Macdonald:
āThe executions of the Indians ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governsā
(1885)Should Canada have an official day for John A. Macdonald?
This is a ridiculous question on many levels. Here are some reasons why.https://educ.queensu.ca/sites/educwww/files/uploaded_files/JAM%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf
@ianrogers We already have an official day for John A. MacDonald. It's today, January 11.
I don't think it's ridiculous to ask whether we should. I think it's always a good idea to revisit whether this kind of commemoration make sense.
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@evan I voted as a permanent resident of Canada -- don't know if that makes me officially "Canadian"?
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@evan I voted as a permanent resident of Canada -- don't know if that makes me officially "Canadian"?
@annaleen I didn't know you were a PR! Good for you.
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@annaleen I didn't know you were a PR! Good for you.
@annaleen also, it was sometime between getting PR and citizenship that I started calling myself Canadian, so it's really up to you.
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Hey, thanks everyone for answering.
I'm going to say Yes, But.
Yes, MacDonald is one of the most important figures in Canadian history. It's almost certain that without him, Canada would not have anything close to its present borders -- probably not the far North, BC, or the Prairie provinces. Whether a smaller Canada made up of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes would have survived intact to the present day is not certain (although impossible to test).
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Hey, thanks everyone for answering.
I'm going to say Yes, But.
Yes, MacDonald is one of the most important figures in Canadian history. It's almost certain that without him, Canada would not have anything close to its present borders -- probably not the far North, BC, or the Prairie provinces. Whether a smaller Canada made up of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes would have survived intact to the present day is not certain (although impossible to test).
But, he is clearly guilty of at least cultural genocide. His complicity in the residential school system is directly responsible for suffering by generations of indigenous people. No remembrance of Macdonald should ignore these crimes against humanity.
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But, he is clearly guilty of at least cultural genocide. His complicity in the residential school system is directly responsible for suffering by generations of indigenous people. No remembrance of Macdonald should ignore these crimes against humanity.
One of the hard things that we here, indigenous and non-indigenous people, have to figure out is what the role of the settler-colonial entity called Canada will be in the future of this land. Maybe it will disappear forever; maybe it changes into something more appropriate for reconciliation. Maybe this is the work of decades or centuries. Whatever Canada becomes, I don't think it will be possible to disentangle its history from Macdonald.
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One of the hard things that we here, indigenous and non-indigenous people, have to figure out is what the role of the settler-colonial entity called Canada will be in the future of this land. Maybe it will disappear forever; maybe it changes into something more appropriate for reconciliation. Maybe this is the work of decades or centuries. Whatever Canada becomes, I don't think it will be possible to disentangle its history from Macdonald.
So, I think yes, Canada should have an official day for the first prime minister, but it should be more complex than simple hero worship. It's a good time to understand and own our history and what it means now and for the future.
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@evan I think honouring him does a disservice to history. In general I think days honouring politicians are fraught as these kinds of honours tend to mask the ugly parts of their history.
@Chigaze it seems dishonest to me that we Canadians would disavow Macdonald entirely but retain all the benefits of his work.
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@Chigaze it seems dishonest to me that we Canadians would disavow Macdonald entirely but retain all the benefits of his work.
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@Chigaze it seems dishonest to me that we Canadians would disavow Macdonald entirely but retain all the benefits of his work.
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@virtuous_sloth @Chigaze that seems like a missed opportunity for reflection and growth.
Reading the Act, it doesn't seem like a day for particular celebration, even.
https://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/AnnualStatutes/2002_2/page-1.html
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@virtuous_sloth @Chigaze that seems like a missed opportunity for reflection and growth.
Reading the Act, it doesn't seem like a day for particular celebration, even.
https://laws.justice.gc.ca/eng/AnnualStatutes/2002_2/page-1.html
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@mos_8502 I think, or maybe merely hope, that having deep expertise and actually understanding all the code being spewed forth at alarming rates (even if I haven't actually read most of it), has long-term value.
But, I don't think I have any choice about using it and staying employed. If I want to keep working in the field I'm in, I'm going to be doing it with AI assistance. That was up in the air until recently...but, the current generation models+agents lay the question to rest.
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@swelljoe My reply to the vibe coder in this scenario is "well, then, what do we need you for? Pack up your desk."
Now, this is not to say I'm 100% dead set against it per se. I would restrict its use to expert-level programmers who understand the problem domain, on the grounds that you need to know the language at a high level and understand the problem if you're going to debug and maintain the code.
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@mos_8502 the vibe-coder answer to that is, "I don't need to understand it, I just ask Claude to maintain it, too." And...I scoffed at that idea in the past. But, it's gotten really good.
I think it's still very dangerous in the hands of non-technical folks. And, I think most of the models are still flailing a lot (the frontier models are all pretty good, but Opus 4.5 is the one that Just Works, but all the lower end models are stupid a lot).
I dunno. The ground shifted beneath my feet.
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@mos_8502 I was dragged into using it at work, and I've had to accept that I was wrong about how well it works. I still have plenty of reservations about its use. But...it can write good software very, very, fast. And, in an agentic configuration (like Claude Code or whatever other agentic harnesses you wanna use), it can test its own work, verify outputs, etc. It's genuinely astonishing how well it works.
Whether I like it kinda doesn't matter. It works well enough to where it will be used.
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@swelljoe What worries me is the "competent operator". Best case scenario, the model generates perfect code that does exactly what the fuck it should -- and the user who prompted it has no clue how to maintain or debug the code.
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@mos_8502 I wasn't enthusiastic about AI for coding, but Claude Code with Opus 4.5 is remarkable. I can't really say I'm happy about it, but given a competent operator, it produces quite good, if a little verbose, code that works the first time most of the time. It writes better and more tests than I've found most human coders do, it often includes accessibility markup without being asked (another thing human coders simply don't do), and it documents its work.
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@nickzoic @mos_8502 A million lines of actual code, regardless of where it came from, is a catastrophic failure.
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@mos_8502 It's like trying to accept code from a contributor who keeps making a gratuitous wrong change every time they fix the last thing you told them to fix, and trying to slip it past you. Infuriating and pointless when you could just do it faster yourself or reject their proposal entirely.
