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MacDonald Laurier Institute

Toronto’s “Sankofa Square” – The terrible folly and historic injustice of erasing the legacy of abolitionist Henry Dundas

Published

5 months ago

13 minute read

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Lynn McDonald

Canadians’ keenness to repent for the misdeeds of the past has its merits, but has also led to gross errors of judgment.

Mayor Olivia Chow and Toronto City Council went even more over-the-top in their choice of “Sankofa Square” for Yonge-Dundas Square. Other renamings in the city have either substituted a banal name, like substituting Toronto Metropolitan University for Ryerson University, or, more frequently, selected an Indigenous name as a substitute for “colonizer” monikers. The Ghanaian word “Sankofa,” however, was selected for its meaning: “learning from the past.” But what can we learn about slavery in Ghana?

Slavery was rife both throughout Africa and much of the world in centuries past. Under its previous name, the Gold Coast, Ghana was a prime place for the sale of slaves to European slave traders. As well, its version of slavery included the horrible practice of executing the slaves of a chieftain who died, so that they could serve him in the afterlife.

In 1847, a Methodist missionary, the Rev. George Chapman, sent an account of this practice from his mission post in Kumasi, the second-largest city in Ghana. In an article in the Toronto Christian Guardian titled “Horrid Treatment of Infants in Ashanti,” Chapman explained that both men and women slaves, of all ages, were executed. When a woman slave with a nursing infant was beheaded, her baby fell to the ground “with her headless body.” Such an infant was regarded as an “abomination.” It gets worse:

“The body of the mother may remain in the street all day exposed to the gaze of every passer-by, and by her side may remain her helpless, living infant exposed to, not only the heedless foot of the multitude, but suffering intensely from the direct rays of a tropical sun. Seldom does any eye pity; no one would ever think of taking away that child and thus saving its life—it remains in the street until evening, and then, as the individual whose business is to drag away the bodies of these victims, takes away the mother; he may at the same time take away the child, not to pity and save it, but to cast both mother and child into the cell where these wretched victims are thrown, and they both remain to putrify [sic] or to be devoured by swine or carnivorous birds.”

In the same article, Chapman described being alerted to the beheading of a female slave in a nearby village. The dead mother’s baby, still alive, was left by her side. Starving, it had crawled up to his mother’s body to lick the blood from her bleeding neck. The missionary hastened to the execution site to try to save it, but he was too late: a bystander saw Chapman coming and prevented rescue by standing on the infant’s neck to kill it.

Ghana abolished slavery only in 1874, roughly 100 years after it was abolished, through court cases, in 1772 in England, and in 1778 in Scotland. For Scotland, it was Henry Dundas, as a lawyer, who won over the Scottish law lords on the appeal case he headed of an escaped enslaved man, Joseph Knight. They not only freed him, by a solid 8-4 majority, but ruled that there could be no slavery in Scotland, and thus freed all other slaves in the country.

This was Henry Dundas’s first achievement as an abolitionist.

Ontario, thanks to John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor, has the merit of being the first jurisdiction in the British Empire to abolish slavery, albeit gradually, in 1793, about 80 years before Ghana got around to it. Simcoe, it should be noted, was an appointee of Henry Dundas, a fellow abolitionist.

Yet Mayor Chow called the renaming of Yonge-Dundas Square “beautiful,” and even claimed that she could not “think of a better a name for a gathering place at the heart of our city” than Sankofa Square. To Chow, Henry Dundas’s actions were no less than “horrific.”


Dundas and Ryerson: the Christian Guardian connection

Rev. Chapman sent his story to the Christian Guardian, a weekly Methodist magazine based in Toronto, for which Egerton Ryerson was the founding editor. He was no longer the editor when this story appeared, but he had himself written on abolition in the British Empire and the United States. Ryerson, notably, was a visitor in the British House of Commons on May 14, 1833, for the last debate and adoption of the law to abolish slavery in the British Empire. He gave a superb report on it in the Christian Guardian titled “House of Commons: Colonial Slavery.”

Ryerson also happened to be in Boston, en route to England in 1850, when the United States Congress passed the draconian Fugitive Slave Act. This required the return of slaves caught in free states, where they previously would have been safe. That law meant that escaped slaves from the American South would have to make it to Ontario to be safe, which sparked the development of the “Underground Railroad.” In a report written for the Christian Guardian, Ryerson condemned the law as an attempt to “trample under foot” the “rights of man,” adding that it was “incredible to me” that slavery was being championed in Boston, “the cradle of liberty.”


The abolition of slavery in Africa

The British law of 1833 that abolished slavery in the “British colonies” effectively meant in the West Indies; it also included Canada, which by comparison, had very few slaves. It would take decades more for slavery in Africa itself to be abolished, as well as the slave trade on the continent’s east coast. Recall journalist Henry Stanley’s “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” on finding missionary doctor David Livingstone alive, but ill, on the coast of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. Livingstone had himself witnessed the beheading of 400 local slaves by slave traders from Zanzibar.

Given Ghana’s significant role in the transatlantic slave trade, and Dundas’s clear opposition to slavery, it makes little sense to strike Dundas’s name off of Toronto’s most famous public square. But so far, Chow is sticking by her assertion that Dundas’s legacy with regards to slavery is “horrific.”


The inconvenient truths about slavery and its abolition

Canadians, and especially Torontonians, are keen to repent of the misdeeds of the past, both against Indigenous people and enslaved Africans. This new humility has its merits, but has also led to gross errors of judgment, especially false accusations against supposed “colonizers” or “colonialists.” Ryerson himself was accused of responsibility for the “colonialist” past, although he himself was born in Ontario, on a farm north of Lake Erie. Neglected is the documented fact that Indigenous societies themselves were slave societies. The losers of wars between Indigenous societies could be killed, mutilated, and/or enslaved, and even sold as slaves. Those more fortunate were adopted by the conquering group, in other words, assimilated – another no-no in today’s world.

No Indigenous society is known to have actually abolished slavery. Indeed, Indigenous slaves were among those freed by the abolition laws of Britain and Upper Canada.

Nor did any African state ever abolish slavery or the slave trade of its own accord. It took decades of pressure from Great Britain, and sometimes bribes from it, to achieve its abolition. Again, Dundas had some understanding of the key role of African leaders in slavery and the slave trade. As he stated in 1792 in the House of Commons when defending his amendment to William Wilberforce’s motion for abolition of the slave trade, to make it “gradual”:

“If once a Prince of an enlightened character should rise up in that hemisphere, his first act would be to make the means of carrying off all slaves from thence impracticable. What reason had they to suppose that the light of Heaven would never descend upon the continent of Africa? From that moment there must be an end of African trade. The first system of improvement, the first idea of happiness that would arise in that continent, would bring with it the downfall of the African trade, and that in a more effectual way than is done by regulations of this country.”

Dundas had a much better understanding of the complications of abolishing slavery and the slave trade than other abolitionists, certainly more than Wilberforce, the Parliamentary abolition leader. But even Dundas had no idea that it would take nearly a century to get rid of it everywhere, and that until it was abolished everywhere, with thorough enforcement measures as well as the adoption of laws, it would remain in force, and many would be its miserable victims.


A better name than “Sankofa Square”

There is good reason not to go back to “Yonge-Dundas” Square, for Sir George Yonge, when governor of Cape Colony, South Africa, made money on the slave trade. Yet neither Mayor Chow, nor Toronto’s previous mayor, John Tory, ever condemned him. This is not to suggest renaming Yonge Street, for too much Ontario history has passed along it. The Rebels of 1837 marched down Yonge Street from Eglinton Street, only to be stopped at Maitland Street. Egerton Ryerson, in his first post as a Methodist minister, had his start as an itinerant preacher riding the “Yonge Street Circuit.”

Reasonable titles would be “Dundas Square,” or, better, “Slavery Abolition Square.” “Ryerson Square” would suit, but only when the anti-Ryerson people come to realize that they fell for false accusations. The square is close to where he developed such great educational reforms as free schools for all, teacher training, and free public libraries, initially for Ontario, in time adopted throughout the country.

Lynn McDonald, CM, Ph.D., is a former Member of Parliament, a professor emerita of University of Guelph, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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ISIS and its violent Central Asian chapter are threatening Canada and the West with jihad. Hussain Ehsani for Inside Policy

Published on October 22, 2024

By

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Hussain Ehsani

Recent terrorism-related arrests in Canada and the wider West are evidence of the resurgence of ISIS, and especially its ultra-violent Afghanistan wing… recently revealed internal memos by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) highlighted ISIS’s growing role in inspiring domestic terrorism

Ten years ago, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria waged a holy war that threatened to engulf the wider Middle East. At its peak, ISIS conquered nearly 200,000-square-kilometres of Iraq and Syria, inspiring thousands of jihadis to join its crusade against the West.

It took a global coalition of 87 nations and groups, led by the United States and including Canada, to defeat Daesh for good. By December 2017, the damage was decisive: ISIS had lost more than 95 per cent of its territory. The coalition members celebrated the defeat of ISIS and thought it could no longer pose a threat, in the Middle East or anywhere else.

The moment lasted only a short time.

Recent terrorism-related arrests in Canada and the wider West are evidence of the resurgence of ISIS, and especially its ultra-violent Afghanistan wing. At the same time, recently revealed internal memos by Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre (ITAC) highlighted ISIS’s growing role in inspiring domestic terrorism, and in particular, potential “lone Wolf” attacks against Canada’s Jewish community.

The memos – issued on June 24 and July 10, 2024, and later obtained by media – were prescient: On July 31, Canadian police detained two alleged ISIS-affiliated men in Richmond Hill, Toronto, apparently based on a tip from French intelligence. In September, the RCMP in Quebec – working with the FBI – arrested a Pakistani national on a student visa for allegedly plotting an attack on a Jewish centre in Brooklyn, New York. These events were especially shocking since it was widely believed that ISIS was confined to Iraq and Syria. But ISIS is clearly influencing a new generation of terrorists around the world. Indeed, it’s suspected that ISIS inspired, and possibly directed, a plot to attack the Jewish community in Ottawa last February. Police arrested two Ottawa youths in relation to the alleged plot and charged them with attempted murder.

American authorities have also thwarted ISIS schemes, resulting in the arrest of ISIS-Tajiki operatives in the US earlier this year. The arrests continue: On October 7, the FBI apprehended an Afghan national and a juvenile co-conspirator for allegedly planning an attack under the Islamic State banner on November 5 – the day of the US presidential elections.

These US arrests point to a new trend: the rise and global reach of the Afghan branch of ISIS, known as the Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISKP). Some background is necessary. ISIS officially emerged in 2014, following rapid territorial gains in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. Rooted in the ideology of Salafi Jihadism, ISIS sought to establish a “Caliphate” governed by a strict interpretation of Sharia law. The group declared its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as Caliph in June 2014 after capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. This marked the height of ISIS’s power, controlling large swaths of Syria and Iraq.

As ISIS entrenched itself, it began expanding its influence beyond Iraq and Syria. Various affiliates, known as “provinces” or “wilayat,” emerged worldwide. Pledging allegiance to the central ISIS leadership, these groups dedicated themselves to establishing a global Islamic State.

That is one reason for the group’s resilience and recent resurgence. The ISKP was one of the most deadly branches to emerge. Founded in southeastern Afghanistan in 2015 on the border with Pakistan, ISKP immediately sought closer ties with the core ISIS group in Syria and Iraq to gain legitimacy and embolden its fighters and middle-rank commanders to conquer more territory. Those efforts came up short, and ISKP failed in its first years to win ISIS’s support.

Since then, ISKP has redoubled its efforts to impress its ISIS masters – and in many ways, it has succeeded. The group is now among the strongest of ISIS’s adherents.

Turning Point

The collapse of the former Afghan Government on August 15, 2021, was the turning point, when a host of transnational extremist fighters were released from prisons of Afghanistan. Aside from rejoicing about the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan, they prepared to take up their “holy duty” to expand ISIS’s regime. ISKP initially in 2015 drew its fighters from disaffected and wayward elements of the Taliban, Haqqani network, and Pakistani Taliban. The release of an additional cohort of Salafists (Sunni fundamentalists) aided its recruitment.

ISKP moved quickly to expand its influence and operations. The first attack in this new era was devastating: it stormed the Abbey Gate of the Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021, killing 170 Afghan civilians and 13 US soldiers. The US Department of Defense later released a report that Abdul Rahman al-Logari, one of the prisoners released on the day of Kabul collapse, was behind the Abbey Gate attack.

The message was clear – ISKP was on the march.

ISKP on the International Stage

To gain “formal” admission to the ranks of ISIS’s provinces, ISKP would have to show initiative and capability, not just in Afghanistan but in the wider territory of Khorasan: Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the eastern part of Turkmenistan.

To do so, it had to find new targets. Traditionally, the Hazara community, the most persecuted ethnicity in Afghanistan, was the main target for Islamist groups, along with former Afghan security forces. They remain primary victims. However, ISKP’s range of targets and ability to strike them has grown. It added new targets in Afghanistan, attacking the Russian embassy in Kabul in September 2022, and a Chinese facility in December of the same year. Then it started reaching  beyond the borders of Afghanistan: ISKP has carried out terrorist attacks in Central Asia and plotted a number of them in Pakistan.

Targets even farther away have now been hit. In January 2024, ISKP executed a complex attack in Kerman, Iran, at an event commemorating Qasem Sulaimani, the former commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, killed by US forces in 2020. On March 22, 2024, it hit a concert hall in Moscow – an operation that took the international community by complete surprise.

These operational successes mattered, but ISIS’s core leaders in Syria and Iraq demanded signs of ideological subservience as well. Under the leadership of Sanaullah Ghafari (also known as Dr. Shahab al-Muhajir), ISKP worked hard to prove that its propaganda machine is an engine of ISIS Salafist ideology.

ISKP uses fluency in a variety of languages, including Urdu, Russian, Tajiki, Uzbeki, Turkish, English, and Pashto, to spread its message. It seeks to extend its ideology to other fighters in the region in order to recruit transnational Salafi Jihadists. It has already recruited a vast number of terrorists from the ranks of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan in the north of Afghanistan. ISKP also exploited propaganda and demand from the diaspora of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to plot attacks against Western countries.

The attacks and ideological efforts seem to have worked. ISKP now appears to have become the operational wing of the core ISIS group. After the ISKP attack on Moscow, an ISIS spokesman released a 41-minute audio message praising the attack by “Mujahidin” and called on other “dormant” provinces of the “Caliphate” to rise up and follow ISKP’s example.

The terror spreads

ISIS leader Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Quraishi has more work in mind for his prized ISKP group. His priorities include freeing jihadists detained in Syria and attacking targets in Europe and North America.

In Syria, Al-Quraishi has encouraged ISIS terrorists to redouble efforts to attack the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed Kurdish militia in the country’s northeast, and try to break detained comrades out of SDF-run prisons. These facilities host thousands of ISIS fighters, including women and children. Given the success of ISKP’s operations and recruitment, ISIS is likely trying to implement the same tactic of jailbreaks in Kurdish territory in Syria and Iraq, to replenish its ranks.

ISIS spokesmen have also called for all Muslims to attack Christians and Jews in the broader West.

In September 2024, Türkiye’s domestic security agency (MIT) arrested Abuzar Al Shishani, who allegedly was plotting an attack on Santa Maria Italian Church in Istanbul in early January 2025. According to MIT, ISKP recruited him in 2021. The arrests in Canada, the US, and Türkiye are proof that ISKP’s reach is growing.

How can Canada fight back?

Canada and its allies in the West must act now to counter the terrorist threat posed by ISKP and ISIS. Fortunately, the RCMP and other Canadian police forces halted the recent spate of planned domestic terror attacks. However, stringent immigration screening is also crucial to keeping Canada and its allies safe. The Canada Border Services Agency needs to be ready to deal with the ISIS/ISKP threat.

To that end, Public Safety Canada should examine ways to enhance inter-agency targeting and intelligence sharing. A task force consisting of Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada, Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Revenue Agency, and FINTRAC – given their respective roles in immigration processing, countering disinformation and anti-terrorist financing – could help to ensure maximum coordination against the group.

Canada must also guard against the threat ISKP/ISIS poses to religious and minority communities in the country. ISIS’s call to target Jewish and Christian communities presents a special challenge. The Jewish community is particularly vulnerable due to the rampant antisemitism seen at pro-Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran rallies across Canada. But Christian sites, like churches, are also vulnerable. ISKP/ISIS are also likely to target Muslim groups that speak against its violent ideology.

Canada should collaborate with international partners to support communities and groups opposed to ISKP/ISIS. These include the Hazara, Kurdish, and Yazidi communities in Afghanistan and Kurdistan, as well as allies in the Kurdistan Regional government, and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Canada should also support initiatives led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries to strengthen the voice of moderate Islam in the Middle East and Central Asia. Such initiatives require careful diplomacy with allies and a range of partners. That is what Canada will require to counter the evolving threat of ISIS and ISKP.

Hussain Ehsani is a Middle East affairs analyst with expertise on the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is currently exploring the foreign policy relationship between Saudi Arabia and Canada. In addition to MLI, he also contributes to the Jerusalem Post, BBC Persian, and The Hill.

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MacDonald Laurier Institute

British Columbians have long reveled in their political uniqueness, but in 2024 they are providing a preview of the next national election.

Published on October 12, 2024

By

From the Macdonald Laurier Institute

By Ken Coates

Electoral warning signs from the West Coast: Ken Coates for Inside Policy

The upcoming election in bitterly divided British Columbia, long an outlier in federal politics, has emerged as a critical test run of the intense, polarized and highly emotional national political contest that looms ahead.

When British Columbians go to the polls on Oct. 19, they can choose between an activist NDP government and the Lazarus-like Conservative Party of B.C. that now dominates the political agenda with a “common sense” platform.

As on the national scene, the B.C. vote is more than a classic “left versus right” contest, although the different approaches to the role of government, public spending, state intervention, and social and identity concerns are evident.

The NDP government shares a lot in common with the federal Liberals, including an increasingly unpopular leader in David Eby, a positive and creative approach to Indigenous affairs, an environmentally activist agenda that is seemingly blind to economic dislocations, and now a wavering position on the province’s long-standing climate change and carbon tax policies.

John Rustad revived the moribund Conservative Party of B.C. by bringing conservative fiscal values back into the mainstream and took strong and previously unpopular positions on Indigenous and environmental matters. Along the way, he dismantled the BC United Party, formerly the BC Liberal Party.

Recent polls suggest the election will be close, likely defined by a deep rift between the Vancouver and Victoria urban support for the NDP and the Interior and small-town flirtation with the Conservatives.

The NDP government has spent generously but not always wisely, running up sizeable deficits that undercut the province’s reputation for fiscal reliability. It stood strongly with the Canadian government on the “safe supply” approach to excessive drug use and has failed, like the federal Liberals, to manage the housing crisis in major cities.

Eby’s government took a cautious approach on natural gas development and pipeline construction, leaving the government several billion dollars short in revenues.

On Indigenous matters, the Eby government became a world leader, particularly in its efforts to implement and respect the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It walked while the federal government has mostly talked.

The recognition of Indigenous title on Haida Gwaii outside the treaty process establishes a new model for engagement with First Nations. Strong and consistent concessions to Indigenous communities on resource development (which have not, incidentally, stopped activities as critics forecast) empowered First Nations and set the groundwork for improved relationships.

Echoing the national popularity of the federal Conservatives, the B.C. Conservatives’ “common sense” platform outlines support for small-town economic development, fiscal restraint, lower taxes (including carbon pricing), expanding LNG production, promoting resource development, constraining the interventions of activists, and reforming education and health care.

Rustad offers a dramatically different approach to the regulation of hard drugs, a tough approach on crime, opposition to identity politics, a promise to eliminate tent cities and a commitment to walk back support for UNDRIP.

The Green party, once the key power broker and partner with previous premier John Horgan’s NDP government, seems to be in sharp decline.  Andrew Weaver, former Green leader, has been highly critical of Eby and the current NDP and professed his support for Rustad, based largely on his concern over the premier’s approach to governing.

The Conservatives’ positions, like their federal counterparts, can be summarized simply: government has gone much too far on many fronts, has amassed an unsustainable deficit, and has undermined the core work of government.

The B.C. NDP, like the Trudeau government, leaves the impression that “you ain’t seen nothing yet” in both government activism and spending.

British Columbians have long reveled in their political uniqueness, but in 2024 they are providing a preview of the next national election.

The resurgent B.C. Conservative party has many policy similarities to the Conservative Party of Canada, with a powerful commitment to economic development and a desire to put identity politics in the rearview mirror.

The B.C. NDP, like their federal counterparts, has turned soft on carbon taxes, leaving Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as one of the few political leaders who have tied their political fortunes to this increasingly unpopular policy.

Should Eby lose or win narrowly, it would reinforce the rise of the right in the country.  Perhaps most importantly, the B.C. electorate would signal it has lost enthusiasm for an activist provincial leader with a willingness to spend freely on social programs, build large deficits, and pays little attention to building the economy. Sound familiar?

Ken Coates is a distinguished fellow and Director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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