A handful of people climbed the monument, tied ropes around the statue and held up banners before unbolting it and pulling it down. The falling statue’s trajectory caused the head to fly off and bounce onto the cobblestones below. A video posted to social media captured the moment, CBC reported.
The incident took place following a peaceful march through downtown Montreal, one of several demonstrations held across Canada organized by a coalition of Black and Indigenous activists.
Hundreds of protesters had marched to the site to call for defunding the police. They reportedly were organized by the Coalition for BIPOC Liberation, which bills itself as “a collective of social justice groups and community activists led by black and indigenous people.”
Police asked the crowd to disperse on a loudspeaker but didn’t intervene as the statue was destroyed. None of the vandals were arrested.
Macdonald, an immigrant to Canada from Scotland, served as prime minister from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891. He’s ranked by historians as one of Canada’s three most accomplished prime ministers, but he has become a controversial figure in recent years. A statue of Macdonald was removed from the steps of Victoria City Hall and placed in storage in 2018, with city councilors citing the father of the Confederation’s role as “a leader of violence against indigenous peoples.”
Macdonald is faulted for championing church-run residential schools that tried to assimilate indigenous children to Western ways. Children were removed from their families and forbidden to speak their native languages in a system that critics have called cultural genocide. Many were exposed to physical or sexual abuse.
