Was Peter Bryce, the One Dead White Man Who Bucked the Demonization Trend, a Saint or a Sinner?

The following editorial was written by Greg Piasetzki and yours truly and published by a leading international news site.

It deals with the puzzle of why one particular Canadian official intimately involved for decades with Canada’s Indian Residential Schools escaped vilification, unlike many others, for the role he played in their operation.

Why have so many of Canada’s important historical figures seen their statutes toppled and their names erased from buildings and maps in recent years in an outburst of historical cleansing? Among the victims: Sir John A. Macdonald, Egerton Ryerson, Sir Hector-Louis Langevin, and Samuel de Champlain, all former heroes and nation builders?

Whatever good these other dead white men did in creating modern Canada has been ignored or denied. Any act or statement they made contrary to current Canadian values is see as warranting their public condemnation and erasure. The litmus test for doing so is any association, however remote or tangential, with Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.

But there is one dead white man from the last century whose reputation has risen as fast as others have fallen. The stature of Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, a senior public health official at the turn of the 20th century and previously a minor character in Canada’s historical record, is rising triumphantly

The following important essay says why.