Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned activists who pulled down a statue of Canada’s first prime minister over the weekend.
The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald was pulled down in Montreal on Saturday, its head falling off as the large monument came crashing to the ground. Trudeau called the statue’s destruction “deeply disappointing” and an act of “vandalism.”
“We are a country of laws, and we are a country that needs to respect those laws even as we seek to improve and change them,” Trudeau said in Montreal on Monday, according to CTV News. “Those kinds of acts of vandalism are not advancing the path towards greater justice and equality in this country.”
Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante also denounced the toppling, saying it “cannot be accepted nor tolerated.” Plante said it is better to put historical figures such as Macdonald “in context rather than remove them,” the BBC reported.
The statue of Macdonald, who has a controversial legacy over how Indigenous people of Canada were treated during his reign, has been subject to vandalism in the past. He served as the country’s first prime minister from 1867 to 1873 and then again from 1878 to 1891.
The Coalition for BIPOC Liberation, which encouraged people to attend the Saturday protest, defended the action against the statue.
“These racist monuments don’t deserve space,” the group said in a Facebook post. “Symbols of hate encourage the mental oppression of marginalized people and serve as reminders to all people of the inequitable imbalance of power and encourage white supremacist attitudes.”
Trudeau said Macdonald did “very good things” for Canada but also noted, “We need to be far more critical of some of his actions.”
The prime minister said it is fair to “ask questions regarding all our former prime ministers, all our past leaders who did many good things but made mistakes as well.”
Statues and monuments of historical figures have been hit by vandalism, removed, or, in some cases, toppled in places across the United States and the world during a reckoning on race this summer following the death of George Floyd, a black man whose life ended after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed a knee to his neck for several minutes during an arrest on Memorial Day.
Statues of Christopher Columbus, credited with the 1492 European discovery of the “New World” of the Americas, have been targeted over his treatment of Indigenous peoples. Columbus, Ohio, removed a statue of the city’s namesake from in front of its City Hall, and in Richmond, Virginia, a statue of Columbus was vandalized and tossed in a lake.
