Debates about monuments the gift that keeps on giving for satirist Tim Fontaine

This episode originally aired October 4, 2020.

When activists pulled down the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Montreal in late August, Tim Fontaine could guess all the responses from critics before they even made them.

It's because they've been making the same points for years — and he's made fun of them on his satirical news website, Walking Eagle News, for years too.

"The sort of jokes that I make on the site are really not that much different than the actual defences people have of statues," Fontaine said.

Fontaine has written headlines for his satirical news site like "'We warned you': After statue removed, millions unable to remember name of Canada's 1st Prime Minister," and "Pipeline stalled after First Nations erect statues of Canada's first PM in path."

He said it's laughable that people think toppling a statue that depicts an historic figure erases history. 

"The idea that we're somehow going to lose history because we tear down a statue that nobody looked at before … it's ridiculous," he said.

But for Indigenous people, Fontaine said tearing down the statues prompts a "visceral reaction." 

It's a reaction that comes from what they see when they see a statue of Macdonald, who starved First Nations people and whose government hanged Métis nationalist Louis Riel, or Edward Cornwallis, who offered a bounty for the scalps of Mi'kmaw people. 

"It's a gut reaction," Fontaine said. "You see this symbol of what, for some of us, is probably hate … it's a symbol of something that's still happening right now.

"It's funny that it's suddenly meant so much to people that didn't give a crap about them before."

For Fontaine, the ongoing discourse around statues offers a ready supply of material. "Guy who spent millions fighting First Nations kids in court 'deeply disappointed' over toppled statue," was written in reference to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's response to the Macdonald statue in Montreal, and his government seeking a judicial review of compensation awarded to First Nations kids last October.

"That's what upsets you? You literally spent millions of dollars fighting kids that were asking for not more, but for equity," Fontaine said. "That was a moment where it was borne out of anger."