This week, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography's weekly online publication of a new biography has been supplemented by the release of a revised biography: that of John A Macdonald, previously issued in 1990 and now extensively reworked. It deserves attention from students of historiography as well as of history.
The basic Macdonald biography remains largely the work as published in 1990 and credited to Peter Waite and J. Keith Johnson (both now deceased), but it now has significant additions signed by J.R. Miller on Macdonald's Indigenous policies and by Patricia Roy on his policies and attitudes regarding Chinese people in Canada, plus a concluding assessment credited to DBC staff -- with new bibliographic notes for all of these. In the "Publication History" sidebar provided in the online DCB, the original 1990 text of Waite and Johnson remains available for comparison.
This practice -- is it new? -- of identifying and assigning authorship of revisions in DCB entries seems to me better than the silent rewrites that seem to have prevailed previously. (Again, the originals of those entries can still be found). Many older biographies have urgently needed revision, but how much rewriting of the work of now-deceased scholars can be made before it becomes necessary to wonder if the original authors would wish to have their names removed from the new texts attributed to them? In the Macdonald process, we can see the quality of Waite's and Johnson's scholarship as well as of that in which they had no part.
No doubt the new material will be closely scrutinized (perhaps even reviewed), given the controversies over Macdonald's actions and reputation that have roiled Canadian history in recent years. My own view on a first reading is that the DCB's revised Macdonald entry signals the impossibility of the project now being attempted by the Canadian Institute for Historical Education and its partisans: to restore all the Macdonald statues and honours and denounce all who bring forth new assessments of him, particularly with regard to indigenous matters. The standard view here has shifted, and the revised biography reflects and confirms that.
I might have a quibble or two still.
The repeated invocation of Macdonald's centrality in the making of confederation makes one think Donald Creighton managed to be a ghost author here.
Also, the respect given to the claim that Macdonald drafted fifty of the seventy-two clauses of the Quebec Resolutions of 1864 grates on at least one reader. Yes, D'Arcy McGee said it, but the setting matters: it was at a partisan tribute dinner in a Kingston tavern where hyperbolic praise was surely de rigueur and the sobriety of all involved was very much in question. There has always been abundant evidence of lively debate and multiple authorship of most of the Seventy Two Resolutions -- and of Macdonald's resistance or grudging assent to many of them.
