I live in the beautiful town of Dundas, Ont., a municipality named after Henry Dundas who, as British Home Secretary in the late 18th Century, had a great deal to do with the evolution of Britain’s various colonies. Politically active at a time when individuals such as William Wilberforce were aggressively pushing for the abolition of Slavery throughout the British Empire, Dundas supported only the “gradual” eradication of the Slave Trade. While he may have been led by a vile indifference to those enslaved, he may also have been concerned with the possibly dire consequences of simply cancelling an institution upon which so much of the world’s economy was dependent. Whatever his motivation, many Canadian “progressives” are calling for his name to be removed from the public domain inasmuch as he appears to have been just another example of White, Western arrogance.
Dundas St. in Toronto has long been a major East-West thoroughfare. In 2020, a group of “concerned” citizens petitioned City Council to change the street’s name, a measure perfectly in keeping with the Left’s tendency to submit those who lived hundreds of years ago to the criteria of its Post-Modern Ideology. While it is absurd to judge such people on the basis of highly questionable ideas that only became widely accepted a few decades ago, what is even more absurd is the double-standard with which “progressives” apply them. Toronto’s “inclusive” City Council has made this quite apparent!
No decision has as yet been made on what to rename Dundas Street. But in Aug. of 2025, a major downtown intersection that used to be known as Yonge-Dundas Square, became Sankofa Square! Sankofa is a Twi word, Twi being the dialect spoken by the majority of the citizens of Ghana. It apparently implies the need “to learn from the past.” So Toronto’s City Council, wanting to signal its disgust with Henry Dundas who was interested in only “gradually” getting rid of Slavery 200 years ago, opted instead to embrace a nation of West Africa where the slave trade was absolutely thriving in the 18th Century!
As I have pointed out in multiple blogs, a number of parliamentary votes in the first decades of the 19th C. indicated Enlightened England’s eagerness to banish Slavery from its domains. These culminated in 1833’s Slavery Abolition Act which soon led to the emancipation of approximately 800,000 slaves throughout the British Empire. Henry Dundas had died in 1811, but there is no reason to believe he would have resisted this truly progressive development. It was a development that naturally devastated the African Slave Trade which entailed Blacks willingly selling other Blacks into servitude around the world. And yet Toronto’s City Council has implied that it is the people of West Africa from whom we White, Racist Westerners must “learn” the lessons of History.
This is nothing new. Sir John A. MacDonald is constantly being reviled by “progressives” for referring to Canada’s Indigenous as “savages” 150 years ago. But Post-Modern Relativism, which engenders the Inclusive notion that the Cultural Values of all peoples are of equal merit, would have seemed utterly idiotic to MacDonald who still lived in the Age of Reason! Quite literally, the contemporary Left ignores the inarguable Facts of History, the radical disparities in the achievements of various peoples, because the superficiality of its world-view simply cannot deal with the complexities of Reality!
And oh, by the way, Toronto has now been assailed by requests to have approximately 60 other place names changed because they might prove uncomfortable to the city’s massive immigrant population!