The Four Pallbearers

Prime ministers are not exactly in fashion. In 2016, for example, Wilfrid Laurier University reversed its decision to house twenty-two life-sized statues of them after critics called the Canada 150 project “culturally insensitive.” Two years later, Victoria mothballed its statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, citing his central role in the creation of residential schools. Regina, Charlottetown, and Kingston followed in rapid succession. Toronto’s remains standing in Queen’s Park, but it’s covered up. Elsewhere, protesters took matters into their own hands, pulling the Old Chieftain fraom his pedestals in Montreal’s Place du Canada and Hamilton’s Gore Park.

Michael Hill got the proverbial memo on prime ministers, Indigenous peoples, and reconciliation, and he acknowledges in the opening pages of The Lost Prime Ministers that First Nations and Métis communities paid a disproportionate price in the making of this country. But that’s as far as he...