Non-Indigenous Canadians’ Attitudes Toward Renaming or Removing Statues as a Reconciliation Strategy

Abstract

Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples has been a named priority for many post-colonial societies. In this context, in August 2018, Victoria City Hall in Canada removed the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, from its grounds; similar events followed across Canada. Research on this issue is lacking but can offer useful insights to researchers and policymakers. To understand how non-Indigenous Canadians respond to renaming or removing statues in the name of reconciliation, we qualitatively analysed online comments posted under news articles reporting the removal of Macdonald's statue (Study 1). Two narratives aimed at delegitimising renaming/removing emerged: depicting the actions as excessive ‘political correctness’ (PC) that represented the values of a powerful, but minority, outgroup of ‘liberal elites’; and depicting the actions as a symbolic threat to the ingroup through notions of ‘rewriting history’. In Study 2, with a Canadian community sample, we investigated anti-PC attitudes and symbolic intergroup threat via rewriting history as predictors of support for reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples. Given the central role of ideological beliefs in intergroup attitudes, we examined RWA and SDO as predictors of anti-PC attitudes, symbolic threat in the form of rewriting history, and support for reconciliation. Path analysis results showed that RWA and SDO indirectly predicted lower support for renaming/removing via higher anti-PC attitudes and higher symbolic threat. Collectively, this research provides evidence that anti-PC and symbolic threat are important constructs in relation to responses to reconciliation proposals in Canada with potential implications for other post-colonial societies.