• A statue of Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald has been removed from the front of the Victoria (BC) City Hall, on account of him being a “key architect of the Indian residential school system.”

• Canada might be getting a new statutory holiday “to mark Canada’s ‘tragic and painful’ residential school legacy.”

• One alumnus of the residential school system was Tom Longboat (1887-1949), a Mohawk from Brantford, Ontario, and the premier long-distance runner of his day. The National Post‘s Joe O’Connor remembers Edgar Laplante, a con artist who traveled around the United States pretending to be Longboat while Longboat was actually fighting in France, and then, when the jig was up, “Chief White Elk.” (Reminds me of Grey Owl, a.k.a. Englishman Archibald Belaney.)