Bernard Dionne, an amateur historian, is trying to change the plaque outside a home owned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister. Dionne says the facts on the plaque are wrong, and due to be replaced with another plaque, perhaps also incorrect, this July.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Paint is peeling off the porch of Les Rochers, the modest, yellow two-story cottage where Canada's first prime minister would wheel his disabled daughter Mary out to give her a view of the magnificent tides on the 25-kilometre-wide river.
The place has significance for more than summer repose, however. Many summers, Macdonald ran the government from the house in St. Patrick. Newspapers called it Canada's Summer Capital.
In 1885, Macdonald held cabinet meetings that included Hector Langevin (a Father of Confederation, and of Indian residential schools) and Charles Tupper (also a Father of Confederation, and a future prime minister). Together, they reviewed and affirmed the decision to hang Louis Riel.
The hanging of Riel was not popular in French-speaking Quebec. Macdonald spent most of the summer of 1886 on his first and only trip to Western Canada. "It was probably wise," said Bernard Dionne, a local amateur historian. French and English got along well in the area, Mr. Dionne said, but emotions ran high that summer.
In front of Les Rochers today, a faded and tarnished bronze plaque installed 74 years ago is mostly ignored as cars zip along Highway 132. The plaque declares "Sir John A. Macdonald. The First Prime Minister of Canada spent many summers here between 1873 and 1890."
That plaque is driving Mr. Dionne to distraction. He has meticulously tracked Macdonald's summertime movements in the region and concluded he lived in no fewer than four homes. Les Rochers was the house Macdonald bought and renovated in 1882 and moved into in 1883 – 12 years after he first summered in the region – and stayed many of the next seven years, but it was only one of his homes. Mr. Dionne has letters, receipts and excerpts from first-hand memoirs to prove it.
But official history has its own momentum. The house became a National Historic Site in early June and the proclamation only cemented what Mr. Dionne has come to view as a crime against history. A new plaque going up in July appears likely to repeat the same text and stand for another 70 years.
Mr. Dionne, a 54-year-old sales manager for a company that transforms peat moss into absorbent material, has written letters, called local officialdom and climbed the ladder of federal bureaucracy, but no one recognizes his research. "Nobody seems willing to announce they've been wrong for 74 years," Mr. Dionne said.
The house, owned by the non-profit group Canadian Heritage of Quebec, is leased out as a bed and breakfast in the summer. On a recent Friday, the building was shuttered and a plumber clanked away at leaky pipes inside. A donation allowed a limited amount of maintenance work for the unveiling of the new plaque, tours and a private citizenship ceremony to mark the 200th anniversary of Macdonald's birth.
Jacques Archambault, the organization's executive director, said he and a part-time helper rely on historical work done years ago to determine the history of the building. They are too busy struggling to preserve 28 buildings to examine Mr. Dionne's findings deeply.
"Les Rochers was the summer capital of Canada. We can argue and discuss which house he was in one day or another," Mr. Archambault said. "But he was there. He rented, he bought it, he made major decisions there. He could have stayed other places. In my work, I'm more concerned about preservation of the building."
Mr. Dionne does not intend to give up, but he has learned to be sanguine about results. History, after all, is about the long haul. "It's not over yet, but at the same time, it's not a life-and-death struggle," he said. "I think I'll write a book."
Les Perreaux