The New Westminster school district has formally approved a renaming process for Richard McBride Elementary School.
The school’s parent advisory council (PAC) brought the idea to the school district in June, expressing their concerns over having a school named after someone with McBride’s past. McBride was the 16th premier of British Columbia, from 1903 to 1915. He held publicly expressed views against Asian and Indigenous people and against women’s suffrage, and throughout his time in office he oversaw legislation reflecting those views. (See more details below.)
PAC members felt those views did not align with the school district’s core values of equity and inclusion and suggested the time is right for a renaming, with a new school building now under construction.
“The new school is an opportunity for a fresh start,” said a letter from the PAC. “We are also in a moment of reckoning, as a society, with the ongoing impact of racism and exclusion.”
At the school board’s operations committee meeting Sept. 15, school district superintendent Karim Hachlaf said the PAC’s request aligned with the school district’s direction.
“The board saw the request aligning with its own values, in terms of our district values, with our commitment towards reconciliation and decolonization,” he said.
Hachlaf presented a three-step timeline for fall, following a school renaming procedure the board adopted in 2019.
From now until mid-October, Hachlaf will invite and confirm representatives for the renaming committee. Hachlaf said that committee will be a diverse one; as per district procedure, it will include a trustee representative, the district aboriginal coordinator, representatives from the teachers’ union and CUPE, a PAC representative, and student and community reps, among others.
Then, from mid-October to mid-November, the committee will have a chance to meet once or twice – not to complete its renaming work, but to develop a consultation plan and timeline.
Finally, that plan and timeline will be brought to the school board’s operations committee for approval at its Nov. 17 meeting.
A full consultation process will then take place in the new year.
Trustees were unanimously in favour of the proposal.
“I think this is pretty exciting,” said trustee Maya Russell. “It’s not an easy step, but I wanted to thank the superintendent for his work and the PAC at Richard McBride for your courage in bringing forth what is not an easy topic, but one that, once you look at the details, it is so absolutely clear what is the right thing for us to do.”
Trustee Anita Ansari told the PAC representatives she is “really, really grateful” for their work.
“I know that this is hard work, and it is hard work to stand up to change institutions, or the way we live our lives in a very colonial fashion,” she said. “Each of you is a visionary, in a sense, or very intrepid in how you’ve taken on changing something that is not easy.”
Trustee Dee Beattie agreed.
“As someone who went to McBride many years ago, I think this is a wonderful way to honour how much our values have changed over the years,” she said.
WHAT IS IT ABOUT RICHARD McBRIDE?
In a June 22 letter to the New Westminster school district, the Richard McBride PAC executive outlined some of their findings about the school’s namesake.
Among those findings:
During his time as premier (1903 to 1915), McBride advocated for “a white B.C.” and sought to shut out the “Asiatic hordes.” He worked hard to prevent “cheap” Japanese labour from competing in the fisheries and in “everything the white man has been used to call his own.”
McBride led the legislature in passing numerous anti-Asian measures, such as taxes on companies that hired Chinese labourers and legislation denying the vote to Asians and Indigenous people.
After the Conservatives formed the federal government in 1911, McBride urged Prime Minister Robert Borden to honour a promise to legislate against immigration from Asia.
McBride was premier at the time of the Komagata Maru incident, when the Japanese steamship carrying hundreds of Sikh passengers was prevented from docking and most of its passengers were barred from entering B.C. McBride was quoted as saying: “To admit Orientals in large numbers would mean the end, the extinction of the white people.”
As premier, McBride pursued a policy of making way for economic development and the expansion of cities by dispossessing Indigenous nations of their reserve lands.
McBride was also well-known as a leading anti-suffrage politician at a time when white women were gaining the vote across Canada. He believed extending the franchise to women would take away too much power from men.
- Source: Cheryl Sluis, PAC letter to New Westminster school district
