It’s exactly 150 years since Thomas D’Arcy McGee was murdered. McGee had settled in Montreal and was elected here as an MP, but was murdered in Ottawa – the only serving MP to be murdered in Canada to date. His tomb is in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges.
There’s to be a memorial mass and Irish wake Saturday, and there’s even a memoriam in the Gazette, where the memoriams are usually for those more recently deceased.
I find it interesting that photos of McGee show a man who seems to be mixed race, but I’ve never seen any account that suggested he had African ancestry and I don’t know how likely that could’ve been in Ireland in 1825.
Blork 13:14 on 2018-04-08 Permalink
Actually, I had the same reaction as Kate when I saw the photo of McGee. Specifically, I was scrolling through FB and saw the photo before I saw the headline, and at a gut level I registered it as a photo accompanying some write-up about slavery and the US civil war. When I realized it was McGee I still thought “Whaaat? Was he part African?”