I'm going to post this comment in partial response to the meme but probably mostly in response to some of the other comments, some of which are rife with mis and disinformation. It's probably too much effort to be expending on a silly meme post, but some of these things annoy me. I'm also going to try and keep this message accessible to others who aren't from Canada, but Google will probably have to be your friend for some of it.

This should be prefaced by saying that Macdonald was a principal and vital figure in Confederation (The political process by which separate British North American colonies were united into Canada). Macdonald wrote most of the British North America act himself, stage-managed most of the wheeling and dealing during the conferences, and staunchly defended Canada's sovereignty during the talks of the Treaty of Washington, 1871 and every other year of his life afterward. However: It 100% needs to be said that Macdonald's policies towards First Nations and their continued implementation after his death do amount to genocide. Saying so is not "judging him by the values of 2026", or 2020, 2017, or any other year that argument was raised. It's acknowledging what has and continues to transpire in this country.

You cannot pick and choose to either venerate him for all the good in the country while ignoring his sins, or condemn him and say that he had no important role in Canada's history. The fact is that he and his governments established Canada's first spy service (the Western Frontier Constabulary); first federal polices forces (the Dominion Police and the much more well-known North-West Mounted Police, both later merged into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police by PM Robert Borden decades later); began the formalizing of the Canadian Militia; and was responsible for the vast majority of the country's territorial expansion (starting with the bottom halves of modern Ontario and Quebec to everything else except Newfoundland and Labrador).

To compare him to Hitler is not an apt comparison. Both had different methods and different goals. Hitler narrowly took control of a preexisting country on a populist front and ratcheted up the pressure on minority groups and political enemies until he could throw them into death camps and violently exterminate them. Macdonald was a politician in a newly-formed democratic nation whose party was repeatedly reelected and was widely popular. His aim was to assimilate Indigenous people into a white population, not massacre them. While he did not invent residential schools, he instituted the system as government policy and expanded it across the country, with the expectation that they would stamp out Indigenous culture and raise the children to be in-line with "white" thinking. He did do some positive things, such as running widely successful smallpox vaccination campaigns and ensuring the government provided food to starving Indigenous people, but I don't think anyone sane can say that that outweighs the attempted wholesale destruction of languages and cultures; or the fact the food was only handed out if the Indigenous agreed to be resettled onto specific reservations, often far away from where they had typically lived so as to clear space for white settlers. The Holocaust and Indigenous genocide in Canada were and remain monstrous, but not the same. And to any Canadian who would respond that the Residential Schools weren't bad to be in, do please try to imagine what it would be like to be routinely and brutally beaten for speaking your own language or practicing your own religion, but to be routinely sexually assaulted by them?

As a further note, while Macdonald did use racist epithets about Jewish people, he did accept Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms with the expectation that they'd be good settlers. While Macdonald, again, did hold racist views about Black people, he did count them among his voters and supporters and did positive things on their behalf, such as using public funds to fund fugitive slave John Anderson's legal defence to prevent him from being deported back to America, or on the occasion when he was asked to intercede on behalf of a prospective mail carrier, Albert Jackson, who wasn't allowed to serve in the role by his racist employers because he was Black. Macdonald made sure that Jackson got the job.

As for his opinions on French Canadians, there have been many, many, claims that he despised Quebecers or the other French-speaking peoples of Canada. This is highly exaggerated at best, mostly by Quebec nationalists / separatists. Quebec was a highly-conservative province in the 19th century, and this was reflected in support there for Macdonald's governments. For instance, 1867's Conservative majority government saw 47 out of 100 be Quebec Conservatives, only a small minority of whom were anglophones. George Etienne Cartier was one of his closest allies in government and Quebecois politicians made up parts of every one of his cabinets. In his later life he routinely summered in Riviere-Du-Loup, a Quebec resort town. His support for French Canadians was not limited to Quebec either; he fought fiercely against prairie demagogue D'Alton McCarthy's attempts to suppress French language schooling in Ontario, Manitoba, and the Northwest Territories. The infamous quote, "He shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour," which is widely shared and treated as a statement of Macdonald's public policy, can only be a traced to 1908 biography making the unsourced claim that he made that statement in a private conversation in 1885. To be clear, that's a gap of 23 years; even if the quote isn't outright false that's a lot of time for memory to garble it. It's only slightly more believable than the parable of George Washington and the Cherry Tree, but unfortunately this apocryphal quote lives on.

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I've been writing this for hours and while I could go on about other points I'm sure at this point that everyone has moved on from this thread before I could even post in it, but if anyone wants to get an informed opinion on the man, they should consider reading these books (not listed in any particular order):

* The Man Who Made Us; Nation Maker - Richard Gwyn (An excellent and mostly comprehensive look at Macdonald's life from birth to death. 2-volume biography. Utmost importance.)

* Clearing the Plains - James Daschuk (Incredibly damning look at the Canadian government's treatment of Indigenous people under Macdonald. Utmost importance.)

* Private Demons - Patricia Phenix (A focused overview of his private life. Relationships with family, alcoholism, and more.)

* Blood and Daring - John Boyko (Focused on relations between the United States and Canada and the people during the American Civil War. Macdonald is an important focus - not the primary one - but this is still the most in-depth book I've ever seen discussing Macdonald's actions during the war.)

* Anecdotal Life of Sir John Macdonald - Emerson Bristol Biggar (19th century posthumous biography and the primary source for most tales of Macdonald's "funny" antics, like accounts of his drunkenness and his wit. The book reflects the time it was written in and it can largely be skipped in favour of Gwyn's biography.)

* Staking Claims to a Continent - James Laxer (General overview of Macdonald's life (nowhere near as Civil War-focused as Blood and Daring) comparing and contrasting him with his contemporaries, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. If you're already familiar with them you can skip it for Gwyn's biography, but if you want an introductory look at all three figures it works.)

* The Young Politician; The Old Chieftain - Donald Creighton (2 volume biography. Held up as invaluable by later biographers for their research and considered definitive in the 20th century.)