All PMs have policy failures, like when Mulroney set out to bring Quebec into the constitution and it didn't work, or when John A Macdonald established the residential schools to brutalize Indigenous kids and it worked. Hey actually what constitutes a policy failure?

It really seems like the very things John A did that some thought leaders insist on weighing against his 'policy failures' were in fact consistent with those 'failures' and in fact the same thing.

The MLI letter is a particularly lazy and pompous expression of it ("history happened a long time ago ...") but this idea that you apologize for bad things that happened while continuing to laud and or to do those bad things, is in fact the essence of Trudeau-era reconciliation.

Reconciliation requires truth, and at least a convincing show of a break with the past. You can't do it while you push pipelines, deny equal funding to Indigenous kids, and insist on the fundamental goodness of leaders whose greatest achivements depended on genocidal policies.

To the extent that John A was able to extend Canada across the prairies, his regrettable policies were successful. They failed to the extent that Indigenous nations continue to challenge the Canadian state on their lands, and elders continue to teach Indigenous kids.