The removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville, Va. sparked plenty of conversation about what place historical figures with checkered pasts should have in modern society.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall is concerned moves like that can alter how history will be known to future generations.

"It's like Orwell," he said. "It's 1984. It's our past. For good or for ill, it's our past."

Wall took to Facebook last Thursday condemning the consideration of removing John A. MacDonald's name from schools in Ontario.

The Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario passed a motion ask school boards across the province to consider removing Canada's first prime minister from the names of schools. MacDonald refered to First Nations people as "savages" and advocated assimilation.

But in his Swift Current riding Friday, Wall said that while MacDonald's views on race were deplorable his name should not be removed from schools.

"He was also though the prime minister who set up the North West Mounted Police, extensively to protect aboriginal people from being exploited, and in the case of the Cypress Hills Massacre, murdered by people like whiskey traders," Wall said. "He built the country with the railroad, so do you expunge him from history or take his name off of schools because he was also the product of his time, tragically so, with this very terrible view of races. He had it. All of his contemporaries did. Maybe in 100 years, they'll think we were backward or worse, but I'd like to think that there was something contributed by this generation."

Wall brought up Saskatchewan's esteemed Co-operative Commonwealth Federation Premier Tommy Douglas as someone else people might look at removing from a school if they went down the MacDonald road.

"The point I made yesterday was that Tommy Douglas - the great CCF premier - wrote a paper on eugenics. His master's thesis was on eugenics and it stated that people with intellectual disabilities - people he called mentally defective - should be sterilized, so they couldn't produce and there wouldn't be descendants because that would be bad for society. He changed his views later on."

Douglas brought about universal healthcare, and Wall is of the mind that showing the good and bad of history can a learning moment.

"Let's not judge, not even in terms of actions, let's not expunge history because people did things that were a product of their time. Let's remember everything they did... You can take your kids, take your students if you're a teacher, to a school, or consider the naming of a school and say here are the great things that Tommy Douglas did. Now he once wrote this, which is reprehensible today. He realized it was wrong and we know it's reprehensible. And you can have both of those things be a teaching moment. The parts of history that are shameful to us and the parts that commend us."

Wall said that even if he was south of the border, his opinion would stay the same.

"Like Robert E. Lee, I would be saying the same thing if I lived in the States about him... They're going to wipe him from history. If you talk about Lee, you can about slavery."