Parks Canada recently cut the ribbon on a “decolonized” version of Bellevue House, Sir John A. Macdonald’s Kingston, Ont., home.

Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and one of the singular architects of Confederation, only lived there for two years in the 1840s, long before the events for which he’d be remembered. Nevertheless, a new revamp is so meticulously critical of its former resident that Parks Canada even took pains to note that the mahogany used in Macdonald’s furniture might have come from Caribbean slave plantations.