The Canadian experience is that it’s very hard to care about Columbus discourse but you still see almost as much of it you would if you were an American.

It’s an incredibly annoying topic because it transparently has nothing whatsoever to do with Columbus – the pro side just uplifts him as an avatar of American mythology, but despite their fixation on enumerating the (actual, serious) evils Columbus committed, the anti side also only cares about him in that capacity, it’s just that they propound a competing mythology where America is evil. (This is a far more accurate mythology, but that owes less to the wisdom of the American left than the fact that classifying any large, powerful nation as evil has a fantastic ROC curve.) Not even the people whose ancestors were killed by Columbus care about Columbus specifically! He’s a stand-in for genocidal American colonialism on the whole.

Anyway, this is bothersome because the putative issue of “let’s not honour Columbus since he sucks” is trivially solved by replacing him with a better avatar of positive American mythology. It’d be pretty easy to get bipartisan support with a good alternative! It’s not like with Washington; nobody is really that attached to the guy. However, the kind of people criticizing Columbus don’t want to do that because their actual goal is to dismantle positive American mythology entirely, so the entire thing is just this obnoxiously indirect parable about the moral worth of America staged using a Columbus hand-puppet. Just talk about America directly and stop beating around the bush! (While I disagree with their political takes more often than not, @mitigatedchaos​ had a similar comment about Lee today that was fairly on-point.)