Charlottetown café refuses to use coffee sleeves featuring ‘problematic' John A. Macdonald image
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Laura Noel, who owns a café in downtown Charlottetown, said she was contacted by the centre and asked to participate in the campaign by using branded coffee sleeves. However, upon opening the box, she was surprised to find Sir John A. Macdonald's face printed on the front of the coffee sleeves.
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Noel received 1,250 sleeves and immediately felt uncomfortable using them, especially given the City of Charlottetown's previous decision to remove a statue of Macdonald due to repeated vandalism and public concern about his legacy.
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Noel said the centre's campaign risks placing the burden of historical controversy on small businesses like hers.
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She said putting the sleeves on cups could lead to uncomfortable customer interactions that business owners aren't prepared for.
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Message and timing
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Noel emailed the Confederation Centre on July 25 asking for clarity, but said she received no response. After following up again on Aug. 6, she received an email from CEO Steve Bellamy later that day. She said the reply did little to ease her concerns and felt dismissive of the issues she raised.
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She also questioned the decision to print the sleeves in orange, widely recognized as the colour of Indigenous reconciliation in Canada during a campaign that would run into September, which is National Reconciliation Month. Macdonald is linked to the creation of the residential school system in Canada that the country has since acknowledged was a cultural genocide.
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'To me, there's too many combinations of problematic things on one sleeve,' Noel said.
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'Separately, they're OK. We can talk about John A, we can talk about orange, but together, it's just too problematic.'
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Colour orange
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'What I hear is orange is ours first, it was our colour first … we picked orange first, is what I'm hearing,' she said.
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Noel said she felt misled by the lack of information when she initially agreed to participate, and that the centre should have considered the impact of using Macdonald's image, especially when asking the public for donations. She imagined having a customer who was a residential school survivor.
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