Canadian politicians agree on virtually nothing except that apologies are owed

The culture of political apologies

Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?

— Thomas Sowell

In recent decades, the first high-profile regret for history came in 1988 from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney for the internment of Japanese Canadians and the government’s theft of their property during the Second World War. Next was a 1990 apology for how the government declared Italian Canadians “enemy aliens” in that same war (after Italy joined the Axis against Canada and her allies). In 2001, Ron Duhamel, the Veterans’ Affairs minister in the Jean Chretien government, expressed official regret for the army’s execution of 23 soldiers during the First World War. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for residential schools, where native Canadian children attended (sometimes by force, and sometimes at the request of parents) between the 1880s and 1990s and where sexual and physical abuses occurred.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued three apologies in rapid succession. In November 2018, he apologized for the actions of British Columbia’s first chief justice, Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie, who, in the 1860s, convicted and sentenced five Tsilhqot’in chiefs to death by hanging. In March 2019, Trudeau apologized for how the Inuit in northern Canada were treated for tuberculosis in the mid-20th century, and in May 2019, for the imprisonment of Saskatchewan’s Chief Poundmaker who was convicted of treason-felony and imprisoned during the 1885 North-West Rebellion.

Since Brian Mulroney’s first apology in 1988, at just the federal level, at least 15 apologies have been issued, with eight from the Trudeau government in four years. Justin Trudeau’s apologies were so numerous that even the BBC headlined a news report with the question, “Does Justin Trudeau apologise too much?”

Mixing politics, history, and an apology is often a mistake. There were always nuances in the various regrets, which could support or alternately undermine them. The six Tsilhqot’in chiefs sentenced to the gallows by Judge Begbie faced that fate after they murdered twenty-one men building a road through Tsilhqot’in territory. Some would defend the six chiefs on the grounds that the killing was a battle in a war against invaders — this was the Trudeau government’s reasoning.

Alternately, some of the attackers who murdered the workers — there were 24 and not all were executed — were “singing and merry-making” with the road builders the night before. The attackers also killed more than just the road crew. They also killed those on a pack train along with a lone settler.

The issue is further complicated by how Chief Justice Begbie was not unsympathetic to First Nations and others discriminated against by white settlers. As left-wing journalist Stephen Hume wrote in 2017, Begbie spoke Secwépemc and Tŝilhqot’in; favoured notions of aboriginal title; opposed settler efforts to displace First Nations by force; ruled against provincial legislation to ensure First Nations women received an equitable share of the estates of their white husbands; and sided with Chinese communities against racist laws. Justice Begbie also often “commuted the expected death sentences for First Nations — something he never did for a non-aboriginal offender.” History is not as simple as politicians would have us believe.

The possible gradations left out of most political apologies are purposeful. The point of the numerous mea culpas is to morally preen and take issue with the dead who cannot argue back. It is often excellent politics, at least in the short term. It also leads to hollowed-out, incomplete history, and a simplistic caricature of events. It is the “Disneyfication” of often difficult decisions from another era.

Also, while personal apologies are valuable in that they take the sting out of a personal offence, it is not clear that government regrets add much to the overall stock of human compassion. In most instances, the apologies are given in place of dead men who harmed other dead men.

But if everyone today agrees that some act committed long ago was morally beyond the pale, then progress as a species is already evident, at least until the next injury we commit in supreme self-confidence that we, as with every generation, have arrived at peak morality.

If there is division on a matter — some think Judge Begbie was wrong to sentence six chiefs to death while others argue road-building without permission on territorial land did not give the chiefs a right to premeditated murder — then an apology changes no one’s mind.

And the hung men and Judge Begbie are still dead and beyond the reach of our present political morality plays.

Excerpted from The Victim Cult: How the Grievance Culture is Wrecking Civilization, by Mark Milke, published by the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.