How about an apology to taxpayers?

According to news reports, Ottawa is about to apologize to the LGBTQ community for wrongs done during the Cold War, when actual or suspected homosexuals working in the defence and security sectors were fired, demoted or transferred in the belief they were blackmail risks. Given the social mores of that era, they may well have been. But the mores themselves were so screwed up and their enforcement in many cases so off the wall (the government deployed a “fruit machine” to detect homosexual tendencies — seriously) that some official recognition of the human cost isn’t unreasonable.

This being government and identity politics, however, the prime minister can’t just come out and say that bad things happened for which the government is truly sorry. The wording and staging of the apology have to be cleared with all the petitioners, stakeholders and interest groups. There even has to be an apology advisory committee.

This latest apology follows similar official apologies to Aboriginal Canadians for the residential schools, to Chinese Canadians for the head tax of 1885 to 1923, and to Japanese Canadians for their internment in the Second World War. The current government, in office barely two years, has already apologized for a previous government having kept out a shipload of would-be Sikh immigrants in 1914 and is currently working on an apology for refusing entry to the MS St Louis in 1939, which sailed the world in vain seeking sanctuary from Nazism for 900 German Jews. It also offered apologies to Omar Khadr and Maher Arar. For that matter, the Canada 150 celebrations seemed one long apology for the European settlement of North America.

Even HBO’s John Oliver thinks the Trudeau government over-apologizes. But since it does consider itself to be in the regrets business, one long-suffering group of Canadians should be next on its so-sorry list: taxpayers.

Taxpayers haven’t literally been tortured or exiled, of course. On the other hand, some of us have chosen voluntary exile to get away from high tax rates while those still here consider it cruel if usual punishment to have to send off big chunks of our incomes to revenue ministers year after year after year. According to the auditor general’s latest report, anyone trying to deal with the Canada Revenue Agency over the phone is subjected to what amounts to psychological abuse. Callers are blocked entirely or shuffled to automated message recordings so the agency’s customer-service numbers didn’t look so bad. If they do get through, the AG says, they’re frequently given the wrong information. If a foreign government did that to us, it would probably violate the Geneva Conventions. (If the tax people themselves don’t understand the tax system, maybe it’s too complicated.)

We pay taxes through the nose — through all orifices, really — yet we wait for hours in emergency rooms or for months to see medical specialists. In Quebec, people have been killed when long-neglected infrastructure has fallen on top of them. Here in Montreal our roads and bridges are so bad that when a government finally does get around to fixing them, traffic effectively seizes up for the three to five years the repairs will take.

In the meantime we get piles of infrastructure we don’t want: Our cities are strewn with public art the public hates, most of it mandated as a percentage of infrastructure construction costs. In Montreal, the park on “the mountain” in the heart of town is now dotted with concrete stumps, someone’s idea of clever cultural, social, environmental or Lord-knows-what commentary.

The auditor general tells us that continuing, seemingly endless repairs to Ottawa’s Phoenix public payroll system will cost “the government” at least another $540 million. But it’s not the government that will pay. It’s us taxpayers. Cancellation of a contract for fighter aircraft may yet involve billions in penalties. Or it may not, depending on whether the cancellation is itself cancelled, the latest possible wrinkle in a tragicomedy so long-running that to manage the transition we may have to buy a couple of wings of used fighters from the Australians. To say nothing of frigates and icebreakers that are long overdue and way over budget. The current Ontario government, when headed by the previous premier, spent more than $1 billion to cancel two gas plants essentially for electoral advantage. A billion here, a billion there, as Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois once supposedly said, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Apologies to generations now departed are wonderful occasions for politicians, allowing them to act warm, magnanimous and statesmanlike without feeling any real guilt and at zero political cost — except maybe with grumpy curmudgeons, of whom, incidentally, resolute non-apologizer Pierre Elliott Trudeau was one. By contrast, an apology to millions of real, live Canadians whose serial abuse these politicians have themselves have participated in would be a real act of courage.