PM’s next apology questioned
Standing before lawmakers in Parliament this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that he would be making an official apology on behalf of all Canadians for an event for which no living Canadian is responsible.
In May 1939, four months before the outbreak of war in Europe, the M.S. St. Louis - a transatlantic luxury liner carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees - left Germany in search of a country that would take in its passengers.
Canada, which had what an immigration official described at the time as a “none is too many” Jewish immigration policy, turned the ship away. And after several other countries followed suit, the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers would die in the Holocaust.
“We failed not only those passengers but their descendants and community,” Trudeau told Parliament, adding that he hoped the apology, for which a date has not yet been determined, would compel Canadians “to acknowledge this difficult truth, learn from this story and continue to fight against anti-Semitism every day.”
The government’s apology for turning away the St. Louis will mark the fifth time since being sworn in as prime minister in 2015 that Trudeau has issued an official apology for one of Canada’s historical misdeeds.
And its announcement has provoked a strange debate in a country known for its propensity to apologize: Is the prime minister saying “sorry” too often?
“I think it’s worth apologizing for it, but you can have dilution in recognition when you start apologizing, apologizing, apologizing,” Marilyn Gladu, a Conservative lawmaker, told The Canadian Press. “It makes it less special.”
She said that she feared the prime minister’s apologies were becoming a “show” and that her constituents were growing suspi- cious and skeptical of the sincerity of this wave of national self-flagellation.
Other Conservative lawmakers have expressed concern that Trudeau’s apologies are tarnishing the country’s image and unnecessarily denigrating its achievements.
Last year, after Trudeau delivered a speech before the United Nations in which he spoke of Canada’s history of “humiliation, neglect and abuse” of its indigenous peoples, the Conservative Party emailed its supporters to ask, “Are you tired of people apologizing for our country’s rich history?”
The email went on to say that the Liberals “only see blemishes in our past, and not the great country that is constantly bettering itself for future generations,” according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Even the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, weighed in after the announcement of the planned St. Louis apology, arguing in an editorial that while the apology is warranted, “most of us know from personal experience that someone who says ‘sorry’ too often usually is not.”
It advised Trudeau to space out his apologies at more “thoughtful” intervals “so that their spotlight falls more squarely on their subjects, and less on him.”
Trudeau’s first official apology for a historical injustice came six months into his term in May 2016, when he said sorry for a 1914 incident in which the Canadian government turned away a ship carrying mostly Sikhs from India.
Since then, he has apologized for abuse at residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, decades of government-authorized discrimination against LGBTQ public servants, and the hanging in 1864 of six Tsilhqot’in tribal chiefs in British Columbia who were convicted of murder after seeking to stop the incursion of settlers into their traditional territory.
With his commitments to diversity, open borders and repairing the country’s relationship with its indigenous population, Trudeau’s apologies appear well aligned with his party’s modern-day policies.
But ever since political apologies became more commonplace in the latter decades of the 20th century, they have been subjected to criticism.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, a scholar and ethicist, in a 2011 journal article wondered how to distinguish between serious, meaningful acts of public forgiveness and instances of “contrition chic” - situations where world leaders apologize for the sins of their predecessors as “a bargain-basement way to gain publicity, sympathy and even absolution by trafficking in one’s status as victim or victimizer.”
Other critics argue that once a government starts repenting for historical injustices, it could find itself on a slippery slope with no end in sight to apologies or, in some cases, monetary compensation.
In Canada, one of the most notable critics of such apologies was Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, who steadfastly rejected calls to apologize to Japanese-Canadians for their internment during the Second World War when he was prime minister.
“I do not think the purpose of a government is to right the past,” he said during a parliamentary debate on the issue in 1984. “It cannot rewrite history. It is our purpose to be just in our time.”
Trudeau has addressed these diverging approaches to righting historical wrongs, telling the Canadian Press that while his father “came at it as an academic, as a constitutionalist, I come at it as a teacher, as someone who’s worked a lot in communities.”
Several Canadian lawmakers and Jewish groups have for years lobbied the government to officially apologize for turning away the St. Louis and have welcomed Trudeau’s announcement. Others are less enthusiastic. Sally Zerker, an emeritus professor at York University in Toronto whose family members were among those turned away on the St. Louis, wrote in the Canadian Jewish News that an apology so many decades later will constitute “nothing but a shallow, empty, meaningless act.”
It would not offer her “solace,” she wrote, and would instead “whitewash a government that did nothing to help the Jews who were fleeing the Nazis and ignored the type of anti-Semitism that was endemic in Canada until the 1970s.”