Trudeau the prime minister of sorry

There comes a time when a habit hardens into a tic. For Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his inclination to render formal apologies for Canada’s past transgressions, the moment came in November. To the former residential-school students of Newfoundland and Labrador, he said, in addition to being sorry, the government was “sorry for not apologising sooner”.

By the logic of formal government apologies, the prime minister’s absence of personal responsibility was a feature, not a bug. Governments rarely apologise so abjectly for their own mistakes. A historical “sorry” has the advantage of casting the glow of contrition on its speaker, with none of guilt’s harsher light.

That is surely part of the reason Trudeau has become so drawn to the practice. With his announcement last week that he will also be delivering a formal apology for the fate of the MS St Louis — a German ship carrying 900 Jewish refugees that was spurned in 1939 by several western countries, Canada included, resulting in the death of hundreds of its passengers in the Holocaust — he will have delivered five apologies in less than three years. This does not include his searing speech in 2017 at the UN condemning Canada’s historical mistreatment of indigenous people. This spree of self-flagellation has irritated some. The recurring charge is that Trudeau is engaging in a kind of moral preening, or “virtue signalling”, that substitutes meaningful action for pious hand-wringing. Yet what none of Trudeau’s critics is willing to claim, tellingly, is that his apologies are unwarranted.

As the case of the St Louis suggests, Canada has a lot to apologise for. Refusing asylum to desperate Jewish refugees, drumming gay people out of the public service, turning back a ship full of Sikh migrants, tricking rebel First Nations chiefs into giving themselves up only to be hanged for capital crimes, and tearing indigenous families apart in the Maritimes — no one defends these things anymore. Toronto, May 18