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

Canadian politicians agree on virtually nothing except that apologies are owed.

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.