Please stop apologizing, Justin Trudeau
May 31, 2021
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a formal apology in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Thursday, May 27, 2021, for the internment of Canadians of Italian descent during the Second World War.
Italy is an ancient place with a rich history, filled with the usual triumphs and terrors of any country able to date events back almost 3,000 years.
It expelled its last king and established a government based on “the Senate and the People” more than two millennia before similar ideas planted the seeds of democracy elsewhere. From a small, hilly village, Rome built one of the greatest empires the world has known. We have it to thank for everything from language to laws to decent roads and the idea of clean toilets. When the empire fell, it brought centuries of darkness with it.
Great as its legacy may be, Italy’s ancestors have a lot of dark spots on their record: invading and conquering most of Europe, parts of Africa and much of the Middle East, raping and slaughtering as they went; enslaving millions; staging public games in which men fought to the death for the entertainment of others; persecuting Jews, Christians and any other religious movement deemed undesirable. After one particularly troublesome slave uprising, 6,000 captured prisoners were famously crucified along the Appian Way.
And that was just the ancient days. Don’t get us started on Benito Mussolini and his alliance with Nazi Germany.
Italians and their leaders take this as part of the past, which by its nature is over with. History is a long, endless lesson, a teaching moment that serves to enlighten us on our faults and failures, hopefully providing the impetus for improvement. Italians don’t apologize for it, and they shouldn’t. The Colosseum hasn’t seen a gladiatorial contest in forever. No one gets crucified any more.
Canada is different. In Canada, our governments like to apologize for the past, especially if the people they’re apologizing for are no longer around to defend themselves. Ottawa has been ringing its hands in public since former prime minister Brian Mulroney begged forgiveness for the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War.
Most of the interned Italian-Canadians were hardcore Fascists. Why is Justin Trudeau apologizing?
Opinion: Trudeau's apology to Italian-Canadians must be viewed in contextThat was in 1988. Since then, ministers or prime ministers have apologized for a variety of offences from First World War executions to taxes on Chinese immigrants. No one has rivalled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has apologized or re-apologized for something or other every year since his Liberals came to power in 2015. In 2016 it was for turning away a shipload of migrants in 1914; next year it was for abuses at residential schools and discrimination against LGBT people. 2018 saw two more: for arresting and hanging Tsilhqot’in chiefs 150 years ago, and for turning away German Jews in 1939. Next came the Iqaluits, and the Cree Chief Poundmaker.
Some of these were official apologies for events that had already been regretted in a less-formal manner. Last year saw a bit of a shift, as the prime minister was busy with the COVID pandemic and mainly found time only to apologize for his own actions in the WE charity scandal, his third ethics complaint.
This week Trudeau delivered his latest plea for forgiveness, a formal apology in the House of Commons for the internment of Italian Canadians during the Second World War. It was in fact a re-apology, as Mulroney had already sought atonement at a gathering of Italian Canadian organizations 30 years ago. According to Trudeau’s office, the repeat was necessary because “the government’s actions violated the values that our country was fighting to secure during the Second World War, including freedom, equality, and justice, and had serious impacts on families and the Italian Canadian community.”
True enough, but as a scholarly investigation by three Italian-Canadian researchers found, of 112,000 Italian Canadians at the time, about 31,000 were declared “enemy aliens,” of which about 3,000 were identified as hardcore supporters of the fascist regime then at war with Canada, and about 600 (others put the number at 500) interned under the War Measures Act of 1939, which gave Ottawa legal authority to “detain without charge, seize property from, and limit activities of Canadian residents born in countries that were at war with Canada.”
It was, in other words, not an act of racism, discrimination, random brutality or irrational fear. It was a logical move by a country to protect itself against the most fervent supporters of a regime Canada was facing in a war in which 45,000 Canadians were killed. As detentions go it was fairly civilized: no one lost their home or possessions, and everyone was freed by 1943. Starting in 2008 Ottawa spent $5 million on projects commemorating the contributions of Italian Canadians, who poured into the country after the war in such numbers the community now totals more than 1.6 million.
There’s nothing wrong with an honest apology, but Trudeau’s Liberals seem intent on atonement for every flaw they can unearth from the past. Countries, like people, make mistakes, but hair shirts, self-flagellation and a yearning for penance speak of a country that is more often embarrassed by its history than proud of the lessons it’s learned. No wonder we do so little to teach it in school, where students must wonder how such an enthusiastically well-meaning country could find itself so regularly seeking forgiveness from the world.
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