On June 11, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will stand in the House of Commons and issue a formal apology to survivors of Canada’s residential schools. Established in the 1870s under the auspices of various Christian churches, these schools later fell under partial or full federal jurisdiction until they were closed in the mid-1970s. More than 100,000 native children were compelled to attend these beacons of church-state complicity, where they were subjected to cultural assimilation, forcible separation from their families and physical and sexual abuse.
The apology has been a long time coming. Last fall, the United, Anglican and Presbyterian Churches, as well as branches of the Roman Catholic Church, agreed to a legal settlement that would compensate surviving victims of the system to $2.9 billion. At the same time, Canada’s first ever Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established, with a mission to “document the legacy of residential schools and make recommendations.”
Implicit in this decision was the idea that the federal government should atone for its past sins. “It would show good faith and sincerity for the prime minister to offer an apology at the beginning of the work of the commission,” argued Ellie Johnson of the Anglican Church of Canada. Now, more than half a year later, Harper is set to do so.
I have no doubt that Harper’s formal apology will be full, sincere and unconditional. After all, his own ministers have said as much. “This is going to be a very meaningful and respectful apology,” Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl told reporters last week. Respectful? No doubt. Meaningful? Well, that’s trickier.
Canada’s TRC is part of an international trend that gained momentum following the model established in post-apartheid South Africa in 1995. The idea was to allow victims of that regime to come forward and tell their stories, while also enabling perpetrators of violence and abuse to speak out and seek amnesty, if not redemption. Since then, TRCs have performed a similar service in almost 20 others countries around the world.
In the U.S., a similar desire to atone for past sins has seen various states issue formal apologies for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. It also produced a tearful display of contrition from London’s Lord Mayor Ken Livingstone last August, for that city’s own culpability in that same historical crime. Yet even as he prostrated himself before the public gaze, Livingstone conceded that it wasn’t possible to “meaningfully apologize for something a former generation did.”
This brings us back to Harper’s apology. The meaningfulness, if not the sincerity, of Harper’s mea culpa may be questioned on at least three fronts. First, politics. Just what is Harper’s status? Is he the leader of a Conservative party that happens — via a non-decisive election and courtesy of lightweight opposition from the Liberals — to survive as a minority government without a clear mandate from the people? Or is he, in some Hobbesian fashion, an embodiment of the Canadian state that transcends partisan divisions and even the passage of time?
If the latter is true, then maybe Harper can speak for all of Canada across the ages, in which case his apology would be apt. If the former more fairly describes Harper’s situation, then who is he to apologize on behalf of any or all previous administrations, many of which — presumably — he has violent ideological disagreements with?
More to the point, if it becomes the task of sitting governments to issue apologies for the wrongs committed by their predecessors, then this could soon become the consuming role of parliament. For example, women might rightfully demand that the federal government apologize for its extended delay in granting full constitutional, legal, economic and social equality, long after granting them the vote after the First World War. And Canadian workers should demand an apology for the state’s repeated use of formal and informal spy agencies to monitor, arrest and deport thousands of their comrades over the past century.
Second, philosophy. As Livingstone suggests, for an apology to be truly meaningful it has to come from the perpetrator of the act, not some Johnny-come-lately stand-in. Harper may well be sorry for the abuse committed by former governments, but nothing he says on June 11 can exonerate those individuals who established and ran the residential schools.
More accurately, perhaps Harper could apologize not for the schools themselves but for the failure of previous prime ministers to have apologized before now; but even such a gesture also rests on shaky philosophical ground and would hardly appease those who seek contrition.
Third, history. When Harper apologizes, it’ll be to the 80,000 or so surviving victims of the residential school system. When Brian Mulroney apologized a generation ago for the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the First World War, there were enough survivors still alive to make the gesture appear meaningful. With only one living Canadian veteran from the First World War, it’s tough to imagine any Canadian government belatedly apologizing for wrong-headedly endorsing Britain’s rush to war in 1914 and sending more than half a million men to the horror of the front.
In short, the passing of time dulls the impetus to say sorry. This is good, otherwise we’d have Italian prime ministers apologizing for the expansion of the Roman empire 1,000 years ago, or Scandinavian politicians belatedly expressing regret for the Norman invasion of England in 1066.
As one commentator recently wrote, “The danger with retrospective apologies is that it risks turning us all into victims…. If a man in a suit then apologizes to us for that historical injustice, our victim status will be confirmed.” I’m sure that Harper’s planned apology flows from the best of intentions, and that for many victims of residential schools it’ll be both welcome and overdue. However, native peoples will once again be cast in the role of victims, rather than agents in their own destiny.
