Remembering Past Wrongs: Apologies, Redress and Commemoration

Why does a country say sorry?

On September 22, 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney stood in the House of Commons and apologized to Japanese Canadians for their treatment during the Second World War. Many survivors had been interned as children or young adults. They had waited more than forty years for a government to admit that what happened to them was wrong.

Since 1982, Canadian governments have apologized for, or officially remembered, many past wrongs, at home and around the world. Why did these apologies happen then, decades after the events? Do they matter? And how should a country remember tragedies that happened elsewhere, such as the Holocaust? These questions are at the heart of expectation E3.3, and they connect history directly to the present.

Acknowledging wrongs at home

• Japanese Canadian Redress (September 22, 1988). During the Second World War, about 22 000 Japanese Canadians were removed from the B.C. coast, interned and had their property sold. After years of campaigning by the National Association of Japanese Canadians, led by Art Miki, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologized in the House of Commons. Each eligible survivor received $21 000, and funds created the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.
• The Chinese Head Tax (June 22, 2006). Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the head tax and for the 1923 law that excluded almost all Chinese immigrants until 1947. Symbolic payments were made to surviving head tax payers and spouses. Many families of those who had died felt left out.
• Ukrainian Canadian internment. In 2005 Parliament passed a law recognizing the internment of Ukrainian Canadians and others as "enemy aliens" during the First World War, and a recognition fund was created in 2008.
• The Komagata Maru. In 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized in the House of Commons for turning away the ship's 376 passengers, most of them Sikh, in 1914.
• The MS St. Louis (November 7, 2018). Trudeau apologized for Canada's 1939 refusal to accept the ship's 907 Jewish refugees. After the ship returned to Europe, 254 of its former passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.
• Inuit High Arctic relocation (2010). The federal government apologized for moving Inuit families from Inukjuak (Nunavik) and Pond Inlet to the High Arctic in the 1950s, where they faced great hardship.
• Black Canadians. In 2010 Nova Scotia granted a posthumous free pardon to Viola Desmond, arrested in 1946 for sitting in the whites-only section of a movie theatre; in 2018 she appeared on the $10 bill. Also in 2010, the city of Halifax apologized for the destruction of Africville, a Black community demolished in the 1960s. In 2022, the federal government apologized to the No. 2 Construction Battalion, a Black unit of the First World War whose members faced racism.
• Residential schools (2008) and the work of the TRC were covered in the last lesson.

Remembering the Holocaust and fighting antisemitism

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of about six million Jews, along with many others, including Roma and people with disabilities, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. In the 1930s and 1940s, Canada accepted very few Jewish refugees; historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper titled their 1982 book about this policy None Is Too Many, after words reportedly spoken by a Canadian official. After the war, tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors settled in Canada, and many later spoke in schools about their experiences.

Canada remembers the Holocaust in several ways:

• Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) was recognized in federal law in 2003; it falls in April or May, depending on the Hebrew calendar. January 27 is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
• The National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa opened in 2017.
• In 2020, Canada named its first Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, former justice minister Irwin Cotler.

Why remembrance still matters. Antisemitism is hostility, prejudice or discrimination against Jewish people. It did not end in 1945. Statistics Canada reports that police-reported hate crimes in Canada rose sharply between 2019 and 2023, and that crimes targeting the Jewish population have been the most common type of hate crime motivated by religion. After the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed, Jewish communities in Canada reported a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, including shots fired at Jewish schools in Toronto in 2024. Muslim and Palestinian Canadians also reported a rise in Islamophobic incidents in the same period. Learning the history of the Holocaust helps people recognize how prejudice, propaganda and extreme ideologies can lead to persecution.

Remembering other genocides and atrocities

• The Holodomor (1932–1933). Joseph Stalin's Soviet regime seized grain and food and blocked movement in Ukraine, causing a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Soviet Union hid the truth for decades. In 2008, Canada passed the Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ("Holodomor") Memorial Day Act, recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide and making the fourth Saturday in November a day of remembrance. Canada has one of the world's largest Ukrainian diasporas, and Ukrainian Canadians led this campaign.
• The Armenian Genocide (1915). The mass killing and deportation of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Senate (2002) and House of Commons (2004) recognized it as genocide; it is remembered on April 24.
• The genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994). About 800 000 or more people, most of them Tutsi, were killed in about 100 days. Canadian General Roméo Dallaire commanded the UN mission, which was not given the troops or mandate to stop it (Lesson 13).
• Srebrenica (July 1995). About 8 000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. Canada's Parliament marks July 11 as Srebrenica Remembrance Day.