© Library and Archives Canada, Public Domain.)
“Indian school”, Regina, Saskatchewan, 1908.
We Canadians say sorry a lot. It's a national stereotype that contains more than a bit of truth, but that doesn't necessarily make us the nice people others (Americans, mostly) believe us to be. More than a few cultural commentators north of the 49th parallel have noted that there's a passive-aggressive streak to the Canadian penchant for apology - a barely hidden spite to the ubiquitous "
Soary, eh." Or, as humorist Will Ferguson, author of
Why I Hate Canadians, puts it, "Canadians say sorry a lot, but they rarely apologize."
It's true that while we're very quick in this country to apologize for, say, cutting somebody off in line at Tim Horton's, we're less than prompt at apologizing for the really big stuff - like the century-long policy know as the Canadian Indian residential school system,
which forcibly removed indigenous children from their families. The first real apology on behalf of the Canadian government didn't come until 2008, when then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged the excesses of the residential school system, and that the system itself had been a crime. This was a first - and it took 130 years since the creation of the Indian Act in 1876, which led to the system's creation.
In a way, Harper's apology was premature. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada would not issue its
final report on the crimes committed by the Canadian government - and their literal partners-in-crime, the Catholic and Protestant churches - until 2015. After a decade of digging into the annals of the residential school system, it produced a raft of statistics that astonished most Canadians (at least those who deigned to pay attention). Here is but a taste of what the report revealed:
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