February 13, 2025
A PM that apologizes for our past sins should also celebrate our good.
Justin Trudeau wanders the country speaking in the accents of atonement, but doesn't execute public gratitude with any comparable frequency.
Justin Trudeau wanders the country speaking in the accents of atonement, but doesn’t execute public gratitude with any comparable frequency.

Our Prime Minister has shown a capacity, surpassing eagerness and tending towards habit, to provide an autopsy on all the sins of Canada perpetrated before his reign (which appears to be the definitional limit), and having unearthed and highlighted them, to make public apology on behalf of every other Canadian for the flaws, mischiefs, perceived crimes and follies of our ancestors.

Many commend him for this, even in the absence of a counter-effort to research the perhaps even greater good and more numerous acts of virtue that all the generations before his own entered into the national record, or gathered without record — the great mass of everyday decencies that lie outside written history. Combined, these did so much to forward the building what many of us, under no impulsion of mere chauvinism, believe is one of the finest countries in this 21st-century world.

Trudeau does not execute public gratitude in any comparable frequency, for all the great and good things accomplished by Canadians past. This is at least curious in the light of his marked inclination to wander the country speaking in the accents of atonement.

It is implicit in any act of apology for those faults and deeds not your own that the contrition is vicarious. It is a bystander’s regret. It is both theoretical and logical that all apologies, of either substance or effect, must come from the mouths of actual perpetrators. As a trivial example, if your loud sister slaps a neighbour’s child over the head, it will not appease the neighbour or comfort the child if some visitor from down the street, no way involved in the transaction, shows up at the wailing urchin’s door to apologize to the parents and child.

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See Also:

(1) Stay on Your Side of the Border, Eh?: Trudeau Lectures Pence about New Pro-Life Laws in U.S.

(2) Trudeau plays politics with abortion issue

(3) Free trade, sure, but what about those disgusting Tory pro-lifers?

(4) Desperate Liberals get set for a gun control splash

(5) Senate ensuring the Mark Norman stink gets needed airing out