The following is an op-ed by Canadian writer Erna Paris in response to the Canadian media's reactions to Canada's apology to Chinese-Canadians who were abused in Canada.
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Apologies have power
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
ERNA PARIS
After Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Chinese-Canadians last week, a barrage of criticism focused on the prospect of "victims" lining up at the public trough. Most missed the central point: confirmation that human rights still matter in this country.
How many Canadians knew about the punishing head tax imposed on 15,000 Chinese workers brought here to build the CPR? How many knew up to 1,000 of these men died during this back-breaking labour? Or that families were divided because Canada refused to allow wives and children of those who had raised the money to join them? Without formal recognition of injustice, the darker side of a nation's past is unlikely to make it into school history texts, which are the bedrock of the national narrative.
In an ethnically mixed society, social adhesion is threatened without a public acknowledgment that the state, itself, maltreated minorities living within its borders. Although those of us who were not affected by head taxes, residential schools, or wartime internment as "enemy aliens" may spend little time thinking about this "other" history, Canadians who were have not forgotten. The story of maltreatment is passed down from generation to generation, until the survivors, or their progeny, have the courage to demand formal redress. State-instigated human-rights abuses live in a category of their own, as the history of the 20th century makes abundantly clear. Unaddressed, they are increasingly corrosive to the body politic. When addressed, they contribute to healing and, by extension, national unity. It is no surprise an elderly Chinese-Canadian interviewed on the day of the apology declared that she finally felt she was a Canadian.
Pierre Trudeau said he and his government were not responsible for Canada's past, only its future. He was wrong. It matters not one whit whether human rights abuses were carried out yesterday, or decades ago. Those who occupy the seats of power today carry, and are responsible for addressing, yesterday's corrosive legacy, for the unreconciled past inevitably sends long tendrils into the present.
Other countries have also begun to acknowledge that at a time when human rights were undervalued, or not valued at all, their governments committed grave abuses that decades later, threaten national unity. In France, for example, President Jacques Chirac formally apologized for the actions of the collaborationist Vichy regime, which willingly assisted the Nazis in deporting 78,000 Jews to death camps. His courageous acknowledgment ended decades of official myth-making and prevarication that was taught to children as factual history. France also held criminal trials for the German Nazi, Klaus Barbie; the French Nazi, Paul Touvier; and the bureaucratic paper-pusher, Maurice Papon, who signed away thousands of lives with a flourish of his pen. This reversal in policy came about because a few survivors of the deportations never forgot that the country of their birth had betrayed them, and neither did their children. They correctly believed that France would be unable to normalize its present until it was willing to acknowledge what had been carried out in the state's name.
Japan, on the contrary, has never formally apologized to the families of those who survived the Rape of Nanking in 1937, among many other atrocities; in fact, Japan's Prime Minister makes provocative visits to a Shinto shrine where the "souls" of several convicted war criminals are glorified. This unresolved tear in the historical fabric has affected relations between Japan and China.
Canada cannot afford to ignore the state-inspired cruelty of the past. Which is not to deny that reason and balance must reign. More than half a century ago, the fledgling United Nations published the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- the key word being "universal." These must be the foundational yardstick for assessing claims against the Canadian government.
Official acknowledgments, memorials, museums that tell the truth about the past, and token reparations to surviving victims are symbolic ways of separating the unlovely past from the present. And for promoting unity among the diverse peoples of Canada.
Erna Paris is the author of Long Shadows: Truth, Lies, and History.