8 When to Speak, When to Act: Reflections on the Recent MS St. Louis Apology
8 When to Speak, When to Act: Reflections on the Recent MS St. Louis Apology
Andrea Eidinger and Laura Madokoro
On 7 November 2018, Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons and issued a formal apology to the families of passengers of the MS St. Louis as well as the entire Jewish Canadian community for the Canadian government’s decision to refuse to allow the ship to dock in 1939. As historians with expertise in the history of immigration and Jewish Canada, both of us paid close attention to the apology. While we were pleased that to see the Prime Minister drew attention to this shameful event in our history and acknowledged the long history of antisemitism in this country, we felt that it ultimately rang hollow.
While the Prime Minister vowed to fight antisemitism and to learn from the past, the speech was short on specific details. As Trudeau noted in his apology, even today Canadian Jews are the most frequent target of hate crimes in this country, at seventeen percent. In the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in October 2018, Christine Chevalier-Caron and Philippe Néméh-Nombré published a piece on HistoireEngagée.ca, demonstrating how antisemitism is normalized in Quebec and Canada, as well as the prevailing belief that Canada was (and is) a place of refuge for those in need.1
In our minds the contradiction is striking and not easily dismissed. How is it that antisemitism can be a quotidian part of life in Canada while the country is also associated with being a place of refuge? How did this fundamental contradiction come to be and what are the implications for the present and future? Part of the answer lies in the ease with which politicians can speak in morally righteous terms when apologizing for historical wrongs and the gulf that often exists between the symbolism of their words, their actions, and the lived experience of those most affected by the subject and substance of their apologies.
We have seen the power of words and actions before, both domestically and on the international stage. While today Canada likes to think of itself as a bastion of human rights, this is not reflective of historical or contemporary reality. Even though the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted in part by Canadian legal scholar, John Peters Humphrey, the Canadian government abstained when it came up for approval at the committee stage. Humphrey himself expressed shock, later writing
Although I knew that the international promotion of human rights had no priority in Canadian foreign policy, it had never occurred to me that the government would carry its indifference to the point of abstaining in such an important vote.
The government’s reservations stemmed in large part due to the fact that, while the Declaration was not binding, it fundamentally conflicted with their restrictive immigration policies, the Indian Act, and the treatment of Japanese Canadians (who still did not have freedom of movement at the time of this debate