Trudeau’s plan to apologize for the Komagata Maru is no solution to racism, say critics

Ujjal Dosanjh and others on the Komagata Maru apology:

Justin Trudeau, for instance, promised before the 2015 campaign to apologize in Parliament because some Punjabi-Canadians were upset that his predecessor, Stephen Harper, had tendered an apology on behalf of Canada at an event in Surrey.

“As Pierre Trudeau predicted, it’s becoming a slippery slope. There’s no end to it. And there are other apology-seekers at the gates now.”

He said his only exception is in accepting Harper’s apology to Aboriginal Canadians for residential schools in 2008 and Mulroney’s to Japanese-Canadians two decades earlier as both involved Canadian citizens.

But he said even in these cases, he is only accepting the reality of these apologies after the fact. In retrospect, Dosanjh said, he wishes Pierre Trudeau’s successors had followed his lead.

“Just because there’s an apology there won’t be an end to racism,” he said. “It’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and there’s going to be no poverty or inequality or discrimination. That’s where the efforts need to be.”

Dosanjh also criticized Trudeau for announcing his pending apology last month at a Sikh religious event in Ottawa, saying it’s “dangerous” to mix religion and politics.

B.C. Liberal MP Randeep Sarai, whose wife’s great-grandfather was on the Komagata Maru and who was wounded and imprisoned after the riot, said he strongly disagrees with Dosanjh.

“This symbolizes who we are as Canadians, it’s hugely symbolic,” said the MP for Surrey Centre. “It helps heal wounds, and you feel more Canadian once a wrong has been righted.”

B.C. historian Hugh Johnston said Tuesday that both Justin Trudeau and Harper, rather than apologize for a single incident, should have focused instead on the policy that severely restricted immigration from “non-traditional” countries like India before the 1960s.

“The really big thing is the policy over half a century, not just one incident,” said Johnston, author of The Voyage of the Komagata Maru, the first authoritative book on the incident.

Canada went from a country of roughly 30,000 Sikhs in 1971 to about a half-million today, he noted.

“That strikes me as more significant than turning back a ship with less than 400 people aboard in 1914,” said Johnston, whose book was first published in 1979 and revised and expanded in 2014.

But Johnston, like Dosanjh, questions the notion that politicians should apologize over events in the past.

“I’m an historian. I share Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s view. You can’t rewrite history.

Source: Trudeau’s plan to apologize for the Komagata Maru is no solution to racism, say critics