Apology Psychology: The Sorry State of a Canadian Quirk

Groveling, and other acts of contrition

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

It’s a fair stereotype that Canadians tend to apologize for everything. Saying “sorry” in our home and (on?) native land is like a reflex. Cut someone off in a conversation? Sorry. Bump into someone on the street? Sorry. Someone else bumps into you on the street? Doubly sorry! Say sorry too much? Sorry about that, too. It’s a quaint custom, and one that I think endears us well.

Before the show Friends went from feel-good sitcom to sexist, homophobic, transphobic, white supremacist hate propaganda, my wife and I would often parrot Jennifer Aniston’s character, Rachel, who, when caught necking with fellow Friend, Joey, (by on-again, off-again lover, Ross) feigns remorse by leaning forward, squeezing her outstretched arms together, pushing out her breasts and cooing, “sooo sooorrrry.” The laugh track laughed. It was all so cute.

If only we could still apologize like that. Screw up, recognize nobody was going to die, give a half-ironic apology, and move on. Life has never been a sitcom, but it is especially not so now, unless the sitcom involved a bunch of white guys sitting around talking about how they should get vasectomies for the good of humanity (I’m sure it’s coming, laugh track included). Apologies have never been less sincere, since they’re required so often, but they’ve become serious business. No longer are we talking about the reflexive Canadian apology that really just means “my bad” or “I recognize you’re also present in the world.” Today, they must mean “I am bad” and, crucially, “I need to learn.” Livelihoods depend on them.

It’s no secret that our petulant Prime Minister loves apologizing for things - Canadian homophobia, Canadian racism, “Canadian” colonialism, Canadian misogyny, Canadian love of blackface (ok some he keeps to himself). There is surely a part of him which resented the fact that his predecessor, “Islamophobe” Stephen Harper, got to apologize for one of the truly regrettable policies in our history, the Canadian Indian Residential School Program. Imagine the glee Trudeau would have felt. While history will likely judge the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that followed in a less favourable light, this apology was at least symbolically important, and viewed by much of the country as a necessary step forward in Crown-Indigenous relations.

For the first five years of his reign, Trudeau made up for a dearth of quality mea culpas with mind-numbing quantity. It wasn’t until his second term that he saw an opportunity to genuflect for what he thought were real moments of moral clarity. Unfortunately, his ignorance of history (recent and distant) and desire to play the empath got the better of him, and he wound up kneeling before the proto-fascists of BLM (oops) and holding a teddy bear to mourn historic atrocities that almost certainly never happened. The latter bit of credulity kept our flag at half mast for months (right through Canada Day) as Trudeau was held hostage by the very activist groups he sought to placate. Indigenous Veterans Day and Remembrance Day - whose honourees might have had something to say about what constitutes an actual genocidal superstate - finally broke the impasse, but even then the absurdity of the whole thing was, well, absurd. From the CBC: “In a joint statement today, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller confirmed the flags on Parliament Hill's Peace Tower and all government buildings will be raised at sunset on Nov. 7 and lowered at sunrise on Nov. 8 to recognize Indigenous Veterans Day. They will then be raised again before being lowered on Nov. 11 — Remembrance Day. After those ceremonies, the flag will fly at full mast on government buildings.” Sweet merciful Jesus. 

Things might be more tolerable if it were just Trudeau embarrassing himself. But Canadians, as we know, are culturally primed to say sorry. And the more we are impelled to do it, the more we will demand it from others - forever trapped in a vicious cycle of virtue signal apologia.

The same is true of medicine. Many of us have been walking on eggshells for years and, especially if you’re a straight white guy, every conversation with woke colleagues feels like a mouth-breathing minefield. Everyone knows they are just one joke, one errant message or email, one complimentary ogle away from a dignity destroying hostage statement. And, predictably, as we are asked to check an ever-expanding list of privileges, the truly privileged (i.e. those on the right side of this revolution) will demand apologies for increasingly trivial reasons. One just never knows. That’s the thing about caprice - it’s capricious.

To wit, a couple years ago, as residency was coming to an end, I enrolled in the country’s most popular “review course” in preparation for my board exams. The course had only been around for a few years, but taking it was like looking at a DEI fossil record. Over the years, trigger warnings had been solidified in woke sediment in response to “feedback” from attendees. Among other revelations, physicians are apparently so fragile that they now require advance notice if the next powerpoint slide might contain information about “Intimate Partner Violence” or some other such unpleasantness (“We have learned from previous participants that the following material…”). Sounds like a fun experience for these instructors to have been “educated” in this way by inexperienced junior colleagues armed only with sanctimony. Presumably their patients are now required to provide similar trigger warnings before they can tell their doctor about any troubling experience?

The instructors were both “cis” men (as far as my lying eyes could tell) and, given the times, there were a thousand wires for them to trip over. What if their lizard brain poked through and they accidentally referred to a pregnant person as a woman? What if their land acknowledgements were too short (or too long)? What if they made some racist generalization like black people are more likely to get Sickle Cell Disease? What then? 

Interestingly, what caught them up in this case was something decidedly pre-2020: Suicide. In a lame-dad attempt to engage their audience, the instructors had devised a way of remembering the factors that predispose patients to take their own lives, which include things like being male (I wonder why?), lonely, depressed, etc. “Suicidal Santa”, as they called him, was meant to embody an at-risk individual (he’s isolated, he drinks, he has chronic back pain from lugging around the present bag), and so one of the instructors dressed up in a Saint Nick outfit and rhymed them off. 

Apparently this attempt at humour didn’t go over well with some in the audience and, after a quick break, the next segment started with a grovelling apology from the instructors about how they received many messages reminding them that suicide isn’t funny (you don’t say) and that they “understand” and “never meant to offend anyone” and blah blah blah. If this kind of prostration didn’t happen every day, it would have been surreal.

Granted, people’s suffering is never funny in a ‘haha’ way, and medicine need not be a frat house in order to keep a sense of itself. But in a culture this prone to scold, and this quick to demand penance, eventually we will break. I suppose I should be thankful that those poor instructors weren't forced to write their pronouns fifty times on the blackboard or kneel in contrition for their ancestors’ role in putting down the Northwest Rebellion. But if the Robespierrian Mean Girls manning the DEI departments have their way, one day they will be. Unless something changes drastically in the coming years, more and more decent people will be forced to prostrate themselves in evermore elaborate and puerile ways. For tolerating this reality, Canadians will one day be truly sorry.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read MAiD in Canada: A Dying Shame

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