The Australian government has apologized to the Home Children, British orphans who were sent to that country in past decades. The government of Canada, the “white Dominion” to which the largest number of Home Children were sent, has said that it has no plans to formally apologize to its Home Children. Canada does, however, plan to issue a commemorative stamp. New Zealanders are debating whether an apology is in order. Britain plans to apologize to all of the Home Children next year.
For British press coverage of this issue, see here, here, and here. For Australian news reports, see here, here, and here. For Canadian press coverage, see here, here, and here.
The ongoing campaign for an apology in Canada is as ridiculous as the one in Australia. It would be odd for Canada to apologize for accepting British child immigrant so soon after it apologized for excluding Chinese immigrants during roughly the same historical period! Both policies stemmed from the same racist-imperialist ideology: the Dominions wanted to get as many British people in as possible and to exclude those it deemed racially inferior. In both Canada and Australia, the Chinese were the victims of the immigration policies and the Home Children were the beneficiaries! One could argue that the aboriginal populations of the Dominions also suffered from the arrival of the Home Children and other subsidized British immigrants, since they had to share their countries’ resources with yet more white intruders.
As for the kids themselves, the children who came to the Dominions were better off as orphans in the Dominions than as orphans in Britain. We forget that because incomes in the UK are today equivalent if not higher than those in the former white Dominions. But in the early 20th century, an unskilled labourers could earn roughly twice as much in an hour in North America or Oceania as in Europe. Perhaps Canada should apologize to the whites who bought Japanese-Canadian businesses at fire-sale prices in 1942. Maybe the government of South Africa should apologize to whites who benefited from the famous job-reservation rules under apartheid!
I would like to point out two historians who can speak on some authority about this topic. One is R. Douglas Francis of the University of Calgary, who is both the son of a Barnardo boy and one of the authors of the textbook used in most Canadian history survey course. The second historian is Dr Tanya Evans, a research fellow at Macquarie University. It would be interesting to know what their views of the apology demands are.
The Past Speaks 