Next to Canada’s treatment of Indigenous Canadians over far too many generations, no incident has darkened our collective history like the forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Under the guise of Canada’s being at war with Imperial Japan, thousands of these Canadian citizens were uprooted from their homes and placed in internment camps. On this date in 1988 then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney officially apologized on behalf of Canada for these terrible events. His speech took place in the House of Commons. “I looked to the galleries,” he later wrote in his Memoirs, “overflowing with elderly Japanese Canadians and saw the outpouring of raw emotion from a group of loyal Canadians whose reputations and honour had been tarnished and besmirched by a government (Mackenzie King’s Liberals) that led Canada from this very chamber almost fifty years earlier.” Shortly after Mulroney delivered the apology, he received an emotional letter from one of Canada’s leading Catholics, Cardinal Carter of Toronto. “If there ever was a collective miscarriage of justice and a condemning of persons as guilty without proof, this was it,” His Eminence wrote. “I love my country. I have seldom been ashamed of her, and this one exception is now expunged by your gracious and timely intervention.” caption id="attachment_583781" align="alignleft" width="310" Japanese Canadians were shipped off to internment camps during World War II/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.