Reparations and racism, discourse and diversity: Neoliberal multiculturalism and the Canadian age of apologies

•Canada has produced 10 major apologies since the mid-1980s.•Apologies reflect a changing form of multiculturalism.•Critics debate whether apologies go far enough.•This paper contextualizes the apologies politically, as well as economically, as a neoliberal form of multiculturalism.

Political scientists have recently noted that we live in an “age of apologies”, in which there is a surge of government apologies for certain wrongs. In Canada, there have been at least 10 major apologies since the late 1980s. This paper reviews these apologies, and the ways they articulate with multiculturalism as a state policy. While these apologies are often considered separately, and in political terms, in this paper I argue that it is important to consider them together. To do so helps illuminate some of the political economic dynamics shaping the rise in apologies and why and how this rise in apologies is co-extensive with significant neoliberal transformations in the Canadian state, and of Canadian ways of understanding diversity.