Thread by @michaelpetrou

Tomorrow @JustinTrudeau will issue a formal apology for Canada's internment of about 500 Italian Canadian suspected fascists during the Second World War. The apology is built on the false premise that they were interned because of their ethnicity: theglobeandmail.com/opinion/articl…
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I explained why the apology's premise is inaccurate in the above @GlobeDebate article. Since its publication, I've been disturbed by politicians' willingness to perpetuate falsehoods and a lack of curiosity among my journalist colleagues to find out what the truth might be. 2/?

.@DavidLametti, for example, says of the detainees: “There wasn’t anything other than the fact that their name may have appeared on a list somewhere.” This is not true. Worse, Lametti must know it's not true but he says it anyway: theglobeandmail.com/canada/article…
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The tiny minority of Italian Canadians who were detained were suspected by the RCMP of supporting fascism. Here's historian Roberto Perin, quoted by the CBC: "When we say that people were interned simply for being Italian, this is nonsense." 4/?newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/itali…

It may be nonsense, but that hasn't stopped journalists from repeating it as fact. Here, for example: thestar.com/politics/feder…
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Might some of the RCMP's evidence have been faulty? Yes. It's also true that the detentions lacked due process and none of the detainees was formally charged. 6/?

But the RCMP also kept careful watch on the 3,500 Italian Canadians involved in fascist organizations prior to 1940 and evidently made the right call some of the time. Here are detainees holding a Fascist banner while detained: 7/?

Joyce Pillarella, who spearheaded the apology campaign, says we should take a cue from former Montreal mayor Camillien Houde, who was detained alongside the Italian Canadians, because he refused to penalize them during hockey games held in a detention camp thestar.com/opinion/contri…

Houde, in Feb 1939, also said French Canadians' sympathies would be with Italy were it to go to war against Britain. And in 1948 he blamed Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King for starting the Second World War by "provoking" Hitler in 1937: archive.macleans.ca/article/1948/9…

The nature of Mussolini's regime was not a secret before Italy declared war on France and the U.K. in 1940. His Blackshirts had already marched through Spain, where Italy allied with the Nazis, and Ethiopia, where the Italian airforce dropped poison gas on civilians. 9/?

Lametti, in the CP article, said it's crucial that stories of the detainees be shared "through commemoration and education." If public money is to be spent on education and commemoration, I hope both are based on sound research.

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