Should a nation apologise for the crimes of its past?

The big political question facing the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge when they paid a state visit to Canada recently was whether they would be called on to apologise to First Nations peoples for the ravages of colonialism that have left their communities at such a bitter disadvantage.

As it turned out, Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs declined to attend a reconciliation ceremony, saying:

Reconciliation has to be more than empty symbolic gestures … the chiefs-in-assembly just didn’t feel that it was appropriate to feed into that public illusion that everything is okay.