David Emerson has apologized:

These past several days have been a difficult time for my family and me. I know many of my constituents are having difficulty with the choice I have made. To those of you who are upset with my decision – I apologize. However, I did not come by this decision lightly and I stand firm behind the decision to become a part of this new government.

Well, no, he hasn’t. There’s a difference between saying the words “I apologize” and actually apologizing, which blogger Idealistic Pragmatist identified brilliantly in a post last year, citing John Searle‘s 1969 work Speech Acts:

Searle laid out the criteria a statement has to fulfill in order to qualify as an apology, and in layman’s terms, we can say that it requires two parts: 1) regret (the “I’m sorry” or “I apologize” part), and 2) responsibility (some explicit statement that you were the one who did the thing that’s being apologized for).

[….] Often, people will use a rhetorical trick in which they make a statement that has a lot of the superficial trappings of an apology, but without one or both of those basic criteria of form. I call these statements “fauxpologies.” One classic type of fauxpology is to say something like: “I’m sorry that you’re upset about me borrowing your jacket without asking.” This fulfills the regret criterion, but not the responsibility criterion, since the speaker is expressing regret not for an action, but for someone else’s emotion.

Mr. Emerson’s apologyâ„¢ is pretty clearly expressing regret that people are upset with him. Not regret that he led people, however inadvertently, to believe that because he was running as a Liberal he would remain one at least up to the first day of the new Parliament. Not regret that, having attacked Stephen Harper’s Conservatives as unfit to govern, he promptly joined them. Not regret for anything that actually upset people. Just regret that they’re upset.

That isn’t an apology. It’s the most token of obligatory gestures. And voters would be completely justified in responding with a gesture of their own.

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