Canada’s sorriest prime minister is getting on people’s nerves. “What else does he do, besides apologize for things that happened years and years ago?” Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu asked this week.

The news that occasioned Gladu’s remark was Trudeau’s statement on Tuesday that he would be issuing a formal apology for Canada’s refusal to let the MS Saint Louis land in Halifax in 1939. The 907 Jewish men, women and children fleeing Germany had already been turned away by Cuba and the United States. But as an immigration official of the period remarked, when it came to Jews entering Canada, “None is too many.” The vessel was turned back to Europe, where 254 of the ship’s passengers died in concentration camps.

Trudeau is sorry about Canadian history. He or his ministers have previously apologized for Canada’s residential schools, the relocation of Inuit communities, the relocation of the Sayisi Dene in Manitoba, the systematic expulsion of LGBTQ2 workers from the public service, the hanging of six BC Tsilhqot’in chiefs, and for turning away hundreds of Sikh passengers on the Komagata Maru. Even in Canada, where “I’m sorry” is a second national anthem, some wonder if the words are losing their meaning.

I consider myself an apology apologist. As the pope’s recent refusal to apologize for the Catholic church’s part in residential schooling has shown, withholding an apology can leave survivors feeling angry and further hurt. Canada’s racist and homophobic policies have destroyed lives over many generations, and affected communities deserve to hear that Canada is ashamed.

Trudeau is the embodiment of the new man of feeling, who’s not afraid of emotion

But it’s hard not to see Trudeau’s penchant for penitence as a particularly Canadian form of self-aggrandizement – humble-bragging about how bad you feel. Congratulating ourselves for feeling guilty makes us feel good again, and the praise we lavish on ourselves for our honesty is warmly received – by us. Trudeau is the embodiment of the new man of feeling, who’s not afraid of emotion. He wells up when talking about his father, residential school survivors, Syrian refugees and the death of a Canadian pop star. For some, it’s a feminist victory. For others, it’s exasperating to turn on the TV and see the prime minister with his beautiful face awash in tears, like a My Little Pony glistening with bathwater.

Apologies are becoming part of our national myth. In the past few years, as details of Canada’s broken treaties with indigenous peoples have come to mainstream attention, settler Canada has been spinning through a cataclysmic shift in self-image. The cycle of apology can come off as the cheapest way to hold on to our sense of ourselves as one of the “good” countries. These actions must be aberrations, because Canada is a fundamentally honourable place.

But Canada’s epiphanies about its shameful behaviour in the past would be more convincing if that behaviour had truly ceased. Trudeau is committed to the Kinder Morgan pipeline, despite opposition from indigenous nations whose lands it would cross. And Trudeau’s representatives are currently in Lagos, quietly negotiating with officials to prevent more Nigerians seeking asylum in Canada. In combination with religious persecution and homophobic violence, the actions of Boko Haram, a militant group that has abducted, raped and killed tens of thousands over the past decade, have internally displaced some 2 million people and created hundreds of thousands of refugees. Some of these asylum seekers are walking into Canada, and Trudeau’s government would prefer to be able to turn them back at the US border.

The language of apology – and Trudeau’s personableness – has started to feel wrong because government accountability is different in scale and in kind from personal accountability. Government has the power to change millions of lives through the implementation of policy, not simply in statements of moral feeling. Becoming a just country is more than slapping an “I’m sorry” bumper sticker on the ship of state and hoping no one notices as you continue to smash into things.

For some in Canada’s Jewish community, this apology helps to heal one historical wound. But in the Jewish tradition, atonement is a complex process, requiring a commitment to future actions that depart from the wrongdoing of the past. By this light, it’s not at all clear that Canada is sorry.