Outsiders like American poet Henry Longfellow were the first to tell the terrible story of the deportation of Acadians by the British between 1755 and 1762. His epic poem Evangeline (1847) became symbolic of this Acadian tragedy. Gradually, however, Acadians in the Maritimes have publicly reclaimed the memory of this “Great Upheaval.”

No one, however, broached the subject of responsibility for the deportation until the early 1990s when Louisiana lawyer Warren Perrin demanded a judicial apology from the British Crown.

The idea was taken up by a Quebec MP with Acadian roots, Stéphane Bergeron. In 1999 and 2001, he attempted to convince the federal parliament “to intercede [...] to cause the British Crown to present an official apology to the Acadian people for the wrongs done to them in its name between 1755 and 1763.” However, these motions were torpedoed by the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien, with the support of its Acadian MPs. The Société nationale de l’Acadie, in turn, promised to work with elected officials to agree on the content of a “better” resolution, which would nevertheless exclude the term “apology.” This discussion sparked a lively debate in the media.

It was against this backdrop that five people published the “Beaubassin Manifesto” on October 25, 2002. “We consulted historians and archives. We were astounded by what we found,” explained the manifesto’s instigator Marie-Claire Dugas. The manifesto underlined the scale of the human tragedy represented by the Deportation and the fact that the operation was illegal under the laws of the time. It concluded that genocide was involved.

The following year, the federal government issued a Royal Proclamation “recognizing the wrongs done to the Acadians by the Deportation.” However, the proclamation contained no “acknowledgement of responsibility.” For some, it was an “elegant way out” of the debate; for others, it was a poor gesture that would not allow Acadia to “break the cycle of victimization.” Since then, the debate has occasionally resurfaced.