Canada maintains law making apologies legally meaningless, keeps apologizing anyway
Ontario's Apology Act has been on the books since 2009, and its premise remains one of the great confessions of national character: a law clarifying that saying sorry is not an admission of guilt.
The legislation exists because Canadians apologize at a volume no legal system was built to survive. Sorry for the weather. Sorry for your foot, which stepped on mine. Sorry to the ATM for taking too long. Without statutory protection, the average Ontarian would accumulate more admissible confessions before breakfast than most criminal enterprises produce in a decade.
American jurists find the whole thing baffling. In the United States, an apology is a strategic asset, deployed by counsel after eleven months of discovery. In Canada it is a form of punctuation.
The law has performed flawlessly. Apologies have continued at full volume, now with legal cover, which Canadians acknowledge is itself something to be sorry about.