Roughly 200 youngsters were forcibly removed from their Sons of Freedom families and confined to a government-run school in the fifties

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There had been harbingers of what was to come. School burnings, mostly. And then, in the middle of the night, Oct. 29, 1924, when the Canadian Pacific train on the Kettle Valley Line stopped at the small station of Farron in British Columbia’s Monashee Mountains, there was a deafening explosion. Among the dead passengers were Grand Forks MLA John McKie and eight others, including Peter “The Lordly” Veregin, the spiritual leader of the world’s Doukhobors.

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Second only to the savage reign of the Ku Klux Klan in the American South, what followed was the longest, most spectacularly violent terrorist campaign in North American history. Until it petered out in the 1970s, factories, sawmills, canneries, bridges and power lines were dynamited. Rail lines were destroyed. Hundreds of homes and businesses were burned to the ground. Nearly 1,000 extremists were jailed.

It’s a good bet that most Canadians know nothing about it. There was certainly no inkling of this history in the formal apology the British Columbia government issued last month to atone for the apprehension of roughly 200 Doukhobor children who were caught up in their parents’ mayhem back in the 1950s.

In an expression of regret for confining the children to a school dormitory in the town of New Denver between 1953 and 1959, the apology comes with $10 million for wellness, culture and education programs, mental health services and archival research.

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