:
I call the meeting to order.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to meeting number 110 of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs.
We are meeting today for the first time with regard to the incident that took place in the gallery of the House of Commons.
I would like to welcome our guests who are here with us.
I also want to note that it is March 21, 2024, which is World Down Syndrome Day. It is a day that was created to raise public awareness, promote inclusivity, encourage advocacy and support the well-being of those living with Down syndrome.
I'm usually in my riding on this day, but I am not today, so Kaleb and I shared a pair of socks with each of you. We hope you rock your socks.
With that, we'd like to welcome Ihor Michalchyshyn, chief executive officer and executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, and Jars Balan, director of the Kule Ukrainian Canadian studies centre at the Canadian institute of Ukrainian studies.
I believe there are opening comments from one of you, and you'll both be available for comments.
With that, I welcome you both to PROC. I thank you for taking the time to be here.
The floor is yours.
:
Good morning. Thank you.
We were just having some audio issues, but I hope you can hear me now.
I'll read the opening statement, and then we're available for questions.
On behalf of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, it's a pleasure to be here today virtually to speak with you. I'll read our opening statement on this matter at this point.
For many centuries, all of the inhabitants who lived on the territory of what is Ukraine today, including the Jewish people, suffered successive occupations by foreign empires and colonizers who sought to subjugate those for whom Ukraine was home. Some 30 years ago, with the declaration of Ukrainian independence and statehood, the difficult process of reaching mutual understanding and comity began—and it continues to this day.
The history of World War II in Ukraine is complex and difficult to easily summarize. Ukraine was caught between the two tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin. In the 20th century, Ukraine was the centre of what Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called the “Bloodlands”.
The Ukrainian people fought for their independence in WWI and WWII, and are now fighting for the freedom of Europe. Without their own state, Ukrainians fought in different military formations, but always in pursuit of a free and independent Ukraine and against Soviet, Bolshevik and Russian tyranny.
Following the incident in Canada's Parliament this fall, our community was once again subjected to a familiar disinformation narrative smearing Ukrainians, which originated from the Soviet Union and is now being used by the Russian Federation.
It is unfortunate and hurtful that many ill-informed politicians and members of the media chose to engage with simplistic and inaccurate narratives, instead of relying on the findings of a Canadian commission of inquiry. As one of Canada's pre-eminent scholars of Ukrainian history, Dr. Paul Robert Magocsi, chair of Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto, stated, “There is simply no proof that the Galicia Division engaged in war crimes”. The characterization of former members of the Galicia Division collectively as Nazis, fascists, war criminals or monsters is inflammatory and unsupported by the historical record.
In the 1980s, the Government of Canada called a commission—the Deschênes commission—to investigate claims that thousands of Nazi war criminals were hiding in Canada. The commission found that:
Between 1971 and 1986, public statements by outside interveners concerning alleged war criminals residing in Canada have spread increasingly large and grossly exaggerated figures as to their estimated number.
The commission also found that:
Charges of war crimes against members of the Galicia Division have never been substantiated, neither in 1950 when they were first preferred, nor in 1984...nor before this Commission.
It has been the long-standing position of our community that, if there is evidence of any wrongdoing by any individual, regardless of who they are or when they committed a crime, this evidence should be brought to the attention of Canada's war crimes unit to be pursued in that forum and not in the court of public opinion.
As Dr. Magocsi stated, “It is not in the interest of Canada for politicians and the media to distort the historical past and besmirch the reputation of an individual in order to gain some ostensible advantage in the Canadian political arena.”
The disinformation narrative smearing Ukrainians originates from the Soviet days and now is being used by the Russian Federation in an attempt to discredit an independent Ukrainian democracy. This is an effort to sow social division within Canada and other western democracies. It is an attempt by Russia to distract from the war of annihilation against Ukraine that it wages, which this Parliament has correctly and unanimously recognized as a genocide against the Ukrainian people.
Every day, including last night, Ukrainians cities are being bombed by Russian missiles. Every day, Russia is murdering Ukrainian civilians, abducting Ukrainian children and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is the defence of Ukraine and ensuring Ukraine's victory over Russia which the UCC and our community are seized with at this time. We invite all members of this committee, all parliamentarians and the Government of Canada to join us in this effort.
Thank you.
We will now enter into five-minute rounds, starting with Mr. Kmiec, followed by Mr. Duguid.
[Translation]
Then it will be Ms. Gaudreau's turn, and after her, Ms. Mathyssen.
[English]
We'll go over a couple of points really quickly.
First, one person speaks at a time, because we do have two official languages. It's challenging, because you are virtual and we are in person, but I think you can see the room, so you'll see when a person has finished. We can try not to speak over top of each other.
Second, we know it's a tough topic and not an easy conversation. I would ask that we remember why we're here and to stay focused on the study. We do want to have a thorough discussion and conversation, but it needs to be respectful. I will do my best to ensure that happens, as I'm sure all members will.
Mr. Kmiec, five minutes go to you—through the chair.
:
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Through you, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being with us today. While I haven't had a chance to meet you in person, it's a pleasure to meet you in committee.
You may or may not know that my oldest son deployed to Ukraine in 2018 as part of Operation Unifier. He helped train Ukrainian forces to defend themselves. It's a real pleasure to be with you today.
With respect to questions on procedure internally, obviously the people best placed to answer those questions are the internal people you've also been meeting with as part of this study.
I wanted to connect with you with respect to your comments about knee-jerk reactions.
I'll walk you through how things happen in the House. As my colleague, Mr. Kmiec, mentioned, this was not a regular sitting of the House. This was a special event for which a dignitary was here. Based on previous testimony from the Clerk, we heard that normally in these kinds of instances, a member of the visitors gallery would not be recognized by the Speaker. This was something that normally is not done, and obviously is something that we're going to look at going forward in terms of protocol.
When that does happen in a regular sitting, the Speaker will recognize someone in the gallery and invite members to stand. We assume that the Speaker has done the proper vetting and the person or people being recognized are worthy. We're talking about moments or seconds. We stand, we recognize whoever's being recognized by the Speaker and we applaud.
Then, going through the weekend, we heard the reports coming and the media headlines. Even coming to the meeting today I saw some of the media headlines referencing Mr. Hunka in a different term.
I wanted to get feedback from you. How has this hurt the Ukrainian community?
I want to give you an opportunity to help because we all want to learn from this. There's also an opportunity to learn about the history of Ukraine's fight during World War II. I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to share that with Canadians watching today, if you'd like to share anything with us.
:
Welcome back to meeting number 110 of the procedure and House affairs committee.
I had mentioned earlier that this was the first time we were studying this matter, but it is actually the second time. I was mistaken.
With that, we're really excited to have our next panel. Appearing as an individual is Professor Lubomyr Luciuk, department of political science, Royal Military College of Canada. We also have with us Richard Marceau, vice-president, external affairs and general counsel, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
As we've been working out the calendar, we've had some changes. You have my apologies that we have had to reschedule you a couple of times, which means the opening comments time has varied and changed. Because we have done that, I will be providing some leniency. I will let you for the most part go on with your comments. When you see me starting to wave, I would like them to come to an end, but at the same time, you are our guests and we really appreciate your taking the time to be here with us today.
With that, Professor, we'll start with you. The floor is yours. Welcome to PROC.
Thank you for inviting me, and thank you for your time.
The title of my presentation is Cui bono? or “Who benefits?” I'm not going to read it. I'm going to simply speak to some of the points, but I believe you've all received it in both official languages.
At the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Yaroslav Hunka was present in the House during the visit to Canada of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When it was subsequently reported on left-wing blogs that Mr. Hunka had served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, more commonly referred to as the Galicia Division, a controversy erupted that has continued to fester to this day.
Now, there are a few things I want to point out right at the start.
I don't know Mr. Hunka. I've never met him.
Second, my mother was kidnapped as a teenager and brought to the Third Reich as a slave labourer during the Second World War, so I have absolutely no interest in defending any Nazi who may still be alive. Let's be very clear about that.
I was, however, also a member of the Civil Liberties Commission representing the Ukrainian Canadian community during the commission inquiry on war criminals, so I think I'm one of the only people in this room who was there and was part of the investigation that examined the allegations that thousands of Nazi war criminals had somehow managed to get into Canada.
I was present in the lockdown with the Minister of Justice, Ramon Hnatyshyn, when he revealed the commission's findings to the Baltic, Jewish and Ukrainian communities. Along with a representative of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Irwin Cotler, whom you all know, I appeared on the CBC program The Journal with Barbara Frum on March 12, 1987, and welcomed the findings of the Deschênes commission.
At that time, our community had a suspicion that Soviet agents and their fellow travellers in the west had provoked this controversy over the alleged presence of thousands of Nazi war criminals in North America. Only recently, we have come up with documentary evidence. There was a 1985 KGB document describing something called “operation payback”, which was a disinformation campaign started in the 1970s intended to stoke tensions between the Jewish, Baltic and Ukrainian diasporas. That subterfuge worked very well at the time, and it works well to this day. In fact, it is now being deployed to distract attention from Russia's genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians.
I'm not going to go into the position of the Ukrainian Canadian community on bringing war criminals to justice. That's already been explained. Unfortunately, Canada has never properly investigated how alleged Soviet and Communist war criminals and collaborators managed to get into this country. Some did, even individuals who openly boasted of what they had done on behalf of the Stalinist regime in the ranks of the NKVD, Smersh and KGB. Government records about all those persons should also now be made available.
Now let's look at the evidence with respect to Mr. Hunka.
First of all, Mr. Hunka was never a Nazi. He was never a former Nazi. No Ukrainian could ever be a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, because Ukrainians, like all other Slavs, were considered to be subhumans. They weren't Aryans. They were subhumans,Untermenschen, so they could never be Nazis.
Every individual who served in the armed forces of the Third Reich during the Second World War, and that's millions of people in total, was obliged to swear an oath to Adolf Hitler. That, obviously, did not make them all into Nazis, including about a quarter of a million Germans who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s.
Indisputably, Mr. Hunka served with the Galicia Division. Why? Why did he enlist? I found a letter in my research that he wrote on September 22, 2015, years before there was any controversy about him. In that, he provides an explanation about why he joined. He volunteered as a young man, as a teenager, in western Ukraine after the first Soviet occupation of that region. Between mid-September 1939 and late June 1941, Mr. Hunka witnessed massacres perpetrated by the Soviets against innocent civilians. He witnessed the deportation of family members to Siberia, where some of them died, so, as he wrote, “I hated everything Russian”. That's what he wrote years ago.
He joined and he served to the end of the war. He was interned in Rimini in northeastern Italy after the war, and we'll come back to that in a moment.
When the Deschênes commission in 1985 through 1987 investigated the issue of alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada, it came to a number of specific conclusions about the Galicia Division that everyone seems to have forgotten. One was that the division, the Galicia Division, should not be indicted as a group. Two was that members of the division had been screened. Indeed, they were screened by the British, by the Americans and by the Canadians, including people I personally knew, and even by the Soviets.
Charges of war crimes against members of the division were never substantiated. In the absence of knowledge or evidence of specific war crimes, Mr. Justice Deschênes said, “mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.”
He also concluded that, because these people had come to Canada after 1950 with the full knowledge of the Government of Canada and Canadian authorities were aware of who these men were, they could not have their citizenship revoked because it had been granted to them normally through the naturalization process.
What does all that mean with respect to Mr. Hunka? It means simply that he came to Canada legally in 1954. His wartime record with the Galicia Division was well known, and no one complained.
Now, I'm going to underscore that there were, understandably, concerns raised by the Canadian Jewish Congress in the autumn of 1950: Who are these people? Why are they being allowed to come to Canada? In fact, the government, at the cabinet level, asked the High Commissioner of Canada in the United Kingdom, L. Dana Wilgress, to investigate this. He did, and he dismissed those allegations about the Galicia Division as being nothing but Communist propaganda. As he also added in his report to cabinet, “it is interesting to note that no specific charges of war crimes have been made” by the Soviet or any other government “against any member of this group”. That rather astute assessment seems to have been forgotten.
What am I here to do today? As I said, I don't know Mr. Hunka, but when I look at the facts of his life, here's what I find.
As a teenager, he fought in defence of Ukraine because of what he had witnessed the Soviets do to Ukrainians between 1939 and 1941. He had nothing to do with the persecution of any minority group. At the war's end, he became a prisoner of war. Later, he became an immigrant and, finally, a naturalized Canadian citizen. He served in the Canadian Army, in the militia, from 1963 to 1965, and he swore an oath to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He worked hard, he raised a family, he paid his taxes, he broke no laws that I'm aware of in Canada and he contributed for 70 years to the general welfare of his adopted country. However, disregarding the principles of natural justice, many members of Parliament from all parties denounced Yaroslav Hunka for being something he never was—a Nazi.
The fundamental principle of our justice system, ladies and gentlemen, is that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Given that there is no evidence of any kind of any wartime criminality on the part of Mr. Hunka, I'd like to say that the House of Commons owes an innocent man, and our fellow Canadian, a public apology.
Thank you.
:
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the members for inviting me.
Allow me to provide a bit of context for the discussion we're having today, because it's important. The context is a significant increase in anti‑Semitism in Canada. Just this week, La Presse published an anti‑Semitic cartoon that it had to withdraw, and it apologized for publishing it.
[English]
A theatre in Hamilton, the Playhouse Cinema, cancelled the Hamilton Jewish Film Festival under pressure. One of your colleagues, NDP MP , had to apologize for his comment in the House linking a ceasefire in Gaza with tackling anti-Semitism here.
The Toronto police released their numbers regarding hate and saw a 93% rise in hate crimes in Toronto since October 7, the majority of which targeted the Jewish community. I could add that the Jewish community had to get an injunction in Montreal to protect its institutions, including a community centre, a school and a synagogue. I could talk about the demonstrations against synagogues in Thornhill, Montreal and other places.
This is the context and it is important to know this.
[Translation]
Now, what are we talking about? We're talking here about the invitation extended to Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the 14th grenadier division of the Waffen‑SS during the Second World War. Let's be clear: This was a volunteer unit of the Waffen‑SS, which the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg said was, as a whole, a criminal organization that organized the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War. So we're not talking about an organization like the Knights of Columbus or the Club Richelieu.
This man was officially recognized and introduced in the House of Commons by the Speaker of the House and was given a standing ovation. It made headlines around the world. The House of Commons, the heart of Canadian democracy, was sullied by this event, not only by the presence of this man but also by the standing ovation he received. Also, of course, it served the Russian propaganda of Vladimir Putin, who is in the middle of an illegal war against our Ukrainian allies. That's important to note as well. So it was an embarrassment for Canada on the international stage.
[English]
Inviting Hunka hurt deeply Holocaust survivors, their families and Jewish Canadians, and I would say that it hurt all Canadians.
[Translation]
We know that the Office of the Speaker of the House of Commons didn't deliberately invite a former member of the Waffen‑SS to be applauded in the House of Commons, but rather that it was an oversight.
[English]
This was a failure of vetting and a failure of due diligence. However, this is not an isolated incident.
In December 2022, a reception was held here in Parliament by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group. Among the attendees was a man named Nazih Khatatba.
Who is this Mr. Khatatba?
He was—at the time at least—the editor of a publication that called the Holocaust a hoax and referred to Judaism as a terrorist religion. His publication spoke approvingly in 2014 of the synagogue massacre in Jerusalem in which Canadian citizen Chaim Rotman was murdered with an axe while at prayer. This man, Khatatba, no more than Hunka, shouldn't have been invited to Parliament.
[Translation]
I repeat: Parliament, as the institution at the heart of Canadian democracy, must do better to prevent such people from being invited.
[English]
Think about it. We sent a man to the moon 50 years ago. I'm sure we can do a better job of vetting people who are welcomed into Parliament.
I know that time flies, Madam Speaker.
[Translation]
We ask you, Madam Chair and committee members, to implement effective controls to ensure that such incidents never happen again. You can't just react to the most recent incident.
[English]
Having people like Hunka in Parliament sends a terrible message to the Jews of Canada. He was a member of the Waffen-SS. Having people like Khatatba in Parliament is also unacceptable.
Members of Parliament, what you say in this place matters. What you do in this place matters. Who you let into this place matters. Please ensure that similar incidents don't happen again.
[Translation]
Thank you.
:
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I think this is the first time that I've been at a panel where I have actually read books by both panellists.
Professor Luciuk, I've read Operation Payback and a series of articles you've written on the subject.
[Translation]
Mr. Marceau, I've also read your book, Juif: une histoire québécoise, which recounts your conversion to Judaism and your story as a former Bloc Québécois MP.
Thank you both for being here.
[English]
Obviously, you bring very different perspectives to the issue. I bring a different perspective as well. The whole incident that happened in September, I'm sure, was as difficult for your families as it was for mine. I had a lot of explaining to do to my family about exactly what I knew, when I knew it and how I knew it. We're not here to relitigate World War II and what happened to different communities that were given very few choices. Larger forces were at play and people were deciding for our communities what was to happen and what wasn't to happen. I'm sure you and your families.... I have family who didn't survive the war. I have family members who spent time in camps.
What I want to understand is how we can reconcile the communities here. President Zelenskyy and President Duda have, for years, been doing reconciliation work on war crimes committed in what Poland calls the “borderlands”, which would be the regions around Lviv, Volhynia and Galicia in Ukraine.
What can we do now, going forward, to reconcile three diaspora communities in Canada? That's so, one, we never embarrass one of our allies again and, most importantly, we never provide the Russian Federation a propaganda win, which they can keep using against our ally Ukraine and against the diaspora communities in Canada. It's so this “operation payback” doesn't continue.
Perhaps Professor Luciuk could go first.
[Translation]
Mr. Marceau, you can go second.
:
I can say that I had a friend, Stefan Petelycky, whose Auschwitz tattoo number was 154922. I helped him prepare his memoirs for publication, and they're now available, so I heard a great deal about what happened at Auschwitz and by who and to whom.
From people like that and the people I interviewed for my doctoral dissertation, I learned not to pick sides, so I'm not going to pick sides on that question.
I will say that I, as a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, was disappointed by the reaction of many members in the House of Commons, from all parties. I have a list of quotations here from every party; I made sure. I'm not going to read those into the record, but the point is that it was a knee-jerk reaction. You were all on a high because President Zelenskyy had come here, and we all recognize him as Ukraine's Moses. This is a man who is leading his people, his nation, the Ukrainian nation out of Russian Soviet bondage. He himself is of Jewish heritage. This is what he is doing, and this is why Putin is pushing back so hard. Putin is the pharaoh. He has just made himself immortal in terms of the “election”. He is going to be there longer than Stalin was.
We had a Ukrainian president here. You all welcomed him. You all applauded him, and in that euphoria, a man from North Bay, in a wheelchair, wearing an embroidered Ukrainian shirt was introduced. He just wanted to see his president, for whom he fought in the sense that he fought for Ukraine's independence.
Then the next day the left-wing press got onto it and said, ”Oh, he's an SS man”, and then people ran with it. There wasn't a single media report that I could find that took a different position, not one. There wasn't a single member of Parliament who paused and thought and said, “Maybe I should read a book. Maybe I should think about this.”
Most of you are a lot younger than I am, and the reality of it is that you might not know these things, but everyone rushed to condemn because it's so easy to say, “SS man, Nazi” and someone even elevated him to being an SS officer. He got promoted by the MP who said that.
Mr. Hunka was never a Nazi. There is no evidence that he did anything wrong. He's an innocent Canadian, yet he was condemned. He was condemned by people in every party, so, please, drop the partisan part of this.
How do you get beyond this? That was one of the questions from both of you. You get beyond this by thinking before you speak. You get beyond this by not falling prey to Soviet disinformation regurgitated by the Russian Federation and their operatives in Canada and their fellow travellers, of whom there are more than a few. They're very good at this, and they suckered you.
:
History, like any other discipline, has schools of thought and different opinions. You need to base yourself on evidence.
Mere membership in the Galicia Division, as Justice Deschênes concluded back in 1987, is insufficient for prosecution. Membership in the Galicia Division is not a crime, according to Justice Deschênes.
These people were screened. There's been no evidence put forward that Mr. Hunka, whom we're talking about, committed any crimes. However, my colleague has suggested this man shouldn't have been in Parliament. Why? Why not? It's because he was a member of the Galicia Division. Okay, so there's a difference of opinion there.
The fact is that we had a commission of inquiry established by the Government of Canada, which continued for nearly two years. It was a very difficult period of time, I can assure you. The Canadian Jewish Congress, B'nai Brith and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress were all represented there. They had standing before that commission, and we welcomed the results.
Thirty-seven years later, you can't say that you don't like the results. You can't say that this Canadian can't come to Parliament because I disagree with his opinions or this Canadian can't come to Parliament because I find him disagreeable.
Just going on Google or Wikipedia and searching for information is pretty fraught, I would think. I'm not sure you'd invite me.
:
Okay. I will try to be judicious with my time.
I think the question is about who should get recognized in Parliament and who should not. You can invite all types of people. I think the second part of the issue that this committee has been tasked with is to figure out how we go about fixing the reputation of Canada—fixing the reputation that we damaged. As a group, as a collective, because of the actions of the Speaker and the lack of action by the Office of the Prime Minister, we damaged President Zelenskyy's reputation. We allowed it to then be used by Russian propaganda to go after him.
We've talked about sources. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance—Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation found that in the village of Huta Pieniacka, a massacre was indeed committed. The 14th was involved. Ethnic cleansing was done against 100,000 Polish people. That is why the Polish community is so sensitive about this.
The national commission was found to have had the right facts. The findings were confirmed by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2005. We can talk about Wikipedia. That's one thing. We can Google things. These are national commissions.
What we do here in Canada, in our sources, it's our particular context. We should look to the two nations closest to a country that they are now fighting—directly, in the case of Ukraine, and indirectly, in the case of Poland—to ensure that both remain free. As I've said before, you cannot have a free Ukraine without a free Poland. You cannot have a free Poland without a free Ukraine. You will never have a home safe enough for the Jewish people in that region without both of those countries being free, where you are free to be a Jew who speaks Hebrew or Yiddish—including Yiddish proverbs, which I loved very much from my grandmother.
How do we move beyond this to fix the reputation of Canada and our Parliament so that we can be of benefit to our ally in Ukraine? I've asked that question of others as well. What are the specific actions we can take to fix the Prime Minister's Office's mistake and the Speaker's mistake for reconciliation?
Perhaps you can keep it short, because I have one more thing to ask. I'll cut you off in a minute and a half.
[Translation]
Mr. Marceau, if you want to answer first, go ahead.