Bill C-459 (Historical)

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day Act

An Act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide ("Holodomor") Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide

This enactment designates the fourth Saturday in November in each and every year as “Ukrainian Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day”.

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day Act

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

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seconded by the member for British Columbia Southern Interior, moved that Bill C-459, An Act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

He said: Mr. Speaker, this year Ukrainian Canadians, Ukrainians around the world, and the international community, will mark the 75th anniversary of one of the most heinous crimes in modern history, the state sponsored famine genocide of 1932-33 perpetrated by the Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin against the Ukrainian people.

The deliberate planned famine was devised to destroy the Ukrainian nation's aspirations for a free and independent Ukraine. It killed seven to ten million Ukrainians. For decades the truth about this horrific crime was suppressed by Soviet authorities.

Canada has a longstanding history of condemning all war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides. That is why today we are debating an act to establish a Ukrainian genocide holodomor and famine memorial day. This bill not only designates the fourth Saturday in November as a memorial day for the Ukrainian famine but also acknowledges the famine as an act of genocide.

Across Canada right now holodomor activities are taking place, largely sponsored by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress and its membership organizations. They are doing things such as holding memorials in a number of cities. Right now there is the international remembrance flame tour with the flame being carried by Stefan Horlatsch, who I had the pleasure of meeting a couple of weeks ago.

Stefan is a survivor of the holodomor, the famine in the Ukraine that was imposed upon him as a small child by Stalin. Stefan has some recollections of that horrific experience and is sharing that story as he travels across Canada carrying the international flame and talking about the problems that he endured as a child and his journey to get out of the Soviet Union.

I have been working on this bill for about 16 months. I know many members in this House have brought forward these types of bills in the past and in this current Parliament, and they feel quite strongly that this is the right issue to jump on board with.

I have to thank Senator Raynell Andreychuk who made sure that a motion like this was brought forward at the 70th anniversary back in 2003 and who had a motion in the Senate where senators discussed recognizing the holodomor as a genocide.

I also want to thank the Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) for his encouragement and help in drafting this bill.

I need to thank the Canadian Friends of Ukraine who have worked tirelessly not only to raise awareness of the holodomor but helped in drafting my legislation over a year ago. I especially thank Miss Lisa Shymko, who is the executive director and Mrs. Margareta Shpir, who is the first vice-president.

As I said, there are many other MPs here from all parties who know that this is an issue that needs to be recognized, one that all Canadians need to be better educated about, as well as making that recognition around the world.

I also want to thank the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Association of which so many of us are members.

I also want to make sure that we proceed in a non-partisan and timely manner in getting this legislation through the House, so that we recognize it before the 75th anniversary actually runs out.

I understand we need to make an amendment to my bill and I encourage that we do this at committee. When I first drafted the bill the one word that I actually did leave out was “holodomor”, which is a Ukrainian term, and I am of Ukrainian heritage. For Canadian purposes we often just refer to it as the Ukrainian famine and I definitely wanted to use the word “genocide” in the bill. We need to put the word “holodomor” in the bill in about five or six different places and the best place to do that is at committee. I am asking my fellow members in the House to send the bill to committee and make those amendments there.

Although holodomor is a Ukrainian word and recognizes the famine of 1932-33, it is based upon two Ukrainian words “holod”, which stands for hunger, starvation or famine, and “moryty”, which is to induce suffering, to kill, to die. These two words together make the root for holodomor.

We need to put this in perspective. We are talking about seven to ten million Ukrainians who died over the fall of 1932 and most of 1933. At the peak, over 25,000 people a day were hauled out of the villages and off the farms, and just thrown on wagons and taken out back and buried in mass graves.

The only way we can really look at this is to know about that time. We are not sure what the statistics were like. We do not know solidly what the population of Ukraine was at the time. We know that the last solid census was taken about 1926-27 by the Soviet regime and it said there were roughly 28 million to 29 million Ukrainians at that time.

By just taking normal population growth with some of the statistics I saw in 1931, the population of Ukraine would have been about 31.2 million people, which is about the same population we have here in Canada, and over seven million were killed, maybe as high as ten million, if we ever could get our hands on the solid statistics of what happened during 1932 and 1933.

That would be like going to Manitoba today and taking away all the food that was harvested because we did not like the people and dumping all that food into Lake Winnipeg. Essentially, starving the entire population.

However, let us not stop there. If we are going to make a real comparison to what happened in the Ukraine, let us go to Saskatchewan, take all the food right off the farms and out of the houses, dump it into Lake Winnipeg and let those people starve to death.

However, we cannot stop there. We also have to go into Alberta, take all the food, all the grain, all the livestock, throw all that into the lake, and let those people starve to death.

However, that is not all. We also have to go to B.C. and starve all those people to death to have the same situation that the Ukrainian people lived through under Joseph Stalin from 1932 to 1933.

It is horrific. We have to make sure that the seven to ten million Ukrainians who died at the hands of the authorities of Joseph Stalin are remembered. The Soviet regime severely punished anyone who resisted it. In addition to starvation and killings by agents of the estate, cannibalism occurred. We know that. There were many suicides and mercy killings, which just kept adding to the death toll. As I said before, I have seen numbers as high as 28,000 people dying every day at the peak of it.

I want to thank Leo Ledohowski, the President and CEO of Canad Inns. He produced and sponsored a great video on the holodomor. He talked to Ukrainian Canadian survivors of the holodomor from across this country, a lot of them right in Manitoba, including Mike and Sonya Kushliak from Selkirk in my riding.

They spoke about horrible stories they remember when growing up. They spoke about people laying on the streets, dying, because they did not have the strength to walk to town. They spoke about people driving horses and buggies picking up the dead people and taking them out to the cemetery and putting them into mass graves.

They said that every time their parents tried to bring even a morsel of food home it seemed that the so-called “activists” of the communist regime would come into their homes and find it, even if it was just a sockful of wheat, and take it back and would not allow them to eat. All the crops were confiscated.

Ukrainians had a bountiful harvest in the fall of 1932, but all their root crops, all their vegetables, all the wheat that they had grown, all their livestock were confiscated and taken away, including their cows, their sheep, their goats and their pigs. They had absolutely nothing left and essentially were made to suffer a horrible death.

Essentially what was happening was the commitment of genocide. I want to read article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was drafted in 1948. It defines “genocide” as follows:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

That is exactly what happened in the Ukraine. It continues:

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

So, definitely in part (c) of the definition: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

We know that the famine was not caused by drought or other environmental causes. There are plenty of records to show that there was a bountiful harvest, that exports of wheat from the Ukraine and from Russia were flowing into western Europe.

There was plenty of grain to go around. The carryover stocks of grain supplies of the Soviet Union would have been more than enough to feed the starving Ukrainians. We know that this was caused by the policies and actions of Joseph Stalin's Soviet authorization aimed at the forced collectivization of agriculture and achieving the maximum extraction of agricultural produce from the rural population.

These policies and actions included decrees “laying down grain procurement targets for Ukraine” and ordering that all collective farm property such as cattle and grain should henceforth be considered state property, “sacred and inviolable”. Those guilty of offences against it were considered enemies of the people, to be shot unless there were extenuating circumstances including the penalty of imprisonment with confiscation of property. Severe enforcement measures included: death sentences, numbering in the thousands; imprisonment in concentration camps; and withholding of food rations and other supplies.

We always think of this in terms that this was based upon the collectivization of agriculture across the Soviet Union, but it was different in the Ukraine. It was different for a number of reasons. First of all, as well as forcing collectivization upon the Ukrainians and people of the Volga River district, Kazakhstan and the Kuban area of Russia, the Ukrainian people were unfairly targeted. They were not allowed to migrate within their own areas. They were not allowed to travel. There were blockades that were put in place to prevent the people of the northern Ukraine from going to Russia where the food was and be able to buy it at the stores, essentially forcing them to live in these starvation ghettos, these famine ghettos.

We know that in the other areas there was still the freedom of movement, that people could move around and find foodstuffs. We also know that they were not just targeting the farmers. They were not going after the peasants. It looked like they were going after the farming community across the Soviet Union. We must remember that 80% of the population at that time were peasant farmers. They were living on the land. Essentially, they were the basis of Ukrainian pride. They were nationalists. They wanted to see a free and independent Ukraine as Ukraine has often cried out for. Unfortunately, they were being quashed by Stalin himself and his thugs.

Anyone who was considered a nationalist, and most of them were peasants but there were many within communities as well, were often hauled out and put in front of firing squads or they were thrown on the train and sent off to concentration camps in Siberia. Some of the numbers I have seen indicate that over 250,000 Ukrainians were moved to Siberia into concentration camps.

Therefore, the Soviet regime was trying to kill the Ukrainian national movement and Ukrainian culture. The senior leadership of the Soviet Union, including Stalin, was directly involved in the development and implementation of these policies. The leadership under Joseph Stalin was apparently fully aware of its impact on the Ukrainian population, but nevertheless mandated actions which worsened the situation and maximized the loss of life from 1932 to 1933.

While these elements are widely acknowledged as historical facts the debate about whether the holodomor was an act of genocide, defined as a deliberate and systematic destruction of a radical, political, cultural or racial group, continues at the political level, and it has not been conclusively resolved by international academic research.

As I said, we know for a fact that there were these starvation ghettos. We know that anyone who considered themselves a Ukrainian nationalist was exterminated. We know that the Soviet regime tried to eradicate the culture by moving people to Siberia or by having this whole in flow of immigrants into the area to drown it out.

So why now? It is the 75th anniversary. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko is coming to Canada to talk about the holodomor. He is promoting a UN resolution to recognize the holodomor as a genocide. There are many other countries that have declared it as such.

I want to thank all the members of Parliament who are supporting this, as well as the Canadian Friends of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

We need to correct history.

I call upon historians, journalists, educators to record and include the facts of this horrible genocide so that all Canadians can learn from this tragic piece of Ukrainian history.

Vichna yim pamyat.

[Andrew Telegdi, Liberal, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I agree wholeheartedly with what my colleague has said. There is no question in my mind that it was a genocide. I can speak from the viewpoint of someone who actually lived under the brutal heels of Joseph Stalin and what he did to societies behind the iron curtain.

When my colleague mentioned that people disappeared into Siberia and there was a state of terror, I can attest to that. I can attest to the paranoia when that black car came by or came down the street, as to who would be picked up and taken away.

The collectivization of the farms was tried all throughout eastern Europe. There was a real resistance by the farmers to go into the process of collectivization. It is well known that the small plots of land that people owned produced more than the collective farms that were put together.

The horrors of Joseph Stalin have to be recognized, and we have to recognize this as a genocide.

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his support. I hope all members of Parliament will support the bill, and recognize what Joseph Stalin and his communist regime did to the Ukraine and to many people across the Soviet Union.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, 1932 and 1933 were definitely been one of the darkest chapters in human history. I feel very strongly that this was an engineered famine, that it was a genocide against the innocent men and women and children in Ukraine.

This year is the 75th anniversary of this terrible genocide, which was provided by the rule under Stalin to the innocent women and children of Ukraine. I was at a holodomor ceremony this Sunday and many people of Ukrainian descent were there. They were strongly mourning the loss and the genocide that was put upon the people of Ukraine years ago.

Could the member please explain why this should be termed a genocide and why there should be a special day to remember this genocide, this dark chapter in history against the innocent people of Ukraine?

[James Bezan, Conservative, Selkirk—Interlake, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Kildonan—St. Paul for her work as president of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group.

There is no doubt in my mind that this was a genocide. If we look at the definition of what it is in the UN Convention, we can see it was a genocide. We already have a total of 20 countries that have recognized it as a genocide, including the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Congress, the Canadian Senate, Argentina, Australia, Brazil and more.

Back in 1988, the U.S. conducted a commission, as asked for by the U.S. Congress, on the Ukrainian famine. In that, it made 19 findings. It said that in no uncertain terms this was a genocide, it was a man made famine and it was done to exterminate the Ukrainian people.

We have to recognize that in Canada not only do we have a lot of survivors of the genocide, but we also have not only those who suffered through the holodomor, but we have people like myself who are of Ukrainian descent. Luckily my grandparents were able to leave the Ukraine at the turn of the century, before the holodomor came into effect, before the communists ruled Ukraine.

All of us feel for the old country, as they often put it, and we want to ensure that everybody understands what happened. We want to ensure we correct the record so it does not happen again.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for Selkirk—Interlake on the motion. He might be rather surprised to see me participating in the debate, but I want to take this opportunity to express, as a private member, my strong support for his bill. I also want to reflect a little on the significance of this event, not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of the world.

As the hon. member has rightly pointed out, the 20th century was, without question, the most violent century in history, in which human beings demonstrated their extraordinary capacity for evil and for creating hardship, havoc, death and destruction for literally tens of millions of their fellow citizens. It was a century in which powerful ideologies, ideologies at some basic level founded on hatred, seized hold of not only individual hearts and minds of men and women, but seized hold of whole countries and whole systems of government.

Far wiser people than I have described this in terms of how the ideology of Nazi Germany took hold through the 40 or 50 years prior to the emergence of Adolf Hitler as a significant leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly others have looked at how the socialist ideology was twisted and turned, taken by Marxist, then by Lenin and then by Stalin and turned the Soviet Union into one of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships that the world has ever known.

It is because of these facts and also because of the tremendous human ties between the people of Ukraine and the people of Canada that it is entirely appropriate for the House to consider, even for a brief moment on a Tuesday, the importance of this question, the impact that it has had on Ukraine and on the people of Ukraine, but also the impact that it has had on the whole world.

The member has quite rightly described how for a long time there was kind of a debate as to whether what was known in some circles as the Ukrainian famine was in fact a famine or whether it was, as we now I think better realize and better understand, a deliberate attempt to subjugate, murder, repress and destroy the heart and soul of a people.

The member for Selkirk—Interlake has quite rightly described how twice in the last century we have seen this brutal process of collectivization, first in the Soviet Union and then in China, have an absolutely unbelievable impact on the existence of a people.

We are only now beginning to understand that the period known as the Great Leap Forward in China, which took place in the 1950s, was every bit as destructive as the Ukrainian destruction described by my hon. colleague in his private member's bill. It is enough to make us reflect on this forced collectivization, this determination to take away people's livelihoods, to take away their farms, their property, their ability to work the land, their ability to feed their families, their ability to provide for themselves and for their children, how all in the name of an ideology, all in the name of power, of extracting as much surplus as could possibly be extracted by the state and taken away from the farm population in the Ukraine as well as in China, and how destructive it was.

The lessons have been learned. In the case of China, the first thing that Deng Xiaoping did in 1979 was to say that the farmers had to be given back their stake in farming, that a greater opportunity for people had to be created, that the whole collectivist idea, the whole process of collectivization had to be completely deconstructed. We are seeing the same thing take place in Russia and Ukraine and it has taken place over a long period of time.

However, as Canadians, we should not forget the significance of what happened in those years of 1932 and 1933, the death and destruction that resulted, some estimates as many as seven million people may have been killed, those who were terrorized and sent off to gulags, those whose lives were completely destroyed and whose families were completely destroyed. Nor should we forget something else, and I will refer to this very briefly in my comments.

We should not forget the way in which the world watched and the world, to a considerable extent, either ignored or misunderstood what was happening. This is something we have to reflect on today. What are the lessons to be learned? How do we stand here proudly as Canadians and say “never again”?

Let us reflect on other genocides that have taken place in our own lifetime. We were all brought up to believe we would learn lessons from the holocaust, that we would learn lessons from the tragedy of Ukraine, that we would learn lessons from what has taken place in other countries. Yet in our own time and in our own generation we have seen mass murder on a huge scale. We now estimate that as many as four million people may have been killed in the conflict in the eastern part of the Congo. We know that as many as two million people have died in southern Sudan as a result of the civil war, which went on there for over a 20 year period. We know tragically, in the case of Cambodia and Rwanda, when these ideologies take hold how dramatic and destructive they can be, how little human life counts and how much murder and destruction can take place. It is almost mind-boggling to see it and to understand it.

What is particularly tragic about the situation in Ukraine is over the period in question, 1932-33, a number of so-called intelligent western observers went to Russia and were fooled. They had the wool literally pulled over their eyes. George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, we can go down the list of all these so-called really intelligent, bright, capable people. They did not see what was before them. They did not understand what was taking place and they simply could not comprehend evil of the dimensions, which we now know were taking place. That is enough to make us also reflect on the importance of objective observation, on the importance of our standing as witnesses to the evil which is taking place. It is enough to make us reflect on the importance of our speaking up and speaking out even 75 years later, even now documenting, going back into the records and into the archives and saying that we have to find out what happened and believe what happened.

An interesting suggestion was made to me the other day and it is something we should reflect on in Canada. Because we are such an international country and a country that really includes the world, and there are so many of our neighbours who are Cambodians, Laotians, Ukrainians and Rwandans and people of all backgrounds who know what has happened and who know what their experience has been, it seems to me it would be entirely appropriate for us, as a kind of place of memorial of the world, to become a centre of excellence for research, knowledge and understanding of how this destruction happens, how it begins, how it takes place, how it ends, how it is organized, how it is implemented and how it is tolerated. We need to become a centre in the world for these kinds of studies, for this kind of analysis so we can, through all the work we do on behalf of human rights, truly become a country that not only gives speeches and talks this through, but also consistently provides the documentation that we need to provide.

We must become witnesses for the future, witnesses to make sure that tragedies and disasters like these do not happen again. We must get to the point where we can say that we are the witnesses, that this can no longer go on, that things must change. And by remembering what happened in Ukraine, we now have the opportunity to make sure that these things do not happen again.

[Meili Faille, Bloc, Vaudreuil—Soulanges, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking my colleagues from Selkirk—Interlake and Toronto Centre for their speeches about the great famine in Ukraine. I am pleased to speak to this bill, which would recognize the great famine of 1932 and 1933.

Throughout human history, many peoples have experienced famines as great as this one. I would like to take advantage of Quebec City's 400th anniversary to invite people to visit Grosse-Île. Quebeckers have witnessed mass migrations from all over the world. Some of these people were in terrible situations or experiencing great famines in their home countries. Among other things, the memorial there commemorates the great tragedy and suffering of the Irish. Canada witnessed that particular moment in history too.

That is not the purpose of this bill. We are talking about the great famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Many people of Ukrainian origin in my riding, Vaudreuil-Soulanges, have spoken of the atrocities they witnessed and the hopelessness they felt in the face of Stalinist repression. That was a tragic chapter in human history.

We have an important issue to deal with and we have to do so with great seriousness. That is why we support this bill in principle. As my colleague from Toronto Centre said earlier, this is a golden opportunity to hear about this issue from specialists, to study the causes of this great famine and to take a stand on this issue.

Nevertheless, we have some reservations about the term “genocide” used in the bill, not for political reasons, but for semantic reasons. Earlier, my colleague across the floor gave a presentation regarding the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Two criteria are important in recognizing a genocide. First of all, a distinction must be made between a crime against humanity and genocide. The consequences are similar. However, upon researching the matter internationally, it appears that the term genocide has not yet been recognized by Canada when it comes to what happened in Ukraine. In a moment, I will state the positions of various countries. Second, to acknowledge a genocide, there must be an explicit intent to eliminate a group for the mere fact that it exists. In Russia, other groups within the territory were also the targets of this famine. Of course, historians agree on the existence of the great famine, but where they do not agree is on the qualifier, that is, whether it was a crime against humanity or a genocide. In committee, members will be able to hear from witnesses and reach a conclusion.

As I was saying earlier, the famine affected all ethnic groups, including Russians living in Ukraine. There were also other famines elsewhere in the USSR, for instance, in Kazakhstan.

Historians are currently analyzing and studying existing documents and others more recently discovered. The famine resulted from grain quotas imposed. Later, I will also point out some historical factors, such as the context of the times, the collectivization of the land, which was a strategy that was used, and the issue of Ukraine's independence, which seemed to be at the core of this issue.

The famine came about because Moscow wanted to industrialize the USSR as quickly as possible by maximizing grain sales to other countries. Historical facts show that if that industrialization had occurred over several years, there would probably not have been as many deaths. Stalin was afraid of losing Ukraine to Poland. The Ukrainian resistance became stronger near the Polish border.

There are facts that must also be examined at this point.

These elements lead us to question the thesis of genocide as an explanation of the great famine, if we go by the definition in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This must not prevent acknowledgement of the tragedy that occurred.

The Bloc Québécois denounces and condemns in the harshest terms the actions of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine. This is why we would like to address the issue in greater depth in committee, in order to be able to hear from experts as to whether or not it was genocide.

As far as recent developments are concerned, Canada has never recognized the great Ukrainian famine as genocide. If adopted, this bill will have the effect of Canada's de facto recognition that there was indeed genocide in Ukraine. I thank the hon. member for giving us the opportunity to research this matter in greater depth in parliamentary committee.

The question of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 was considered a state secret in the USSR. It was officially recognized for the first time in December 1987 by Volodymyr Shcherbitsky, party president in Ukraine. On November 26, 1998, a presidential decree set the fourth Saturday in November as the national day of commemoration of this collective atrocity. There is no mention of genocide.

During debate in the Ukrainian parliament, there was not necessarily support; there was a majority. Here are the results of the voting: 226 of the 450 members, or 50.2%, voted in favour of recognition of genocide. This matter was therefore decided by the Ukrainian parliament, but there was not a large majority.

According to public opinion polls, however, held at the same time, 70% of the population recognized that this was genocide. So we can see that at the present time there is an imbalance in the perception of whether or not this was genocide.

Russia was against recognition of the great famine as genocide, saying that the Ukrainians were not specifically targeted. In 2003, the Canadian Senate passed a resolution calling upon the federal government to recognize the Ukrainian famine as genocide. On October 20, 2003, the United States House of Representatives recognized the famine of 1932-33 as a man-made famine. The resolution makes no mention at all of genocide.

To mark the 70th anniversary of the great famine, the Ukrainian ambassador to the UN circulated a declaration co-signed by 26 states, including Canada, the US and Russia. This resolution was about recognizing a national tragedy, but made no mention of genocide.

On November 25, 2005, Ukrainian President Yushchenko called on the international community to recognize the great famine as an act of genocide committed by the Soviet regime. In 2006, the Ukrainian parliament voted again, this time favourably with a vote of 51.7%. In April, a Russian author denounced the movement to recognize the Ukrainian famine as an act of genocide. This author received the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature for condemning Soviet Gulag camps. He is a Russian who ordinarily would probably have shown solidarity with the Ukrainians.

While in Bucharest for the NATO summit on April 2, the Minister of Foreign Affairs confirmed that the federal government had not made a decision about recognizing the Ukrainian famine as genocide. This is an important political issue with significant consequences. However, in terms of recognizing the genocide, I believe that efforts could certainly be made in committee to shed light on this historical event.

At present, there is no consensus. However, there is agreement that this crime could be considered a crime against humanity. Since we know that the Soviets played a role in the famine that resulted in the death of several million people, there is no question that it represents a crime against humanity. I will stop here as my time is up.

[Judy Wasylycia-Leis, NDP, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour for me to speak to this private member's bill, Bill C-459, which provides a means by which Parliament can formally recognize the Ukrainian famine as a genocide and to declare a special day for its commemoration.

I do not believe there is a soul in the House who disagrees with this private member's bill. My colleague from Parkdale—High Park is one among many in my caucus, dare I say all in my caucus, who believes that this bill ought to be supported. I am sure, having listened to members all around the House, that it is unanimously supported.

The question I have today is, why is it taking so long? Why has this become a political football in this chamber? Why do we not, by unanimous consent, consider all stages of this bill and adopt it here and now on the spot? That would be doing a great service to Ukrainian Canadians who have been fighting for this recognition for many years, certainly for as long as I have been in this place. I can recall that this discussion was before the House 13 years ago. There have been motions repeatedly over the course of the last decade. Yet for some reason we cannot seem to get the government of the day and all parties to give unanimous consent and see this as done. We do that from time to time. There is an ability in this place to compromise and collaborate and cooperate. We did it with respect to a bill I first introduced to recognize a national day of commemoration for the Holocaust. That bill was an idea that was grabbed on to by others and soon was adopted by the House. We could do the same here.

I am wondering why we have to go through another long debate and a rigorous process when in fact the House is in full agreement. Also, there is the precedent of the Senate, the other House, having passed a similar motion. There is no need for this to be delayed. There is no need for more procrastination. Let us just do it. Or am I missing something? Is there something that the member on the government side is not saying? Why has the government of the day not brought this forward as a motion and asked all members in the House to adopt it? What is there a delay?

I have read in the newspapers that the Ukrainian Canadian community has had meetings with the Prime Minister. The Ukrainian News back in December of 2007 said there was a meeting with the Prime Minister about this issue. The Ukrainian community was hoping that the Prime Minister would say yes, let us do it. Obviously he did not. According to this newspaper article, the Prime Minister felt that the government still had to do a little more homework at its end. What homework? What more is needed?

This is self-evident. The facts are in. There is no question that almost 10 million Ukrainians were killed as a result of a deliberate famine and genocide. That is a given. No one quibbles with the facts. Certainly all my colleagues in the New Democratic Party recognize this fact and are appalled by this chapter in history that saw the death and slaughter of so many innocent people because the Stalinist Communist regime wanted to put an end to the Ukrainian spirit that we hold so dear in our hearts in Canada and are so proud of.

Some of us of Ukrainian descent will never stop talking about the importance of recognizing this chapter in our history as a serious crime against humanity that must be remembered. We must remember so that we stop history from repeating itself. As other colleagues in the House have pointed out this afternoon, we live in an era where it is not impossible to see whole races of people being wiped out because of a desire to exterminate and practise genocide against a particular race of people in our society.

We have to remember and we have to act quickly. Manitoba passed such a bill over a year ago, setting aside November 26 as a day of remembrance for recognition of the Ukrainian famine and genocide. We ought to have done this by now here in the House. We should have set the stage. We should have been leading the way for Canadians to have this as a national day of commemoration.

My main question today is this: what is the delay?

Why are we taking so long? How can we speed up this process? How can we ensure that the campaign, the diligence and the commitment of the Ukrainian Canadian population over the years to have this day recognized in the books of this place and the history books of the nation make this happen immediately? How can we make sure that we do it before so many of the survivors of the Ukrainian famine actually pass on without having seen this day of commemoration?

We ought to do this immediately. It means saying out loud that the Ukrainian famine was a genocide. That is the first step.

Second, it means setting aside a special day for all in this country to remember what happened to Ukrainians back in 1932 and 1933.

Third, through our actions today, it is a reminder and a way of ensuring that this whole tragic chapter in our history is remembered and taught to future generations so they have an understanding of what happened and of how we can prevent similar genocides from happening in the future.

Finally, it is a moment when we actually say to the survivors that the pain they went through, the horrors they had to experience and witness, and the loss of so many of their relatives because of this deliberate famine, are important, and we want to acknowledge their pain and suffering and share that with all in our society so that we make a real difference in the end.

As others have mentioned, the international recognition flame passed through Winnipeg recently, as it has passed through so many other cities and villages across this country. That was just last week. It was remarkable to see the survivors still coming out, as they have done year after year for similar ceremonies, and to see the hope in their eyes that finally Parliament might do something. It is hard to describe here in the chamber, but there is an anticipation and an impatience among Ukrainian Canadians to see this done and to see it done right and done immediately.

Let us not forget why we are here. Let us not forget our obligation to keep alive the flame so that others can learn from the pain of the past. Let us not ever forget the fighting spirit of Ukrainians around the world and the contribution that Ukrainian Canadians have made to this country, because they brought that fighting spirit here to help pioneer and build this nation. They have made an incredible difference economically, socially, culturally and spiritually.

It is time that we paid tribute to that contribution by recognizing a chapter in the history of this world when Ukrainians were treated as less than second class citizens. It is time that we honoured those pioneers and those Ukrainian Canadians who continue to make a difference in this country. Let us get on with it, I say. Can we not find room to move on this immediately? Can we not make it happen so that not another day has to pass before the House recognizes a national day of commemoration for the victims of the Ukrainian famine and genocide?

Duzhe dyakuyu.

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, today we are considering Bill C-459, which calls on the Parliament of Canada to recognize the victims of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 by establishing a Ukrainian famine and genocide memorial day and, furthermore, to declare the famine an act of genocide.

As many Canadians are aware, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the holodomor, an artificial famine created by policies promoting the brutal forced collectivization of agriculture throughout the Soviet Union. The famine affected Kazakhstan, parts of Russia and the Volga German Republic, but was most markedly felt in the Ukraine.

We may never know how many people died from starvation during the great famine in Ukraine. The Commission on the Ukraine Famine, created by the United States Congress, published the results of its research in 1990. The commission's findings, along with research undertaken by Ukrainian scholars in the 1980s, suggest that the number of victims in Ukraine alone--80% of the total victims of the famine--was 4.5 million to 5 million, approximately 15% of Ukraine's population at the time. Some may consider these numbers to be conservative. Ultimately, as many as 10 million deaths in Ukraine during the 1930s may be attributable to the famine.

How is it that this horrific famine occurred in Ukraine, which at least until the breakout of World War I was known as the breadbasket of Europe?

In the decade following the Russian revolution of 1917, Soviet policies were systematically aimed at the elimination of the better off farmers, the vast majority of whom, by Canadian standards, had only modest holdings. Beginning in 1927, increasingly harsh measures were taken against them. By 1930, nearly 250,000 Ukrainians were forcibly deported to Central Asia, Serbia and the Soviet Far East. Unfortunately, many perished in the process.

In spite of the elimination of those thought most likely to oppose collectivization, the Soviet policy of forcibly creating large state-run farms, the majority of farmers in Soviet Ukraine continued to resist. Between 1929 and 1931, an estimated 10,000 party functionaries worked throughout rural areas in Soviet Ukraine expropriating property and livestock, coercing individuals into collective farms, and confiscating grain and eventually all other foodstuffs, including seed stocks.

Agricultural work understandably suffered greatly. Starting in 1931, harvests in the Soviet Ukraine became notably smaller. However, the central government's quota for deliveries did not decrease. By the spring of 1932, famine arrived in Ukrainian villages. By 1933, starvation became the norm in rural Soviet Ukraine.

Soviet officials not only denied the famine but continued to export grain abroad. Furthermore, unlike the famine of 1921-22, outside aid was not sought and indeed was turned away when offered. Some western governments and other observers and journalists, notably Walter Durante of The New York Times, also denied the existence of the famine. It is ironic that Durante was awarded a Pulitzer prize in 1932 for his reporting on the Soviet Union.

While the Soviet Union still existed, Ukrainians were not allowed to openly discuss the events of the 1930s. The Soviets even tried to paint western scholarship documenting the atrocities as propaganda. The suffering during the great famine, however, could not be erased from the collective memory of the Ukrainian nation. Allow me to quote from Robert Conquest, the noted scholar and chronicler of the great famine:

The Soviet assault on the peasantry and on the Ukrainian nation, in 1930-1933, was one of the largest and most devastating events in modern history. It was a tremendous human tragedy--with many more dead than in all countries together in World War I. It was a major economic disaster...[with] hideous consequences.

In Canada, the Ukrainian Canadian community of more than one million citizens was among the first to recognize the need to bring the great famine to the world's attention. Accordingly, Ukrainian Canadians have been at the forefront in ensuring that the famine is recognized for the terrible suffering it brought to Ukrainians. It brought devastation upon the countryside and Ukrainian agriculture, and ultimately it must not be forgotten by future generations.

In Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Windsor, the Ukrainian Canadian community has erected memorials to honour the victims. In November 2007, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress began a year of commemorative events to mark the 75th anniversary of the great famine, to bring the victims' suffering to the attention of all Canadians and to help prevent similar tragedies in the future.

As is well known, Canada has close bilateral relations with Ukraine. In recognition of this fact and to underscore our abhorrence of this calamity, Canada also co-sponsored a resolution, adopted at the 2007 UNESCO general conference in Paris, expressing sympathy to the victims of the famine and calling upon member states to consider promoting awareness of the great famine through educational and research programs.

Canada further co-sponsored a ministerial declaration on the 25th anniversary of the famine at the 2007 Ministerial Meeting of the OSCE in Madrid, which underlined the “importance of raising public awareness of the tragic events...of promoting tolerance and non-discrimination, of strengthening the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for prevention of [similar] human tragedies in the future”.

On November 28, 2007, the Prime Minister, at a commemoration ceremony on Parliament Hill, spoke of the famine as the result of Stalin's despotism and squarely laid the responsibility for the tragedy on his brutal policies. In his statement, the Prime Minister honoured those Ukrainians who suffered horribly during collectivization, noting that the result of the collectivization was:

--one of the worst famines the world has ever known, millions of men, women and children--mostly Ukrainian, but also some Kazakhs and Russians--died of starvation. Those who refused to yield were slaughtered.

The Prime Minister went on to say:

We in Canada are bonded to this dark chapter in human history by more than a million Canadians of Ukrainian descent, many of whom lost loved ones in the Holodomor. And so, all Canadians join us in commemorating this 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33.

Our government supports the efforts to remember the victims of the great famine and the reasons behind their deaths as a way to prevent history from repeating itself. We believe that the famine of 1932-33 was a great tragedy which claimed millions of lives in the former Soviet Union, most notably in Ukraine. Canada believes that commemorating this event is one way to ensure that such tragedy does not occur again.

The bill before us seeks to recognize and honour the victims of the great famine. The government concurs wholeheartedly with the need for recognition of the victims and the commemoration of their suffering, to understand the reasons behind this tragedy. Not forgetting the horrors of the great famine is among the best memorials we can give its victims. Remembrance is a living memorial to the victims and their loss of life, human rights and dignity.

The member for Toronto Centre correctly observed the fact that there have indeed been a tremendous number of these events. Our government is working diligently with the Ukrainian community to bring this to a proper, correct conclusion.

[The Acting Speaker, Conservative, Andrew Scheer]

The time provided for the consideration of private members' business has now expired and the order is dropped to the bottom of the order of precedence on the order paper.

The House resumed from April 29, consideration of the motion that Bill C-459, An Act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide, be read the second time and referred to a committee.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we have just emerged from a century which was the most tragic in the history of humanity. The 20th century will be remembered as a century characterized by multiple descents into hatreds, xenophobias and totalitarianisms which led humanity into the abyss of wars, famines and genocides.

November 2007 through to November 2008 is the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine genocide of Ukraine's rural population in 1932-33. During this Holodomor, millions, perhaps as many as seven to ten million, were starved to death in the bread basket of Europe.

As a Canadian of Ukrainian descent, I am humbled to speak to Bill C-459, An Act to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide. I am humbled, for I do not believe that I, or any of our hon. members, have the capacity to adequately describe the horrors of this genocide. Perhaps eye witness accounts best recollect this descent into hell.

Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet official who later escaped from the Soviet Embassy in the United States in 1944, wrote in his book, I Chose Freedom:

What I saw that morning...was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back.... Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his own home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables.

Another eyewitness documented that:

To safeguard the 1932 crop against the starving farmers...watchtowers were erected in and around the wheat, potato and vegetable fields...the same kind of towers that can be seen in prisons. They were manned by guards armed with shotguns. Many a starving farmer who was seen foraging for food near or inside the fields, fell victim to trigger-happy youthful vigilantes and guards.

The American traveller, Carveth Wells, who was in Ukraine in July 1932, described the early stages of the Holodomor and the “sight of small children with stomachs enormously distended” in his book, Kapoot:

We ourselves happened to be passing through the Ukraine and the Caucasus in the very midst of the famine in July, 1932. From the train windows children could be seen eating grass.

Another witness wrote:

The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood. Everywhere we found men and women lying prone (weak from hunger), their faces and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless.

Zina, a small village girl, in a letter to her city-dwelling uncle, pleadingly wrote:

We have neither bread nor anything else to eat. Dad is completely exhausted from hunger and is lying on the bench, unable to get on this feet. Mother is blind from the hunger and cannot see in the least. So I have to guide her when she has to go outside. Please Uncle, do take me to Kharkiv, because I, too, will die from hunger. Please do take me, please. I'm still young and I want so much to live a while. Here I will surely die, for everyone else is dying....

The uncle received the letter at the same time that he was told of her death. He said:

I did not know what to say or what to do. My head just pounded with my niece's pathetic plea: “I'm still young and want so much to live....Please do take me, please....”

As the famine raged, Ukraine's lush countryside was denuded of its leaves and grasses as people ate anything that grew. In this denuded grey landscape, one by one, hundred after hundred, thousand after thousand, million after million lay down their skin and bones onto Ukraine's fertile black soils, life extinguished.

Stalin's march towards his communist, imperialist vision was fed by the corpses of millions, and the appeasement of world leaders unwilling to face down evil.

As millions starved, the Soviet Union exported grains from these fertile lands to the west; a west which, apart from a handful of brave politicians and journalists, turned its gaze away while eating the bounty, the bread of these starving lands.

As former Soviet official Kravchenko wrote:

Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter being sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart.... I could only hear the groans of the dying, and the lip-smacking of fat foreigners enjoying our butter....

A half century has passed since Stalin's death and his evil empire has been consigned to the history books of humanity's tragic 20th century.

As far back as UN General Assembly Resolution 96(1) of December 11, 1946, we can list international resolutions, decade after decade, condemning crimes against humanity and genocides.

Yet the Rwandan genocide took place before our eyes. All of our resolutions are nothing more than fine sounding rhetoric unless each and every one of us makes a pledge to act when hatred, conflict or crimes against our fellow human beings occur.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it, is a saying we often mention. Nonetheless, today we are witnessing attempts at a genocide by attrition, a famine genocide in Darfur.

As elected representatives in a country with over 1.2 million citizens of Ukrainian ancestry, a common ancestry with those millions starved to death through a genocide by attrition, we cannot allow ourselves to forget humanity's common tragedies, and we must acknowledge our culpability when we do not act when facing evil; all the more so, as Canada is the country which, at the dawn of the 21st century, gave birth to the concept of the responsibility to protect at the United Nations World Summit in 2005.

Canada and Canadians have the ability to shine a light into the dark corners of the globe into countries such as Sudan, Burma and Zimbabwe, where tribal and blood hatreds lead to ethnic cleansings.

We have the capacity to be a shield for the defenceless and the innocent who today echo little Zina's plea, “Please, I'm still young and I want so much to live a while”.

Here in Canada's House of Commons, on the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine genocide of Ukrainians, let us pledge to ourselves and to those Canadians who have placed their trust in our leadership two simple words, never again.

[Member spoke in Ukrainian]

Mr. Speaker, discussions have taken place this afternoon among all parties and in the spirit of those two words, never again--

[Member spoke in Ukrainian]

--at the end of today's debate, there will be an unusual display of goodwill among all parties and respect for the millions who perished. There will be agreement on amendments to the Holodomor famine genocide bill which will allow its passage at all stages so it can be sent to the Senate.

[Member spoke in Ukrainian]

[Bernard Bigras, Bloc, Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased, but at the same time very sad, to rise here to speak to Bill C-459. The purpose of the bill is to establish a Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day and to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide.

I would first like to thank the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake for introducing Bill C-459.

I would like to say that it was an honour for the members of the Bloc Québécois to welcome Viktor Yushchenko, the President of Ukraine, here in the House yesterday. In recent years, he has helped Ukraine become freer, more democratic and more open to the rest of the world. Thus, as citizens of the world, Ukrainians can now participate in community life while respecting individual rights.

Of course, the Ukrainian president was here yesterday in order to promote good relations between Canada and Ukraine, but I also remember the hundreds of Ukrainians gathered yesterday in front of Parliament, near the flame, to commemorate this 75th anniversary of the Holodomor.

We should not be afraid to talk about it, since between 4 million and 10 million Ukrainians lost their lives in that famine, the most important scourge ever to hit Soviet Ukraine at the time. It began in the early 1930s and hit its crisis point in 1933. It was an artificial famine, not the kind of famine we usually hear about following a natural disaster, a drought or a plague of grasshoppers, which are common enough. No, it was a forced famine, artificially created by the communist regime at the time, Joseph Stalin's regime.

Joseph Stalin's regime used unacceptable measures, measures that we have a hard time grasping today, to starve a population, a nation state that had the right to live a national existence, a distinct population that deserved to be recognized. The tactics that regime used, when it confiscated the essential food supplies needed by the populace, must now be denounced in this House.

Grains and food stored in central warehouses were confiscated, shipped directly to Russia and then exported to Europe in order to sustain Joseph Stalin's revolution. This organized, artificial famine put in place by the Soviet regime had major consequences. I will say it again: between four and ten million Ukrainians died. It was essentially a crime against humanity.

We should review some of the history.

First, there have always been colonial links between Ukraine and Russia. Furthermore, at the time, Moscow refused to recognize Ukrainians as a distinct people, a people with the right to an independent nation.

Second, in the 20th century, Ukraine declared its independence six times and lost it five times. The 1918 proclamation of independence was ripped up by the Red Army when it decided to invade Ukraine and return it to the Russian fold. After doing everything to not recognize that Ukraine was made up of a distinct people with the right to independence, they used force to take away its independence.

Third, every expression of national Ukrainian character was perceived by Moscow as the rejection of Bolshevik power and a threat to the Soviet empire.

We have to take these historical facts into account in our analysis of Bill C-459. The famine of the 1930s illustrates Russia's colonial policy toward the Ukraine. That way of doing things, that policy, was neither more nor less than an act to destroy part of a national group. The goal was clear. Russia wanted to take everything away from Ukrainian peasants and take the Ukrainian nation by force through “dekulakization”; to uproot hundreds of thousands of richer peasants and evict them from their homes; to take everything away from those who were the lifeblood of the Ukrainian nation and deport them; and to exile the Ukrainian intellectual elite in order to prevent them from organizing.

The first step was “dekulakization”. Next, Russia collectivized agriculture in Ukraine, confiscating all farm assets and harvests, and storing and centralizing them as they saw fit without taking the people's needs into account. Is there anything more essential to farmers than farming? After getting rid of the peasants who were Ukraine's strength, Russia confiscated all of their goods, transported the goods to Russia and exported them.

Senior communist party officials considered Ukrainian peasants opposed to collectivization to be enemies and sought to eliminate them. Therefore, the Bloc Québécois is very pleased to stand with Ukrainians in supporting this bill.

[Alex Atamanenko, NDP, British Columbia Southern Interior, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour for me today to rise to speak to Bill C-459. I would like to thank the hon. member for Selkirk—Interlake for tabling this very important piece of legislation and also for inviting me to second it. My party and I will be supporting all of the amendments, so hopefully we can get the bill passed in the spirit of cooperation today.

The bill as re-introduced today coincides with the visit by President Yushchenko yesterday. It was an honour for me to be here, as it was for others, and to listen to him. It is because of him and many others in Ukraine that the Orange Revolution was a success.

I have relatives who camped out many nights in Kiev in the hope that finally their country would achieve independence. It was moving to watch and to listen to the speeches yesterday at the flame ceremony commemorating the victims of the Holodomor, this forced famine and act of genocide.

For me it is a very moving time, because I have a personal stake in this. My family also suffered at the hands of Stalin and the ruthless communist regime.

As we know, research has stated that since 1917 millions of people were starved, executed or worked to death by this brutal Soviet regime. The Russian author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn puts that number at around 60 million people. It is hard to imagine all those citizens of the former Soviet Union executed because of this brutal regime.

My family has suffered. My grandfather was a Russian Orthodox priest in the Far East who was taken away and executed. As a girl 10 years old, my mother had to go onto the frozen Amur River to try to find his body before she and her mother and siblings had to flee. Otherwise, they would have been on the hit list. My father was born in Ukraine. He fought in the civil war against the communists, the Bolsheviks, and was evacuated from the Crimea along with General Wrangel.

I first visited Ukraine in 1971. I remember relatives telling me of the horrors, my cousin especially, who experienced going from village to village trying to stay away from the hit squads and seeing big caravans of trucks going by the road. The flaps would go up and he would see piled up, row upon row, the dead bodies of those who suffered during this forced famine.

This is one of the tragedies in the history of humankind that is very hard for us to imagine. Before I go on to describe what has taken place, I would like to mention that there are those today, and I know there are in the Russian government, who do not want to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide and who want to wrap all this in as other unfortunate people who were executed or liquidated.

I would like to point out that this tragedy was engineered in Moscow. Certainly it was the Soviet Union that suffered, but the tragedy was engineered by the Soviet government, by Stalin, from Moscow, and part of this human tragedy that took place did take place in Ukraine. That was the forced famine to forcibly starve people to death. That is genocide.

I would like to implore the Russian people and their government, in the spirit of solidarity, to recognize that and to move on. Let us move forward and let us ensure that it never ever happens again.

Stalin decided to eliminate Ukraine's independent farmers for three reasons. My grandfather was an independent farmer in Ukraine. I had a chance to visit the old homestead in 1971. He was one of them. They represented the last bulwark of resistance to totalitarian Russian control.

The U.S.S.R. was in desperate need of foreign capital to build more factories. The best way to obtain that capital was to increase agriculture exports from Ukraine, once known as the breadbasket of Europe. The Soviet Union confiscated wheat from the Ukrainians, starving them to death, and at the same time exported the wheat to other parts of the world.

The fastest way to increase agricultural exports was to expropriate land through a process of farm collectivization and to assign procurement quotas to each Soviet republic. It is hard to believe, for example, that anyone caught hoarding food was subjected to execution as an enemy of the people or, in extenuating circumstances, imprisonment for not less than 10 years. My Aunt Lusha spent 10 years in a Soviet labour camp because she wanted food to feed her family.

To make sure that these new laws were strictly enforced, special commissions and brigades were dispatched to the countryside. In the words of one Sovietologist:

The work of these special “commissions” and “brigades” was marked with the utmost severity. They entered the villages and made most thorough searches of the houses and barns of every peasant. They dug up the earth and broke into the walls of buildings and stoves in which peasants tried to hide their last handfuls of food. They even in places took specimens of fecal matter from the toilets in an effort to learn by analysis whether the peasants had stolen government property and were eating grain.

Stalin succeeded in achieving his goals. The horrors go on and on if we look at those war years. I have just had a chance to see a film put out by the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, entitled Between Hitler and Stalin: Ukraine in World War II.

During the war, people in the Ukraine were faced with two evils. Many of them wanted to fight on the side of the Germans in the hope that they could liberate their country from Stalin. All in all, there were something like two million people from various ethnic groups and nationalities in the Soviet Union who were united and ready to march into the Soviet Union with the German army under a Russian general, but the Germans did not allow this to happen. Can anyone imagine people being forced to go with the enemy to liberate their own country?

We have seen many atrocities in history. Often we equate atrocities with fascism. We equate them with the repressive dictatorships that we have seen in various Latin American countries and Asia, but we often slide over this horrible tragedy that took place in the Soviet Union, starting in 1917 and not finishing until the repressive communist regime finally ended.

Part of this tragedy is this forced famine. It is important for us to remember this so that it never happens again. I would like to say to my fellow Canadians, especially those of Ukrainian descent, that as we commemorate this tragedy we have hope for Ukraine and for the future, thanks to people like President Yushchenko and the million or more Ukrainians here in Canada and throughout the world who support Ukraine finally becoming an independent country that will find its way in the world. There are problems, but I have been to Ukraine as recently as two years ago and I have faith and hope in the Ukrainian people.

Once again, it is an honour for me to speak today. My party and I will be supporting this bill and the amendments.

[Joy Smith, Conservative, Kildonan—St. Paul, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of Bill C-459, which would formally commemorate the victims of Ukraine's great famine of 1932-33, the Holodomor, by establishing a memorial day and recognizing this tragedy as an act of genocide.

Yesterday, the Secretary of State for Canadian Identity recognized, on behalf of the Government of Canada, the Holodomor is a genocide. I thank him for the dedication he has shown to ensuring that the crimes of the far left are not whitewashed over by history.

Commemoration of the Holodomor focuses on freedom and human rights, themes important to all Canadians. We owe it to the millions of victims of the Holodomor and to our children and grandchildren to shine a bright light on this terrible event.

As our Prime Minister said last November during the commemoration ceremony for the victims of the famine, “remembering those who died, and why they died, is our best hope against history repeating itself”.

The Canadian people have long recognized that the great famine was a terrible human tragedy. It was a time when food, a basic necessity for life, was used as a weapon in the pursuit of ideological views and goals, with whole villages in rural Ukraine dying by way of slow and painful starvation. Millions of Ukrainians lost their lives as a result of the policies of the Communist regime of Joseph Stalin, designed to punish those who had opposed the forced collectivization program of the 1930s.

The year 2008 marks the 75th anniversary of the great famine and it is fitting that we rise today to support its remembrance. This is all the more important when we reflect back on the efforts to hide what was occurring. While millions starved to death, the government of the Soviet Union claimed to the world that there was no famine, refusing offers of aid from international relief organizations and continuing with exports of grain to the west.

Many western journalists, including Walter Duranty of The New York Times, and the Fabian socialist intellectual, George Bernard Shaw, denied the famine and blamed the stories on anti-communist hysteria. Even today, those who oppose recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide make the same accusations of excessive anti-communism. It is not possible to be excessively antagonistic toward communism.

Eyewitnesses, like Malcolm Muggeridge, whose son, the late John Muggeridge, settled in Canada, and whose grandchildren and great-grandchildren are proud Canadians, was one of the few who told the truth. He wrote:

The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering,

Finally, in 1990 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine issued a statement admitting that the famine had been a man-made creation of Stalin's socialist regime.

In recognizing the Holodomor, we do not in any way detract from the heinousness of other crimes against humanity, such as the Shoah against the Jewish people in which six million Jews were murdered under the ideological and racial imperatives of national socialism.

No one who lived before 1789 could have conceived of these terrible crimes that have scarred the history of mankind. In that year, of course, the French Revolution introduced the first genocide to modern history with the murder of the king and with the mass execution of 250,000 men, women and children in the Vendée, the region of France that most strongly resisted the revolutionary terror. Thus began the history of regicide and genocide that was repeated on an even more terrible scale in the 20th century by the creeds of national socialism and international socialism.

In Canada, our government is embodied in the Crown. When we pass laws, we do so in the name of Her Majesty the Queen in Parliament. This is a very potent symbol of our freedom and independence.

The Crown, which stands for our rights and freedoms as Canadians, for Canadian sovereignty and for our determination to uphold freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, stands as a powerful reminder that Canada was spared the crimes against humanity that afflicted the Ukrainian people and countless other victims. These victims included the Queen's cousin, Czar Nicholas II and his family who were murdered on Lenin's direct order.

Canada has been an active participant in activities of remembrance for the victims of the horrors of the Soviet genocide in Ukraine. The extent of this activity reflects the fact that throughout the long period of Soviet rule in Ukraine, the Canadian government and Canadians of Ukrainian heritage worked together to promote memory of the famine and to ensure that the dream of an independent, democratic and prosperous Ukraine never died. That independence was achieved in 1991.

In the last 10 years, as Soviet archives added to our understanding of what happened under Communist regimes, there has been a renewed interest in commemoration.

On November 7, 2003, to mark the 70th anniversary of the great famine, 25 states, including Canada, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the United States of America, co-sponsored a joint statement within the United Nations General Assembly to officially recognize the great famine as the national tragedy of the Ukrainian people.

This resolution expressed remembrance for the lives of millions of innocent people in 1932-33, and equally the millions of Russians and representatives of other nationalities who died of starvation in the Volga River region, Northern Caucasus, Kazakhstan and in other parts of the former Soviet Union, including the terrible deportation of the nationalities to Siberia.

More recently, on November 30, 2007, a joint statement was issued by 32 participating states, including Canada, under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to mark the beginning of the 75th anniversary of the great famine of 1932-33. This statement paid tribute to the memory of the victims of this national tragedy of the Ukrainian people. It also underlined the importance of raising public awareness of the tragic events of our common past.

Establishing a memorial day to honour the memory of those who perished in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Union in 1932 and 1933 is part of this process of reconciliation and healing.

The Ukrainian Canadian community of more than one million citizens was among the first to recognize the need to bring the great famine to the world's attention. Accordingly, Ukrainian Canadians have been at the forefront in ensuring that the famine is recognized for the terrible suffering it brought. The Ukrainian Canadian community has erected memorials to honour Holodomor victims in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg and Windsor.

In light of the special kinship that exists between Canada and Ukraine, the Canadian government recognizes that after decades of suppression and denial, Ukrainians and Ukrainian Canadians want to make symbolic expiation for the dignity that was denied in life to those victims of communism.

I am therefore pleased to support the objective of establishing a day of remembrance as proposed in Bill C-459.

Remembrance is a living memorial to the victims, their loss of life, human rights and dignity, and a tribute to the fact that sometimes, in some places, truth prevails over darkness and denial.