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”.

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.

Ukrainian Famine and Genocide Memorial Day Act

[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.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great honour to rise and 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 have many Ukrainian people in my constituency in places like Estevan, Weyburn and Bienfait, as does the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle. We have many Ukrainian people in Ituna and Wishart, and in many towns, villages and cities in the province of Saskatchewan represented by many of our MPs.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1990, there has been a growing awareness of the incredible extent of the crimes against humanity and the harsh consequences of communism. It has been denied in the west for so many years by academics and journalists who believed in the moral equivalence of east and west.

Light has been shone into Soviet archives that have been closed for decades and we now know more than ever about the crimes against humanity that occurred during the period when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled over an empire that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Sea of Japan.

One of the most horrendous of these crimes against humanity was the Stalinist genocide against the Ukrainians in 1932-33, known as the Holodomor, the great hunger or the Soviet terror famine. This strike against the culture, identity and the very lives of the people of Ukraine remains to this day a cornerstone of the collective memory of the Ukrainian people and of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada.

Unfortunately, this great human catastrophe remains largely unknown to most non-Ukrainians as well as to some Ukrainians. It is necessary, therefore, to take steps to raise awareness and to shine a light on what the Prime Minister has described as “a dark chapter in human history”. That is why it is so important to have a debate as we are having in the House today, and to have the International Remembrance Flame travelling to some 33 countries to tell the story of this tragedy and to honour the victims.

It also was important to have the President of Ukraine visit this House and address, not only members of the House but also the Senate, dignitaries, diplomats and a full visitors gallery, to speak to the facts of what occurred and to speak openly about those facts and the prospects for Ukraine.

While standing on the steps leading to the Centre Block is something that I will remember and count as one of the highlights of my career as a politician. I think it is important that people know what happened, that the tragic deaths of several million men, women and children does not go unnoticed, and that those deaths in Ukraine by starvation, in a nation that was the breadbasket of Europe, needs to exposed. The facts need to be brought to the consciousness of all communities and nations, never to be forgotten.

I personally had the opportunity to read portions of the book entitled, Ukraine A History, by Orest Subtelny, Third Edition, 2000. I will paraphrase portions of it to sort of bring the reality to the ground, so to speak, of this great tragedy.

“Lacking bread”, he said, “peasants ate pets, rats, bark, leaves”. I add here on my own that they were relegated to do unspeakable things. He goes on to say that “the first who died were the men, later on the children and last of all the women, but before they died people often lost their senses”.

He quotes from a writer, Victor Kravchenko, who makes a fair point. He says:

On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause.

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

The central fact about the famine is that it did not need to happen. Food was available. However, it was systematically confiscated. Any man, woman or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a government silo or a collective farm field could be, and often was, executed. Even those already swollen from malnutrition were not allowed to keep their grain.

As the Ukrainian Canadian Congress stated in its literature, the region was also isolated by armed units so that people could not exit to search for food. This at a time where, it stated, the Soviet regime dumped 1.7 million tonnes of grain on the western markets at the height of the Holodomor. It stated that at the height of the Holodomor people in Ukrainian villages were dying at the rate of 25,000 per day, 1,000 per hour, or 17 per minute. It stated that the Soviet government refused to acknowledge to the international community the starvation in Ukraine and turned down the assistance offered by various countries and international relief agencies, including the International Committee of the Red Cross. What happened was not reported appropriately, or not reported at all, in the press. In fact, information was suppressed.

What was done was done, so to speak, in a corner, without the greater world and humanity's eye on it. That is why it is so important that it be revealed to many. It was a time where millions perished in the terrible famine orchestrated by Stalin in the pursuit of evil ideology.

As reported by Campbell Clark, in today's Ottawa Citizen:

Mr. Yushchenko stated “In this brutal, inhumane way, the Communist authorities were trying to deal a mortal blow to the very foundation and heart of our nation, to the peasants and farmers, and thus eliminate the future possibility of reviving and growing as an independent Ukraine”.

President Yushchenko also stated in this House:

First, and probably most important, Ukraine is a country of full democracy. The leading international organizations recognize Ukraine as a free democratic state.

The breaking point for this was the Orange Revolution in 2004. It witnessed the maturity of the Ukrainian nation, which in critical times stood up for its independence and for fundamental human rights and freedoms.

The Orange Revolution awoke our society and made irreversible and positive changes in human minds. Ukrainians believed in their own strengths and in their [own] ability to stand up for their rights and for their own destiny.

In my mind, he symbolized and personified the fact that despite the best strike of the enemy, good can, and does, prevail.

As I previously quoted from Orest Subtelny, who said, “[Ukraine suffered] a tragedy of unfathomable proportions, it traumatized the nation, leaving it with deep social, psychological, political, and demographic scars that it carries to this day.”

The president bears the marks on his body at the attempt made to strike at the very heart of his being. So does the nation of Ukraine.

What Stalin attempted was to break the will of a people, but could not. The nation still walks today, to be a free and democratic nation, albeit bearing the scars and with a limp; however, with a resolve and a character that has risen to the occasion. A resolve that shoulders the responsibility for democracy and freedom with honour and grace to ensure that the freedom endures and that the lives lost are not lost in vain but, rather, that those lives may be lived through the opportunity that has been bought and paid for, for those of us who remain and those who remain in Ukraine, so that that which was intended for evil may be used to produce much good not only at this time but well into the future.

May it be that not only Ukraine be inspired by bringing these facts to light but that our nation and other nations be inspired to stand with Ukraine, facing the reality of the past and embracing the prospect of a future for Ukraine filled with hope, steady progress, and where there was once lack, prosperity and overabundance.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Resuming debate. As there is no other member rising, I will recognize the hon. member for Selkirk--Interlake for his five minute right of reply.

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

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank all hon. members of the House who have spoken to this historic bill over the first and second hour of debate.

I especially want to thank the member for Souris—Moose Mountain who moved this bill at first reading. I want to thank the member for British Columbia Southern Interior who seconded this bill at second reading. I want to thank the leadership that the member for Kildonan—St. Paul has shown for the Ukrainian community. I want to thank the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie who also helped in drafting the request for unanimous consent on this bill that I am going to present later. Of course, I want to thank the member for Etobicoke Centre for his hard work on behalf of all Ukrainians and for making sure that we get this done today.

I want to thank the Ukrainian Canadian Congress for its support, the League of Ukrainian Canadians which has quite a large Internet wave of support coming from the Ukrainian community through its website, and also the Canadian Friends of the Ukraine who have been with me right from the start on drafting this legislation.

I also want to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the Right Hon. Prime Minister. His continued leadership on the world stage was evident again yesterday when he hosted a state visit with the President of Ukraine. His devotion to democracy and human rights is always unwavering. His support for the Ukraine on the international stage is appreciated and commendable.

Yesterday, I stood by many Ukrainian Canadians outside this House in memory of the victims of the famine genocide of 1932-33, the Holodomor. They came to watch their homeland president, President Yushchenko, speak to them about the Holodomor.

I want to thank the hon. Secretary of State (Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity) who spoke at that event. He has worked very hard on this issue for over two years now on behalf of the government and, of course, on behalf of Canadian Ukrainians and Ukrainians worldwide. He gave a heartfelt speech yesterday in memory of the victims and I thank him for his thorough understanding of this issue and his support for this bill. I welcome the broad support this has received from all parties and I am truly, truly humbled.

I want to once again put this into modern day context so that people understand the atrocity of this crime. As I described in my previous address, if every single man, woman and child in western Canada were starved to death and all their food taken and thrown across the Prairies, off the farms, out of the grocery stores, out of their shelves and fridges, and thrown into Lake Winnipeg, then we would have an equal type of crime to the same extent that the Ukrainians suffered under the communist regime and the Stalin dictatorship.

When I started studying this issue and I listened to the personal accounts of survivors, I was overwhelmed with the magnitude of this atrocity. The individual pain and suffering that people endured is just simply overwhelming. I cannot stress enough the importance of recognizing the Holodomor now as a genocide even though the west sat silent while this took place. This is an important time for Ukraine, for this Parliament and for Canada.

Discussions have taken place between all parties and I would like to move the following motion. I move:

That, notwithstanding any Standing Order or usual practices of this House, 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 shall be amended as follows:

That Bill C-459 be amended by replacing the long title on page 1 with the following:

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

That Bill C-459, in the Preamble, be amended by replacing line 2 on page 1 with the following:

“ocide of 1932-33 known as the Holodomor was deliberately planned and”

That Bill C-459, in the Preamble, be amended by replacing lines 6, 7 and 8 on page 1, with the following:

“Ukraine, and subsequently caused the death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933”

That Bill C-459, in the Preamble, be amended by adding an additional paragraph after line 8 on page 1 with the following:

“WHEREAS that forced collectivization by the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin also caused the death of millions of other ethnic minorities within the former Soviet Union”.

That Bill C-459, in the Preamble, be amended by replacing line 28 on page 1 with the following:

“Austria, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary,”

That Bill C-459, in the Preamble, be amended by replacing lines 23 to 27 on page 2 with the following:

“WHEREAS Canada, as a party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of December 9, 1948, condemns all genocides;”

That Bill C-459, in clause 1, be amended by replacing line 36 on page 2 with the following:

“Famine and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day Act.”

That Bill C-459, in clause 2, be amended by replacing line 4 on page 3 with the following:

“(“Holodomor”) Memorial Day”.

That Bill C-459, in clause 3, be amended by replacing line 6 on page 3 with the following:

“and Genocide (“Holodomor”) Memorial Day is not a legal”.

following which, Bill C-459 shall be deemed to have been read a second time, referred to a committee of the whole, deemed considered in committee of the whole, deemed reported without amendment, deemed concurred in at report stage, and deemed read a third time and passed.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

Does the hon. member have the unanimous consent of the House to move this motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

The House has heard the terms of the motion. Is it the pleasure of the House to adopt the motion?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Acting Speaker, Andrew Scheer]

(Motion agreed to, bill read the second time, considered in committee of the whole, reported, concurred in, read the third time and passed)