Thank you, Mr. Pacetti, for coming before us. Thank you for answering that last question, because that was an outstanding concern in the New Democratic Party.
Overall, I'm very pleased with this bill. I think it does address an outstanding issue that has to be addressed in order to close a chapter in our history.
I was interested in what you said at the outset about how many of the stories have not been told because of a sense of family shame. I told a story last week, but to me, it's something I've lived with all my life. My grandparents were Scottish and lived in the Italian neighbourhood in Timmins. They knew well what happened to the Italians in the war, and it was something never to be spoken of. Every now and then I'd start to ask questions and I would be told that's not history, we don't talk about that. This was because of the sense of shame.
I started to research it. We talk about having to put these things in context of the times and how people saw things at the time. I did extensive readings of the microfiche of the local newspapers for the 1930s, and the local editorials loved Mussolini. They were always complimenting Mussolini in the local papers, saying here's a guy who's standing up, here's a guy getting something done; here's a guy standing up to those Bolsheviks.
Then they would turn, and the attacks in our community were against people from Finland. There were lots of editorials saying that we should have wholesale deportation of all the rotten Finns because they were communists and they were not loyal Canadians. There was never any mention of the Italians in the 1930s in any of the papers in northern Ontario as being disloyal or a threat to the empire—not until 1940. Suddenly the local papers were calling for the Italians to be subject to the treatment that they had previously wanted the Finns and Ukrainians to receive.
I think it really shows the arbitrary nature of history when we start to suddenly identify people as enemy aliens who had previously been considered loyal. Nobody at the start of the war turned around and said to the editorial boards of all the local papers, you guys have been promoting Mussolini for years, so why aren't you interned? They went from being treated as respectable citizens, and very good Italian community leaders were targeted because of these kinds of newspaper attacks.
I think that what you say is very true. For those families who suffered for it and for those families who were ashamed to even speak about it years later, this heals a wound.
Certainly the New Democratic Party will be supporting this bill. With my colleagues, the only concern was about the identification in number four for restitution to the National Congress of Italian Canadians as the only group identified. We had another group here before us saying that they wanted to be part of that.
Is there language that we could use in the bill that would alleviate the sense that one group is perhaps being brought to the front and not other groups in the Italian-Canadian community?