Mr. Chair, I think Mr. Genuis said well why we'll be opposing it. Perhaps I could give a little information, since it's my first time in this committee, about my background.
I'd like to comment on Mr. Zuberi's earlier comment. I am young, too, in terms of being an MP, but perhaps not as young in age as Mr. Zuberi, and I have some familiarity with Mr. Oliphant's riding, having been a constituent of Don Valley West for 10 years in Leaside.
More importantly, I served in the Mulroney government as a member of the political staff for the Honourable Barbara McDougall through four different government departments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs. I was their senior policy adviser and executive assistant while she served in that role for three years from 1991 to 1993. It was a very interesting time in the world, obviously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the coup in Haiti, negotiating NAFTA, unrest and a coup in Peru, the departure of Pinochet in Chile, Nelson Mandela, who has been mentioned earlier, and obviously Tiananmen Square.
With regard to the collapse of the Soviet Union, this is where it ties to Ukraine and the study on Ukraine quite specifically. Canada, as we all know, was the first country to recognize Ukraine as an independent country from the Soviet Union. While I served in my role for Mrs. McDougall in the then named secretary of state for external affairs as the position was called, I can remember.... I don't know how many here remember what they were doing on December 1, 1991. Some in the room might not have even been born, but I recall where I was. I was sitting at my then girlfriend's parents' house in Hawkesbury, Ontario, as we were having a discussion on those old, big Motorola cellphones that we had back then about whether or not to recognize Ukraine, because the Soviet Union formally didn't collapse until between Christmas and New Year's of that year. It was important to us with our long-standing relationship with Ukraine and with the number of Ukrainian Canadians who are very active in Canada, over a million back then and still now, that we recognize Ukraine first and recognize it before the Soviet Union collapsed.
This was a difficult decision. It was not something the department was keen on at the time because the Soviet Union still existed, and recognizing a country within the Soviet Union while it still existed was not the diplomatic thing to do and because Prime Minister Mulroney—as these jobs are when you lead a country—had very close relationships with President Gorbachev. Being the first to acknowledge that a major part of the Soviet Union was no longer part of it was not something that Mr. Gorbachev wanted to see his friend, Prime Minister Mulroney, doing.
We used to take correspondence home for ministers and you know about the many letters ministers get in the big bags. I was sitting there doing that, and I got the call from Privy Council Office saying, “We want to try to work on this.” So I spent the better part of December 1 and December 2, 1991, negotiating back and forth just how and why and what we would say on the recognition of Ukraine.
I say that because at that time we were dealing with a lot of issues around the world that were important, too. We were in the middle of negotiating NAFTA with Mexico and the United States. I had just come back with the minister. We had had a military coup in Haiti against the democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president of Haiti, where we had passed a resolution through the Organization of American States, led by my boss's speech there to impose western hemispheric sanctions on the illegal coup in Haiti. I can remember because we wrote it on the plane going down.