Procedure and House Affairs Committee on March 21st, 2024

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to drill down a little bit on those lists one more time. Can I get final clarification on whether there were any qualifiers or conditions placed by the PMO on the lists you provided in terms of who could be an invitee?

[Ihor Michalchyshyn]

We were asked to provide community members for an event in Toronto, which we did. There was no reason that anybody who would be a donor or a community volunteer or a participant would be excluded from that kind of list.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Okay. Great.

In terms of that larger disinformation, which we're seeing across the United States in terms of funding for humanitarian aid, we're worried about that here in Canada, absolutely. Can you provide us with any further recommendations? I was really glad to get into that on the funds requested for reconciliation. Do you have any further recommendations you can provide to us today on that broader question of disinformation as we go forward and as part of this study?

[Ihor Michalchyshyn]

Go ahead, Jars.

[Jars Balan]

My understanding is that there is a commission investigating interference in Canadian elections. I think that's a useful discussion to have, because it is going on.

Could you refresh my memory on the first part of your question?

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

It was about what we're seeing unfold in the United States and even here in terms of misinformation and disinformation. I'm glad you brought up the commission on foreign interference as well. I appreciate that.

[Jars Balan]

I would just say that the Jewish community has its hands full right now too with what's going on in the Middle East. I'm sure that this is a distraction in some ways for them too. We all have an interest in making progress on it.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Excellent.

With that, I would like to thank you both for taking the time to join us today at the procedure and House affairs committee. Should something come up that you would like members to consider, please do not hesitate to send it to the clerk. We'll have it translated in both official languages and circulate it around.

Your time and attention means a lot to us. We wish you a good rest of the day.

With that, colleagues, I will suspend the meeting. We'll start back up in less than five minutes with the second panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Welcome back to meeting number 110 of the procedure and House affairs committee.

I had mentioned earlier that this was the first time we were studying this matter, but it is actually the second time. I was mistaken.

With that, we're really excited to have our next panel. Appearing as an individual is Professor Lubomyr Luciuk, department of political science, Royal Military College of Canada. We also have with us Richard Marceau, vice-president, external affairs and general counsel, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

As we've been working out the calendar, we've had some changes. You have my apologies that we have had to reschedule you a couple of times, which means the opening comments time has varied and changed. Because we have done that, I will be providing some leniency. I will let you for the most part go on with your comments. When you see me starting to wave, I would like them to come to an end, but at the same time, you are our guests and we really appreciate your taking the time to be here with us today.

With that, Professor, we'll start with you. The floor is yours. Welcome to PROC.

[Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, Professor, Department of Political Science and Economics, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Thank you for inviting me, and thank you for your time.

The title of my presentation is Cui bono? or “Who benefits?” I'm not going to read it. I'm going to simply speak to some of the points, but I believe you've all received it in both official languages.

At the invitation of the Speaker of the House of Commons, Yaroslav Hunka was present in the House during the visit to Canada of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. When it was subsequently reported on left-wing blogs that Mr. Hunka had served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, more commonly referred to as the Galicia Division, a controversy erupted that has continued to fester to this day.

Now, there are a few things I want to point out right at the start.

I don't know Mr. Hunka. I've never met him.

Second, my mother was kidnapped as a teenager and brought to the Third Reich as a slave labourer during the Second World War, so I have absolutely no interest in defending any Nazi who may still be alive. Let's be very clear about that.

I was, however, also a member of the Civil Liberties Commission representing the Ukrainian Canadian community during the commission inquiry on war criminals, so I think I'm one of the only people in this room who was there and was part of the investigation that examined the allegations that thousands of Nazi war criminals had somehow managed to get into Canada.

I was present in the lockdown with the Minister of Justice, Ramon Hnatyshyn, when he revealed the commission's findings to the Baltic, Jewish and Ukrainian communities. Along with a representative of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Irwin Cotler, whom you all know, I appeared on the CBC program The Journal with Barbara Frum on March 12, 1987, and welcomed the findings of the Deschênes commission.

At that time, our community had a suspicion that Soviet agents and their fellow travellers in the west had provoked this controversy over the alleged presence of thousands of Nazi war criminals in North America. Only recently, we have come up with documentary evidence. There was a 1985 KGB document describing something called “operation payback”, which was a disinformation campaign started in the 1970s intended to stoke tensions between the Jewish, Baltic and Ukrainian diasporas. That subterfuge worked very well at the time, and it works well to this day. In fact, it is now being deployed to distract attention from Russia's genocidal war against Ukraine and Ukrainians.

I'm not going to go into the position of the Ukrainian Canadian community on bringing war criminals to justice. That's already been explained. Unfortunately, Canada has never properly investigated how alleged Soviet and Communist war criminals and collaborators managed to get into this country. Some did, even individuals who openly boasted of what they had done on behalf of the Stalinist regime in the ranks of the NKVD, Smersh and KGB. Government records about all those persons should also now be made available.

Now let's look at the evidence with respect to Mr. Hunka.

First of all, Mr. Hunka was never a Nazi. He was never a former Nazi. No Ukrainian could ever be a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, because Ukrainians, like all other Slavs, were considered to be subhumans. They weren't Aryans. They were subhumans,Untermenschen, so they could never be Nazis.

Every individual who served in the armed forces of the Third Reich during the Second World War, and that's millions of people in total, was obliged to swear an oath to Adolf Hitler. That, obviously, did not make them all into Nazis, including about a quarter of a million Germans who immigrated to Canada in the 1950s.

Indisputably, Mr. Hunka served with the Galicia Division. Why? Why did he enlist? I found a letter in my research that he wrote on September 22, 2015, years before there was any controversy about him. In that, he provides an explanation about why he joined. He volunteered as a young man, as a teenager, in western Ukraine after the first Soviet occupation of that region. Between mid-September 1939 and late June 1941, Mr. Hunka witnessed massacres perpetrated by the Soviets against innocent civilians. He witnessed the deportation of family members to Siberia, where some of them died, so, as he wrote, “I hated everything Russian”. That's what he wrote years ago.

He joined and he served to the end of the war. He was interned in Rimini in northeastern Italy after the war, and we'll come back to that in a moment.

When the Deschênes commission in 1985 through 1987 investigated the issue of alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada, it came to a number of specific conclusions about the Galicia Division that everyone seems to have forgotten. One was that the division, the Galicia Division, should not be indicted as a group. Two was that members of the division had been screened. Indeed, they were screened by the British, by the Americans and by the Canadians, including people I personally knew, and even by the Soviets.

Charges of war crimes against members of the division were never substantiated. In the absence of knowledge or evidence of specific war crimes, Mr. Justice Deschênes said, “mere membership in the Galicia Division is insufficient to justify prosecution.”

He also concluded that, because these people had come to Canada after 1950 with the full knowledge of the Government of Canada and Canadian authorities were aware of who these men were, they could not have their citizenship revoked because it had been granted to them normally through the naturalization process.

What does all that mean with respect to Mr. Hunka? It means simply that he came to Canada legally in 1954. His wartime record with the Galicia Division was well known, and no one complained.

Now, I'm going to underscore that there were, understandably, concerns raised by the Canadian Jewish Congress in the autumn of 1950: Who are these people? Why are they being allowed to come to Canada? In fact, the government, at the cabinet level, asked the High Commissioner of Canada in the United Kingdom, L. Dana Wilgress, to investigate this. He did, and he dismissed those allegations about the Galicia Division as being nothing but Communist propaganda. As he also added in his report to cabinet, “it is interesting to note that no specific charges of war crimes have been made” by the Soviet or any other government “against any member of this group”. That rather astute assessment seems to have been forgotten.

What am I here to do today? As I said, I don't know Mr. Hunka, but when I look at the facts of his life, here's what I find.

As a teenager, he fought in defence of Ukraine because of what he had witnessed the Soviets do to Ukrainians between 1939 and 1941. He had nothing to do with the persecution of any minority group. At the war's end, he became a prisoner of war. Later, he became an immigrant and, finally, a naturalized Canadian citizen. He served in the Canadian Army, in the militia, from 1963 to 1965, and he swore an oath to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He worked hard, he raised a family, he paid his taxes, he broke no laws that I'm aware of in Canada and he contributed for 70 years to the general welfare of his adopted country. However, disregarding the principles of natural justice, many members of Parliament from all parties denounced Yaroslav Hunka for being something he never was—a Nazi.

The fundamental principle of our justice system, ladies and gentlemen, is that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Given that there is no evidence of any kind of any wartime criminality on the part of Mr. Hunka, I'd like to say that the House of Commons owes an innocent man, and our fellow Canadian, a public apology.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Mr. Marceau, the floor is yours.

[Richard Marceau, Vice-President, External Affairs and General Counsel, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the members for inviting me.

Allow me to provide a bit of context for the discussion we're having today, because it's important. The context is a significant increase in anti‑Semitism in Canada. Just this week, La Presse published an anti‑Semitic cartoon that it had to withdraw, and it apologized for publishing it.

A theatre in Hamilton, the Playhouse Cinema, cancelled the Hamilton Jewish Film Festival under pressure. One of your colleagues, NDP MP Brian Masse, had to apologize for his comment in the House linking a ceasefire in Gaza with tackling anti-Semitism here.

The Toronto police released their numbers regarding hate and saw a 93% rise in hate crimes in Toronto since October 7, the majority of which targeted the Jewish community. I could add that the Jewish community had to get an injunction in Montreal to protect its institutions, including a community centre, a school and a synagogue. I could talk about the demonstrations against synagogues in Thornhill, Montreal and other places.

This is the context and it is important to know this.

Now, what are we talking about? We're talking here about the invitation extended to Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of the 14th grenadier division of the Waffen‑SS during the Second World War. Let's be clear: This was a volunteer unit of the Waffen‑SS, which the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg said was, as a whole, a criminal organization that organized the mass murder of Jews during the Second World War. So we're not talking about an organization like the Knights of Columbus or the Club Richelieu.

This man was officially recognized and introduced in the House of Commons by the Speaker of the House and was given a standing ovation. It made headlines around the world. The House of Commons, the heart of Canadian democracy, was sullied by this event, not only by the presence of this man but also by the standing ovation he received. Also, of course, it served the Russian propaganda of Vladimir Putin, who is in the middle of an illegal war against our Ukrainian allies. That's important to note as well. So it was an embarrassment for Canada on the international stage.

Inviting Hunka hurt deeply Holocaust survivors, their families and Jewish Canadians, and I would say that it hurt all Canadians.

We know that the Office of the Speaker of the House of Commons didn't deliberately invite a former member of the Waffen‑SS to be applauded in the House of Commons, but rather that it was an oversight.

This was a failure of vetting and a failure of due diligence. However, this is not an isolated incident.

In December 2022, a reception was held here in Parliament by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group. Among the attendees was a man named Nazih Khatatba.

Who is this Mr. Khatatba?

He was—at the time at least—the editor of a publication that called the Holocaust a hoax and referred to Judaism as a terrorist religion. His publication spoke approvingly in 2014 of the synagogue massacre in Jerusalem in which Canadian citizen Chaim Rotman was murdered with an axe while at prayer. This man, Khatatba, no more than Hunka, shouldn't have been invited to Parliament.

I repeat: Parliament, as the institution at the heart of Canadian democracy, must do better to prevent such people from being invited.

Think about it. We sent a man to the moon 50 years ago. I'm sure we can do a better job of vetting people who are welcomed into Parliament.

I know that time flies, Madam Speaker.

We ask you, Madam Chair and committee members, to implement effective controls to ensure that such incidents never happen again. You can't just react to the most recent incident.

Having people like Hunka in Parliament sends a terrible message to the Jews of Canada. He was a member of the Waffen-SS. Having people like Khatatba in Parliament is also unacceptable.

Members of Parliament, what you say in this place matters. What you do in this place matters. Who you let into this place matters. Please ensure that similar incidents don't happen again.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you.

Once again, as per the previous panel, I'm going to ask that one person speak at a time and ask that we have a respectful dialogue with our guests and between members.

We will do five-minute rounds again, starting with Mr. Kmiec, followed by Ms. O'Connell,

Then we have Ms. Gaudreau and Ms. Mathyssen.

It will be five minutes through the chair, Mr. Kmiec.

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think this is the first time that I've been at a panel where I have actually read books by both panellists.

Professor Luciuk, I've read Operation Payback and a series of articles you've written on the subject.

Mr. Marceau, I've also read your book, Juif: une histoire québécoise, which recounts your conversion to Judaism and your story as a former Bloc Québécois MP.

Thank you both for being here.

Obviously, you bring very different perspectives to the issue. I bring a different perspective as well. The whole incident that happened in September, I'm sure, was as difficult for your families as it was for mine. I had a lot of explaining to do to my family about exactly what I knew, when I knew it and how I knew it. We're not here to relitigate World War II and what happened to different communities that were given very few choices. Larger forces were at play and people were deciding for our communities what was to happen and what wasn't to happen. I'm sure you and your families.... I have family who didn't survive the war. I have family members who spent time in camps.

What I want to understand is how we can reconcile the communities here. President Zelenskyy and President Duda have, for years, been doing reconciliation work on war crimes committed in what Poland calls the “borderlands”, which would be the regions around Lviv, Volhynia and Galicia in Ukraine.

What can we do now, going forward, to reconcile three diaspora communities in Canada? That's so, one, we never embarrass one of our allies again and, most importantly, we never provide the Russian Federation a propaganda win, which they can keep using against our ally Ukraine and against the diaspora communities in Canada. It's so this “operation payback” doesn't continue.

Perhaps Professor Luciuk could go first.

Mr. Marceau, you can go second.

[Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk]

The kinds of efforts that have been made between the presidents of Poland and Ukraine are commendable. They will continue. I know there are colleagues of mine in Ukraine who are working on these very issues. As was stated earlier, having academics and scholars take a second look and think about things based on archival evidence, not emotion, is a very good and welcome thing. That's happening in Ukraine and eastern Europe, more generally. Today, one of Ukraine's greatest friends, as we all know, is Poland—as well as Canada—in terms of supplying Ukraine with the kind of support it needs to fend off the invading Russians.

In Canada, what we all need to do is, as was stated earlier, take a second look. What happened to Mr. Hunka? Where's the evidence that he was guilty of anything other than membership in the Galicia Division? He explained how, as a teenager, watching his family members being deported to Siberia, where some were murdered, going into prisons in western Ukraine and Berezhany in the latter part of June 1941, and seeing mutilated women.... I'm not going to go into the descriptions. They're in my brief and they're pretty grotesque.

How can we, in 2024, say that what a teenager saw and then did out of hatred for the people who did it is wrong, particularly when there's no evidence that he himself was involved in any kind of war crime or crime against humanity?

[Tom Kmiec, Conservative, Calgary Shepard, AB]

I'm sorry, Professor Luciuk. I have limited time. Mr. Marceau can jump in, so I can get a response. I'll ask you the next question.

[Richard Marceau]

Thank you very much for the question.

My late wife was of Jewish Polish origin. A few years ago, I got a call from the Polish embassy. They wanted to award me the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for work I did regarding the maintenance of the Auschwitz camp so that it stays as a monument to man's inhumanity to man. I asked my wife, “Should I accept it?” She said, “Absolutely”, because that is one step towards reconciliation. “Do this and continue the work of reconciliation with the Polish community and Poland.” Then I did it. Those little gestures, I think, matter.

In Canada, I would say the relationship between the Ukrainian and Jewish communities, despite the troubled past, is actually quite good. Both the Ukrainian and Jewish communities are facing crises now. I'll make this very short. I can tell you that, when Russia started its war, the Jewish community mobilized to help welcome refugees from Ukraine, and we're grateful for the support the community has given to the Jewish community now. I think this is the kind of work we should build on.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Thank you so much.

Our time is very limited, and we like the substance, but I would just ask that we try to be—

[Richard Marceau]

I'm doing my best, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bardish Chagger]

Madam O'Connell, you have five minutes—through the chair.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Through you, Madam Chair, Professor Luciuk, my colleague Mr. Kmiec just said, we will never provide a propaganda win for Russia again. However, if we think back to what transpired after Mr. Hunka's gallery appearance and the conduct in the House by Conservatives—and by all parties, to be fair—for Conservative members to now suggest that we can't provide Russian propaganda a win, when in fact some of their own tweets and responses were actually used by Russia to further propaganda, I can only imagine how hurtful and harmful this is to the Jewish community and certainly to Holocaust survivors to see that heightened.

Could you speak to the propaganda that was actually perpetrated by the House reaction, by some members more than others, and actually used by Russia?

[Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk]

I can say that I had a friend, Stefan Petelycky, whose Auschwitz tattoo number was 154922. I helped him prepare his memoirs for publication, and they're now available, so I heard a great deal about what happened at Auschwitz and by who and to whom.

From people like that and the people I interviewed for my doctoral dissertation, I learned not to pick sides, so I'm not going to pick sides on that question.

I will say that I, as a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, was disappointed by the reaction of many members in the House of Commons, from all parties. I have a list of quotations here from every party; I made sure. I'm not going to read those into the record, but the point is that it was a knee-jerk reaction. You were all on a high because President Zelenskyy had come here, and we all recognize him as Ukraine's Moses. This is a man who is leading his people, his nation, the Ukrainian nation out of Russian Soviet bondage. He himself is of Jewish heritage. This is what he is doing, and this is why Putin is pushing back so hard. Putin is the pharaoh. He has just made himself immortal in terms of the “election”. He is going to be there longer than Stalin was.

We had a Ukrainian president here. You all welcomed him. You all applauded him, and in that euphoria, a man from North Bay, in a wheelchair, wearing an embroidered Ukrainian shirt was introduced. He just wanted to see his president, for whom he fought in the sense that he fought for Ukraine's independence.

Then the next day the left-wing press got onto it and said, ”Oh, he's an SS man”, and then people ran with it. There wasn't a single media report that I could find that took a different position, not one. There wasn't a single member of Parliament who paused and thought and said, “Maybe I should read a book. Maybe I should think about this.”

Most of you are a lot younger than I am, and the reality of it is that you might not know these things, but everyone rushed to condemn because it's so easy to say, “SS man, Nazi” and someone even elevated him to being an SS officer. He got promoted by the MP who said that.

Mr. Hunka was never a Nazi. There is no evidence that he did anything wrong. He's an innocent Canadian, yet he was condemned. He was condemned by people in every party, so, please, drop the partisan part of this.

How do you get beyond this? That was one of the questions from both of you. You get beyond this by thinking before you speak. You get beyond this by not falling prey to Soviet disinformation regurgitated by the Russian Federation and their operatives in Canada and their fellow travellers, of whom there are more than a few. They're very good at this, and they suckered you.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

I have a question following along that line. We're seeing the propaganda increase. We're starting to see now a campaign on Facebook and from others who are starting to say, “Just got my taxes done in Canada. I owe Ukraine $14,000.”

Professor Luciuk, just following on your last comment, do you see that the harmful rhetoric is increasing in this country through Russian propaganda?

[Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk]

Yes. Both in the United States and in Canada, these kinds of reactions are occurring, and they're very harmful.

Ukraine is, literally, fighting against the genocidal legend of the KGB man in the Kremlin. We need to do everything we can to support Ukraine now, because Ukraine is fighting for the free world. I think we all know that—Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats and the Green Party. We all know that, so support Ukraine. Don't fall for Soviet Russian disinformation.