Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Through you, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being with us today. While I haven't had a chance to meet you in person, it's a pleasure to meet you in committee.
You may or may not know that my oldest son deployed to Ukraine in 2018 as part of Operation Unifier. He helped train Ukrainian forces to defend themselves. It's a real pleasure to be with you today.
With respect to questions on procedure internally, obviously the people best placed to answer those questions are the internal people you've also been meeting with as part of this study.
I wanted to connect with you with respect to your comments about knee-jerk reactions.
I'll walk you through how things happen in the House. As my colleague, Mr. Kmiec, mentioned, this was not a regular sitting of the House. This was a special event for which a dignitary was here. Based on previous testimony from the Clerk, we heard that normally in these kinds of instances, a member of the visitors gallery would not be recognized by the Speaker. This was something that normally is not done, and obviously is something that we're going to look at going forward in terms of protocol.
When that does happen in a regular sitting, the Speaker will recognize someone in the gallery and invite members to stand. We assume that the Speaker has done the proper vetting and the person or people being recognized are worthy. We're talking about moments or seconds. We stand, we recognize whoever's being recognized by the Speaker and we applaud.
Then, going through the weekend, we heard the reports coming and the media headlines. Even coming to the meeting today I saw some of the media headlines referencing Mr. Hunka in a different term.
I wanted to get feedback from you. How has this hurt the Ukrainian community?
I want to give you an opportunity to help because we all want to learn from this. There's also an opportunity to learn about the history of Ukraine's fight during World War II. I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to share that with Canadians watching today, if you'd like to share anything with us.