Good afternoon. This year, the Ukrainian community is marking the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor, the famine-genocide of 1932-33. On Saturday, Edmonton's Ukrainian community held a commemoration at which several survivors were present. They came to Canada as refugees following World War II.
My parents, too, were among the 35,000 Ukrainians who came to Canada in the late 1940s and early 1950s as refugees, as were my wife's. They were fortunate to have escaped the famine, as that part of the Ukraine was under Polish, and not Soviet, rule in the 1930s. Nevertheless, they experienced the sheer brutality of the Stalinist regime during the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine from 1939 to 1941, as well as the equally brutal Nazi occupation that followed.
They came to Canada to escape totalitarianism and to build a new life for their children. They knew no English or French but were willing to work hard. The period during which they immigrated to Canada was one of those rare instances where our country opened the doors wide to allow massive resettlement of victims of war and oppression.
The willingness to accept refugees on humanitarian grounds is one of the things that make Canada the great country it is. As a person who was born in Canada because this country was willing to accept my parents as refugees, I'm concerned about the proposed amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
The Canadian Council of Refugees has listed a number of concerns with which I agree. Among them, the amendments give too much arbitrary power to the minister to make up the rules as she goes along. The amendments eliminate the right to permanent residence for applicants who meet the requirements of the law. The proposed change from “the visa shall be issued” to “the visa may be issued” dramatically reduces the rights of applicants. The amendments also eliminate the right to have an overseas application for humanitarian and compassionate consideration examined.
This government has made a number of statements about how they intend or don't intend to use the new powers, but expressions of current intention are no protection against future uses of powers in different ways. These amendments should not be included in the budget bill, but rather, dealt with through separate legislation, studied by this committee and debated on their own merits.
While my own Ukrainian roots date from the third post-World War II wave of Ukrainian immigration, most Canadians of Ukrainian origin trace theirs to the first pre-World War I wave or the second inter-war wave.
Unlike the third wave, which was made up almost exclusively of political refugees—