Mr. Speaker, the purpose of this motion is to have this House investigate ways of granting some form of recognition to a noble group of Canadians, the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion. They are a unit of 1,300 volunteer soldiers who banded together to go abroad and fight the suppression of democracy, the fascist powers of Europe.
These were Canadians who had the wisdom and the foresight to see the real dangers of fascism well before governments around the world. In return for this wisdom and foresight and willingness to stand up to fascism, these volunteers were subsequently made criminals by our own government through the Foreign Enlistment Act.
We are at a time when our government is making apology after apology. The Japanese were apologized to, as should have been done. At that time the laws were not good. People were just obeying the laws by putting Japanese Canadian citizens in internment camps and taking their property.
The minister of aboriginal affairs has just apologized to First Nations people. I went to school with a man who at the age of four along with his brother were scooped up off the hillside by a truck that came to town and were taken to a residential school, not to return home for eight years. They were just obeying the law. No question, they did not do anything wrong but it was wrong. It was wrong then and it is wrong now and the government had the foresight to recognize this and apologize for it.
We have here people who fought for our country who were right then and they are right now. We recognize that what they did was right and it was a just cause. It made a difference in the history of this decade, the freedoms of peoples and we will not recognize their efforts. As a country we will not even look at a way to recognize it.
The Spanish civil war was in many ways a dress rehearsal for the second world war and there was therefore an early test of the resolve of the free world to make a stand against the forces that were there to crush democracy. That is putting it very mildly. As we all know, it was the death of millions of minority groups around the world.
The Mac-Paps fighting alongside other international brigades distinguished themselves in a number of major battles against Franco's phalange, the Italian Black Shirt divisions and the German Condor Legion of the Luftwaffe. Among those Canadians was Dr. Norman Bethune. The casualty rate was staggering but even worse was the fact that those who survived were not allowed to enlist and fight for their country so were doubly denied any chance to be seen as veterans.
There are only 40 of these people alive. I do not think it would be setting a dangerous precedent to recognize what they have done. The government has already shown that it has the courage to recognize where we went wrong in the past. We went wrong here and we should have the courage to apologize and recognize as a country what these people did for our country. It is not about money, it is about recognition of Canadian citizens and their efforts to make sure this country remains free.