moved for leave to introduce Bill C-214, an act to establish the Holocaust Memorial Day.
Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to introduce this bill and to place again before the House the idea of an act to establish the Holocaust memorial day.
Many of us in the House have been touched in different ways by the horrors of the Holocaust. When I first introduced the bill in the House last spring, I had just returned from a pilgrimage marking the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Holland and a visit to Camp Westerbork, where the Dutch Jewish population was sent en route to the death camps.
In total, 6 million Jewish men, women and children perished as a result of a deliberate and planned state sponsored persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
The bill proposes to establish a national annual Holocaust memorial day to be called Yom ha-Shoah. I urge all members to consider the importance of this initiative, which will ensure that a sorry chapter in the history of the world is never allowed to repeat itself.
(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)