Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. During question period emotions sometimes run high and sometimes things are said that I think are inappropriate. The member for Malpeque, in questioning the Minister of Agriculture, compared the actions of the minister to a Stalinist purge. I think that term is highly inappropriate and very unfortunate.
Stalin is the greatest mass murderer perhaps of all time. A Stalinist purge, among other things, induced a famine genocide in the Ukraine in the early 1930s, killing over seven million people. Stalin systematically killed kulak farmers in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Over one million of them were killed. There was the near complete ethnic cleansing of the population of the Crimean Tartars by murder and exile to Siberia. There were the multiple pogroms targeting Jews.
To use that term I think is unfortunate and I would ask the hon. member to withdraw that term and apologize, both to the Minister of Agriculture and to all the victims of that terrible time.