moved for leave to introduce Bill C-450, An Act respecting a national day of remembrance of the Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide.
Mr. Speaker, it is with solemnity that I introduce my private member's bill, the Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide Remembrance Day Act.
The purpose of the bill is to establish the fourth Saturday in November as a day of remembrance for the estimated seven million to ten million Ukrainians who died a horrifying slow death from starvation in 1932-33 during the famine masterminded, organized and carried out by the Soviet regime under Stalin.
This Holodomor-Genocide inflicted a deep and lasting scar on the Ukrainian community throughout the world. Many survivors of the famine and their descendants later immigrated to Canada. This famine was an attempt to crush the longing for freedom and to erase all aspirations for an independent Ukrainian state.
Part of the Soviet strategy also involved suppressing, distorting and wiping out all information about the Ukrainian famine, now and into the future to be known as the Holodomor-Genocide.
By enacting this legislation and recognizing a day of remembrance of this horrific tragedy, Canada will reaffirm her core values of defending human rights and condemning all injustices committed by humans against their fellow human beings, and to condemn the greatest of all evils, genocide.
(Motions deemed adopted, bill read the first time and printed)