Mr. Speaker, it is true that over the years Mr. Caccia and some of us tried but it did not happen because the government at the time agreed with the legal advice that this would cause problems. However, on November 12, 2005, under Mr. Martin's government, there was an agreement with all of the communities, not just one but all of them, for retribution, acknowledgement and an apology.
That is not what the Conservative government has done. It has chosen one group over another. When it decided to apologize to the Chinese Canadian community, I was pleased but also very hurt and disheartened that the Italian community was left out. When it apologized to the people who had been on the Komagata Maru ship that was moored off the shores of Vancouver, I was pleased but again, the Italian community was left out.
This is not a new issue. The CBC has done a major documentary on this. As the president of the National Congress of Italian Canadians, I held this file for quite some time. Everyone knows some of the facts. Men lost businesses. I know an individual whose business was taken away from him. He was arrested and the business was sold for $1 to someone else, obviously not of Italian background, and he was never ever convicted of anything. People were never charged for anything. In fact, men were brought in front of a judge who eventually resigned. He thought the whole thing was a sham because there was never any evidence of any kind against any of these people.
Canadian citizens, people who were born here, were held. One whom I knew personally was a professor at the University of Toronto. People were fingerprinted. The women and children who were left in the city and declared enemy aliens were fingerprinted, treated like enemies of the state. They were spat on. They were treated horribly. They could not get jobs. Think of the shame and humiliation they felt. When I came to this country in 1957, Italians who were here before me would not talk about themselves or their past.
Canadian-born children were held because they had parents of Italian origin. I remember one child in the documentary who was maybe 15 years old when he was taken to Petawawa. Illiterate people were accused of being spies. Imagine that. Families would receive mail stamped “POW“, prisoners of war. The stories continued even after the war was over. The charade continued for a long time. The names of these people were kept in archives as if they were criminals.
I worked on this file for a very long time. For the information of hon. members across the way, I worked with the German community, the Ukrainian community, and the Chinese Canadian community. After the Japanese Canadian community received its apology, we decided that we would work together to try to get the Mulroney government to do the same for the rest of the communities as he had done with the Japanese Canadian community. That was not done.
As a member of the Italian Canadian community, I spent 20 years working as a volunteer for immigrant rights in the city of Toronto. A large part of that work was with Italian Canadians. There was extreme shame felt by those people. Most Italian Canadian kids did not know their heritage. Their parents would not tell them because of the shame they felt. I did not know about that until I became the president of the congress. I was in my thirties.
This is not about money. It is about apologies. It is about taking away the shame and acknowledging the people who were born here. They were all Canadian citizens. They were not foreigners. They were citizens of this country. This is about Canadians apologizing to Canadians. What happened should never have happened and it is high time we did that.