Mr. Speaker, Canada's 1.2 million strong Ukrainian Canadian diaspora community is in angst due to recent attempts to muzzle Ukraine's media, and trumped up criminal charges against opposition leaders.
Incredibly, secret service agents have even attempted to intimidate university rectors. On May 18, Father Borys Gudziak, the rector of the renowned Ukrainian Catholic University, received a call on his cell phone from a secret security agent. Twenty minutes later the agent was in the rector's office. What followed was an hour of attempts to co-opt and intimidate the rector into spying on student activists and to rat out the names of student protest organizers.
Not since the days of the Soviet Union has the Ukrainian Catholic Church, its institutions, priests and students been menaced in this way.
Canada has a special relationship with Ukraine and has stood shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine's people on their journey toward statehood and democracy.
Today we do so again with Ukraine's students, journalists and all those who have dedicated themselves to a free and independent Ukraine.