Mr. Speaker, on November 23, I encourage all Canadians to remember and raise awareness of the Holodomor, which was the genocide by starvation perpetrated by Joseph Stalin's ruthless Soviet regime in an attempt to stamp out Ukrainian nationhood. This deliberately planned famine claimed the lives of millions of Ukrainian men, women, and children in 1932 and 1933.
As Prime Minister Harper said following his visit to the Holodomor memorial in Kyiv in 2010, “To contemplate an act of malevolence on that scale truly focuses one's mind on the nature of this evil”.
Saturday, November 23, marks the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor, one of the most horrific events in human history.
Canada was one of the first countries in the world to officially recognize the Holodomor as a genocide. My colleague, the MP for Selkirk—Interlake, introduced bill C-459, which designates the fourth Saturday of November as a memorial day for the Ukrainian famine, but also acknowledges the famine as an act of genocide.
I encourage my colleagues and all Canadians to participate in the numerous Holodomor commemorations across Canada this weekend. We must never forget.