Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with my colleague, the member for Toronto Centre.
I am very glad that we are holding this important debate on the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, and I am privileged to have an opportunity to speak to it.
This issue is of great interest to Canadians, particularly the 1.2 million Canadians who can trace their roots back to Ukraine. Canada has the third largest population of Ukrainians in the world, behind Ukraine itself and Russia. They arrived primarily in three large waves between 1891 and 1952, in each case escaping chaos, war, and repression in their homeland and seeking freedom in Canada.
They have made immense contributions to our country, and these contributions continue to this day. While they are now well established as a community in Canada, many Ukrainian Canadians still maintain links with families and friends back in Ukraine and maintain a keen interest in the fate of their families.
Over the course of my remarks, I will argue that it is not only Ukrainian Canadians who have a stake in the crisis under way, but all of us. First, though, let me summarize the major events that have led us to where we are today.
The genesis of the current crisis, of course, can be traced back to November 21, 2013, when President Yanukovych suddenly and abruptly announced that he was walking away from an agreement, six years in the making, for closer economic and political ties with the EU, the same kind of agreements that other eastern European countries, such as Poland and the Baltic States, signed as part of their eventual admission into the EU and which are now bearing fruit in the form of more prosperous societies and better opportunities for its citizens.
Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and has been moving on a path towards closer integration with the European Union. President Yanukovych's actions broke sharply with that path, prompting an immediate and massive protest movement by ordinary Ukrainians, known, of course, as the Maidan.
For the rest of December and into the new year, vigorous but largely peaceful protests continued in Ukraine. This was met by increased repression by the Yanukovych regime and its Berkut riot police. On December 25, Tetyana Chornovol, a journalist and Euromaidan social activist, was brutally beaten by five assailants. This only reignited the protest movement into more determined opposition to the Yanukovych government.
On January 16, Yanukovych's party pushed through a series of draconian laws cracking down on the rights of Ukrainians to protest peacefully. The laws are too exhaustive to summarize, but I will include a few penalties, such as up to two years in jail for defamation of government officials, up to six years imprisonment for blocking access to someone's residence, up to three years in jail for distribution of extremist materials, and exemption from punishment for police who commit crimes against protestors.
Again, these harsh measures only made matters worse. In the last week, we have seen the first deaths of protestors by police, the spreading of the Euromaidan protests to more cities in Ukraine, and the occupation of several government buildings.
The crisis has reached the point where, as my colleague from Toronto Centre has put it, it will only end with severe repression or a total climb-down by the regime.
Over the weekend, Yanukovych gave signs of attempting such a climb-down. He offered senior positions in the government to two of the opposition leaders and floated offers to review some of the anti-democratic laws passed January 16. He revisited a recent constitutional change that gave his office of the presidency greater power, and he included more opposition members in the body overseeing elections and tasked with preventing election fraud.
We are at a critical moment in the history of Ukraine. What, if anything, can Canada do? What should we do?
Let me begin by stating the position of my party. We condemn the state-sanctioned violence against protestors. This is utterly unacceptable and should stop immediately. Those who have perpetrated violence must also be held to account.
The Ukrainian government must immediately repeal the anti-democratic laws adopted on January 16 and allow the Ukrainian people the right to assemble and speak freely and peacefully. They are now talking about it, but earlier today, they also talked about the possibility of imposing martial law, so we really do need to see some concrete results.
President Yanukovych must enter into real negotiations with opposition forces, not with ultimatums or unilateral offers, in order to de-escalate the situation and restore Ukraine's democratic path. Canada, for its part, should work closely with like-minded allies to bring real pressure on President Yanukovych and his political backers. Our government so far has offered that all options are on the table. While this statement is fine as far as it goes, we are at the point where we need to be more explicit.
When we last debated this situation on December 10, my hon. colleague from Wascana stressed on several occasions that Canada needs to move its position from rhetoric to concrete action. That was six weeks ago. Condemnations are fine but are not likely to contribute to real change in the long term.
What action might Canada take? Measures should include the Prime Minister directly contacting President Yanukovych. Efforts must be made by Canada to get the U.S. and European countries to join it in taking concrete steps to pressure Yanukovych into making changes.
There should be a push by Canada and its allies to set up talks between the Yanukovych government and opposition leaders; a demand to send observers, as we have done in the past; and the imposition of personal targeted sanctions against President Yanukovych and his political backers, both within and outside government, such as freezing personal assets and imposing travel restrictions.
As Liberals have long been calling for, the government has indicated that it is working with our allies to bring diplomatic pressure and coordinated action against the Yanukovych regime. Action is good, and we hope this consultation bears fruit soon. Joint action by Canada, the U.S., and the E.U. will be much more powerful than unilateral action on our part. However, in the event that our allies are unable to agree on coordinated action, Canada should be prepared to lead all the way. The example Canada would set might be important and would influence our allies to follow our lead.
Canada has a tradition of fighting for what is right: banning land mines; fighting apartheid in South Africa, including the imposition of sanctions; sending our peacekeepers into far-flung theatres such as the Balkans, Rwanda, Cyprus, and the Middle East to try to keep warring parties apart and save innocent lives; and crucial diplomatic interventions, going all the way back to Lester Pearson in diffusing the Suez crisis. Further than that, I would argue that we have an important stake in what happens in Ukraine, even though it requires us to think in a more long-term, strategic way.
The world is watching, in particular former countries of the Soviet Union, to see if Ukraine can continue to entrench democracy. My own colleague, the member for Toronto Centre, has described a competition between what could be viewed as democratic capitalism in the west and a more autocratic state-led capitalism in Russia.
While we are not back in the Cold War, and today's Russia is not the U.S.S.R. of the past, there is, however, a real competition of ideas, values, and systems at play. The rest of the world is taking note and is trying to determine which path leads to success.
Ukrainian protestors of Euromaidan can also teach us something about ourselves. They are not starry-eyed idealists. They understand that closer integration with the EU is not a complete panacea. In fact, it is likely to have some short-term pain. Ukrainians, though, especially the young people, understand that long-term economic success lies with the rule of law and institutions with free and democratic societies. They have seen the progress of their counterparts in Poland and the Balkan states. They see the wealth of the E.U. as a whole, despite its challenges. Most of all, however, they see the crucial importance of a country being able to determine its future democratically and with the rights and freedoms all humans deserve. They remind us of how valuable what we have here in Canada is, and it is important for us to remember this and be prepared to stand up for it.