Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise to respond to these sad and touching speeches.
I sincerely thank the Prime Minister for his leadership in issuing this formal apology. That is very important. It is too late to take action, but it is never too late to apologize. I would also like to thank the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques and the member for La Pointe-de-l'Île.
The facts have been canvassed well, eloquently and movingly by all my colleagues. The reality of these facts has been summed up so well. However, I must take a moment to thank the historians who make sure we know of the sins of our past. Unbearable and unspeakable cruelty, blindness and callousness, we all wear the stains of this crime. I do not know if we would know about it without the historians Irving Abella and his co-author Harold Troper. I thank them for writing None is too many. How hard that work must have been. Mark Twain once said that history is written with the ink of pure prejudice. However, one sits down to expose prejudice when history is truth-telling. It leaves us knowing as a fact that our country had the worst record of any country that was refugee-receiving in that period. It is hard to recognize ourselves as Canada in this story, just as it is hard to recognize ourselves as Canada from ripping indigenous children from their families and putting them in residential schools, and ignoring the plights of people over the generations.
Because so much has been said, and so movingly, I want to focus on one aspect of this tragedy. It is not a coincidence, I am sure, that the Government of Canada chose today for this apology, congruent as it is with the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Tonight, at Kehillat Beth Israel synagogue, tomorrow at the Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria, people will gather to commemorate Kristallnacht, the first real manifestation of the evil of Nazi Germany in targeting Jewish synagogues, businesses and homes and smashing the glass everywhere throughout Nazi Germany.
It was only six months later that those 907 German Jews boarded the St. Louis to get away. Six months after Kristallnacht is when the St. Louis left port. How were we so blind and insensitive? However, we were, and we know that was only 80 years ago. We have all said never again, we abhor anti-Semitism, just as we abhor racism in any form.
Then we come up against Pittsburgh and the Tree of Life synagogue. I think we have come full circle in a pattern of hatred and human intolerance that is not yet eradicated, because the Tree of Life synagogue outside Pittsburgh was not only targeted by that crazed gunman because he hated Jews, it was because he hated Jews who helped refugees. That synagogue, Tree of Life, had a very active chapter of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that was helping raise money to resettle refugees now, in 2018. That is why that gunman posted notices ahead of time of the Shabbat for refugees, held by synagogues like Tree of Life.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has existed for decades. Its current CEO, Mark Hatfield, had this to say, “We assist refugees today not because they are Jewish, but because we are Jewish.”
The Torah requires us to intervene, to stop these things that are being done by our government in our name. That light exists in the synagogues, where the moral code of the Jewish people says that we take on a mitzvah, we take on a good work out of religious duty, and we do that work. That is the light that can guide us and we must, as politicians, never turn a blind eye to any among us who would seek electoral advantage by opening the door a crack to white supremacists, neo-Nazis or any of those who would raise up again, and hatred and fear advances their cause.
We in this time see other so-called leaders and, as my friend from the NDP said, there is a movement of intolerance on the rise. We see it globally in Brazil. We see it in the United States. We see that some people gave that gunman in Pittsburgh the idea that he had licence. Therefore, when we say “never again”, we mean it not about history but about our present.
We stand with the people of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh as we stand with the 907 Jewish German citizens who we turned away, to our eternal shame. We wish we could turn back the hands of time and be in Halifax harbour on a million little boats and say “Jump, join us. We love you”. Now, we can only stand here and say that we are so very sorry.