Mr. Speaker, September has always felt like a month of beginnings. The quiet of summer gives way to something busier and more purposeful. In Cambridge and North Dumfries, where I am from, we feel a shift. There is a particular energy to September that other months do not quite carry, a sense that something is being picked up and continued.
Therefore, when I look at Bill S‑210, a Senate bill now at report stage in this House, sponsored by the member for Etobicoke Centre, which would designate September as Ukrainian heritage month, I see an opportunity to combine the vitality of that season with the pride of a community that has shaped Canada's character for generations. That is why I could offer my support. I want to take a few minutes to talk about why, and what I genuinely hope it accomplishes.
The Ukrainian Canadian community's patience has outlasted more than one Parliament already, a testament to its perseverance and its faith in this institution. I have some personal understanding of what it means to leave a country and build a life somewhere new. That was my family's story. What I know from growing up with that history is that people do not leave easily. They leave because they have to, or because they believe the sacrifice is worth what is waiting on the other side. They carry what they can, and they let go of what they must. Then they get to work, because that is the only way forward.
What heritage actually looks like, in my experience, is not the declared kind. It is the lived kind, and the two are not always the same thing. I grew up in Cambridge, Ontario. It is a city with deep roots and a proud identity built over generations by families who came from different corners of the world and decided to invest their full energy and hope in making this their home. The families I grew up alongside came from Portugal, from Scotland, from Germany, from all across this country and from across the world. What they brought with them was not only language or food or tradition, though all of that came too. They brought a way of working, a standard for how people treat their neighbours and a belief that if they show up and do the job right, this place will give something back. Over time, those values merged into something distinctly Cambridge, a city that is just as proud of where it came from as where it is going. That is what heritage looks like when it is working: not a flag on a building or a line in a speech, but real people making real choices, and those choices feeding generations of rich community.
The first wave of Ukrainian settlers arrived in Canada in September 1891, and it is precisely that first recorded arrival that gives the month chosen for this bill its significance. Most of these settlers were farmers who broke ground on the Prairies and created communities from conditions that would have turned most people back. They settled in places like Chipman, Alberta, and Stuartburn, Manitoba, places that were barely names on maps when they arrived. They did not treat being Ukrainian and being Canadian as separate identities—