Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour and a privilege to bring the voices of Chatham-Kent—Leamington to the chamber. I come today representing, especially, both the people of Ukrainian ethnicity and those of Ukrainian heritage. There is actually a difference, and I am going to come back to that in a moment. Of course, we are talking today about Bill S-210, about designating September as Ukrainian heritage month.
Here are some ties that bind our country of Canada and our country of Ukraine. Canada is home to approximately 1.4 million people of Ukrainian descent, and I am referring to ethnic descent. That actually represents 4% of Canada's population. Canada has the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora outside Russia in the world. The first Ukrainians came to Canada in 1891, with about 150,000 estimated to have landed between 1891 and 1914. These figures come from the Government of Canada in 2020, and I am actually going to dispute some of the numbers in a moment.
Most Ukrainians from this period settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, which we have heard from other interventions today. They came to obtain farmland, bringing their rich heritage of agricultural expertise from the steppes of what was Russia at the time and is now Ukraine, here to Canada, to our untamed west at the time and to Ontario. In fact, 28% of Canadians identifying as being of Ukrainian ethnic descent live in Ontario.
These are the statistics from Canadians who identify as being of Ukrainian ethnicity, but as I mentioned earlier, there are others who claim Ukrainian heritage, and I count myself among that group. As many members know, I am from a Mennonite background, and there are a number of Mennonites here in the chamber who have the honour of representing their constituencies. This year marks 100 years since all four of my grandparents came to Canada from, at the time, the steppes of Russia, which is now part of Ukraine. All four of them were actually part of the second wave of Mennonites who left Ukraine and chose Canada as their home.
The first wave came in the 1870s and settled in southern Manitoba, primarily in the east and west reserves. They were also fleeing the greater intervention of the Russian government at the time into their way of life in the colonies of what we call Russia. I consider myself of Russian Mennonite background. There are two streams: Russian Mennonite background and Swiss Mennonite background. I could spend my 10 minutes and the next three hours talking about that wave of history, as Mennonites have fled war and persecution from the Russians from the late 1500s to Danzig in northern Poland, and then to Ukraine.
I am going to talk specifically for a moment about the ties that bind my own family, specifically my Epp lineage, but I am fairly confident that my Neufeld, my Reimer and my Rempel sides also trace this same path of immigration into Ukraine in 1804. My ancestors spent 122 years in Ukraine and now 100 years in Canada. They came to Ukraine at the invitation of Catherine the Great.
This is important because, again, they were fleeing, at the time, greater government intervention in their lives in Gdańsk, called Danzig at the time of the Austrian Hapsburg empire, in northern Poland. They came to the steps of Ukraine at the invitation of Catherine the Great to farm, to break those steppes of Ukraine, and they turned that into part of the breadbasket of Europe. That heritage is in my blood today.
They were told, actually, that the territory at the time was empty. Reflecting now and looking at history, that actually is not true. The Tatars had been cleared of that area, and the land was given to my forebears in 1804. It was the second wave that came into southern Ukraine. The first wave of Mennonites who came from the Prussian empire actually came in 1789, settled into the Khortytsya region, which is called Zaporizhzhya today. My ancestors, as I stated, came in 1804, settling into the Molotschna region, which is near the present-day city of Tokmak. I will come to that.
They left 100 years later. They came into Ukraine and left Ukraine for the same reason, and that same reason is actually one of the reasons we are talking about the bill today. It was the fact that they were experiencing both war and revolution. Mennonites have a complicated relationship with government. When they feel that their allegiance to their faith is superseded by government, historically they have fled or moved, but we must not mistake that for a lack of service to country. That is evidenced by the members of the chamber, and it is evidenced by my own family history.
I am going to get into two short stories. My great-grandfather Gerhard Neufeld was drafted into the service, in 1904, of Czar Nicholas II. Rather than serving in the army, he served in what was called the Forsteidienst, the forestry service, so he was stationed on the banks of the Black Sea at the czar's summer resort, Yalta. My mother's father's family, the Neufelds, came from wealth, so my great-grandfather had been educated in Europe and knew that the phylloxera virus was spread by the aphid, and he saved the czar's vineyards from the phylloxera virus. He was decorated with a silver pocket watch, which remains in our family to this day. It was given to him in 1904.
Those who know me personally know that I do enjoy the odd sip of wine. I do that not for enjoyment reasons but obviously because I am genetically predisposed to enjoy wine, given my Neufeld heritage. My Neufeld family, on August 1 and 2 of this year is celebrating 100 years of settlement in Canada. We are celebrating that in the Vineland region, where my great-grandmother is buried. That same Gerhard Neufeld who was decorated by the czar was shot dead in his bed, five days before they came to Canada. My great-grandmother left, bringing five children, and I and my mother are here because of that history.
On my father's side is my Epp heritage. In 1926, my great-grandfather Epp bought, yes, bought, a passport in order to flee. He saw what was coming. My grandfather came to Canada on that passport at the age of 22. His parents were going to come that fall. When they had finished the harvest in southern Ukraine, they were going to join their family. For seven years, there were letters that went back and forth between my grandfather and his parents, and here is where those histories of ethnic Ukrainians and heritage Ukrainians unite.
Stalin slammed the door shut on my great-grandparents. Their visas and passports were never honoured. They tried and retried. Those seven years of letters became increasingly desperate, and eventually a letter came from my great-grandfather to my grandfather stating that his mother had passed away at the beginning of the Holodomor. My great-grandfather would follow, dying of starvation in 1933.
My own heritage is intertwined with the conflict that comes from war and revolution. My parents never had a desire to visit Ukraine, and neither did any of my grandparents, even when those opportunities opened up again post-1991. I, on the other hand, have been back three times. I have been to that soil, but it actually has not been my own heritage that has allowed me to go back. It has always been tomatoes and the Ukrainian involvement in the tomato industry. I could spend another hour talking just about that, but I will not.
In the final minute of my speech, I want to talk about other areas in which Canada and Ukraine have become close and have supported each other. Canada was the first western country to recognize Ukraine's independence, and since then, we have maintained a close bilateral relationship. Canada is one of the leading bilateral development assistance partners of Ukraine, and many of us continue in that work today. Our free trade agreement has allowed for the further expansion of trade.
Of course, time will not allow me to get into the last four years, but it is war, again, that has brought our relationship even closer. I stand here proudly today, as proud as a humble Mennonite can be proud, to support Canada's relationship with Ukraine and the designation of September as Ukrainian heritage month.