Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the member for Selkirk—Interlake on the motion. He might be rather surprised to see me participating in the debate, but I want to take this opportunity to express, as a private member, my strong support for his bill. I also want to reflect a little on the significance of this event, not only in the history of Ukraine but in the history of the world.
As the hon. member has rightly pointed out, the 20th century was, without question, the most violent century in history, in which human beings demonstrated their extraordinary capacity for evil and for creating hardship, havoc, death and destruction for literally tens of millions of their fellow citizens. It was a century in which powerful ideologies, ideologies at some basic level founded on hatred, seized hold of not only individual hearts and minds of men and women, but seized hold of whole countries and whole systems of government.
Far wiser people than I have described this in terms of how the ideology of Nazi Germany took hold through the 40 or 50 years prior to the emergence of Adolf Hitler as a significant leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Certainly others have looked at how the socialist ideology was twisted and turned, taken by Marxist, then by Lenin and then by Stalin and turned the Soviet Union into one of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships that the world has ever known.
It is because of these facts and also because of the tremendous human ties between the people of Ukraine and the people of Canada that it is entirely appropriate for the House to consider, even for a brief moment on a Tuesday, the importance of this question, the impact that it has had on Ukraine and on the people of Ukraine, but also the impact that it has had on the whole world.
The member has quite rightly described how for a long time there was kind of a debate as to whether what was known in some circles as the Ukrainian famine was in fact a famine or whether it was, as we now I think better realize and better understand, a deliberate attempt to subjugate, murder, repress and destroy the heart and soul of a people.
The member for Selkirk—Interlake has quite rightly described how twice in the last century we have seen this brutal process of collectivization, first in the Soviet Union and then in China, have an absolutely unbelievable impact on the existence of a people.
We are only now beginning to understand that the period known as the Great Leap Forward in China, which took place in the 1950s, was every bit as destructive as the Ukrainian destruction described by my hon. colleague in his private member's bill. It is enough to make us reflect on this forced collectivization, this determination to take away people's livelihoods, to take away their farms, their property, their ability to work the land, their ability to feed their families, their ability to provide for themselves and for their children, how all in the name of an ideology, all in the name of power, of extracting as much surplus as could possibly be extracted by the state and taken away from the farm population in the Ukraine as well as in China, and how destructive it was.
The lessons have been learned. In the case of China, the first thing that Deng Xiaoping did in 1979 was to say that the farmers had to be given back their stake in farming, that a greater opportunity for people had to be created, that the whole collectivist idea, the whole process of collectivization had to be completely deconstructed. We are seeing the same thing take place in Russia and Ukraine and it has taken place over a long period of time.
However, as Canadians, we should not forget the significance of what happened in those years of 1932 and 1933, the death and destruction that resulted, some estimates as many as seven million people may have been killed, those who were terrorized and sent off to gulags, those whose lives were completely destroyed and whose families were completely destroyed. Nor should we forget something else, and I will refer to this very briefly in my comments.
We should not forget the way in which the world watched and the world, to a considerable extent, either ignored or misunderstood what was happening. This is something we have to reflect on today. What are the lessons to be learned? How do we stand here proudly as Canadians and say “never again”?
Let us reflect on other genocides that have taken place in our own lifetime. We were all brought up to believe we would learn lessons from the holocaust, that we would learn lessons from the tragedy of Ukraine, that we would learn lessons from what has taken place in other countries. Yet in our own time and in our own generation we have seen mass murder on a huge scale. We now estimate that as many as four million people may have been killed in the conflict in the eastern part of the Congo. We know that as many as two million people have died in southern Sudan as a result of the civil war, which went on there for over a 20 year period. We know tragically, in the case of Cambodia and Rwanda, when these ideologies take hold how dramatic and destructive they can be, how little human life counts and how much murder and destruction can take place. It is almost mind-boggling to see it and to understand it.
What is particularly tragic about the situation in Ukraine is over the period in question, 1932-33, a number of so-called intelligent western observers went to Russia and were fooled. They had the wool literally pulled over their eyes. George Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, we can go down the list of all these so-called really intelligent, bright, capable people. They did not see what was before them. They did not understand what was taking place and they simply could not comprehend evil of the dimensions, which we now know were taking place. That is enough to make us also reflect on the importance of objective observation, on the importance of our standing as witnesses to the evil which is taking place. It is enough to make us reflect on the importance of our speaking up and speaking out even 75 years later, even now documenting, going back into the records and into the archives and saying that we have to find out what happened and believe what happened.
An interesting suggestion was made to me the other day and it is something we should reflect on in Canada. Because we are such an international country and a country that really includes the world, and there are so many of our neighbours who are Cambodians, Laotians, Ukrainians and Rwandans and people of all backgrounds who know what has happened and who know what their experience has been, it seems to me it would be entirely appropriate for us, as a kind of place of memorial of the world, to become a centre of excellence for research, knowledge and understanding of how this destruction happens, how it begins, how it takes place, how it ends, how it is organized, how it is implemented and how it is tolerated. We need to become a centre in the world for these kinds of studies, for this kind of analysis so we can, through all the work we do on behalf of human rights, truly become a country that not only gives speeches and talks this through, but also consistently provides the documentation that we need to provide.
We must become witnesses for the future, witnesses to make sure that tragedies and disasters like these do not happen again. We must get to the point where we can say that we are the witnesses, that this can no longer go on, that things must change. And by remembering what happened in Ukraine, we now have the opportunity to make sure that these things do not happen again.
