Madam Speaker, I am glad to address Bill C-331. I want to thank my hon. colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette for the great work that he has been doing in presenting this bill. He has a large constituency with Ukrainian Canadians, as I do. I am a person of Ukrainian descent and quite proud of my heritage.
I wish to give members a bit of background. During World War I the War Measures Act of 1914 was implemented which, by order in council, took over 8,500 enemy aliens and 5,000 of those were Canadians and stuck them into concentration camps. Essentially, these interns were turned into forced labourers, used in logging camps and in the development of our national transportation system, and were spread right across the country.
Many of these Ukrainian immigrants came from the area of Bukovyna in Ukraine that was being occupied at the time by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a very unfortunate event because these people had their property and cash assets all confiscated by the Government of Canada, along with some of these other Europeans, and never had those moneys and properties returned to them. It was a grave injustice that through this bill we now have the opportunity to correct.
In 1993 the former Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, when he was leader of the official opposition, promised to rectify the situation. It has been over 12 years since that promise was made. It is just another example of a Liberal promise made, Liberal promise broken. This is a great opportunity for us to address it.
I must say that our family was quite fortunate. My grandparents emigrated from Bukovyna actually as two separate families. My grandmother was only nine years old when she emigrated to Canada from Ukraine and my grandfather was a young man who came a few years later. They came in the early 1900s. Luckily, for whatever reasons, my grandfather immigrated in 1907 and was not put in one of these forced labour camps. He was not put into a concentration camp nor had his property confiscated. Luckily, the Ukrainian community where I grew up was untouched.
My father told me it was not until he was a young man that he even realized that this had happened because our community, for whatever reason even though the immigrants came from Bukovyna which was under the Austria-Hungarian Empire rule, seemed to have gone untouched. However, certain Ukrainian descent Canadians were forced into these camps which is very unfortunate.
I like the way this bill is being proposed by my hon. colleague. Essentially, we are not talking about restitution to families, but we are talking about taking a hard look at putting in place the proper memorials and recognition of the suffering that was unjustly caused by the Government of Canada.
There were 24 concentration camps across Canada. We want to ensure that there are plaques, memorials and cairns erected at those sites, particularly the ones that possibly have not been recognized yet. We do not want to just erect plaques and cairns, but we wish to maintain them. So often in rural Canada we have cairns set up, but no one bothers to take care of them after we get them erected. Pretty soon the flags are tattered and no one is there maintaining the sites. This is actually taking a long term approach at this proposal of recognizing the injustice and maintaining those sites.
The other great part is that it will set up a permanent museum in Banff National Park, the location of one of these concentration camps. Banff is such a high volume visitor area. It will give us an opportunity to show that in the past Canadians have made mistakes. It will give us an opportunity to tell about the injustice, to educate people about how the concentration camps operated, and to talk about what a great contribution those people made to the nation.
Through their forced labour, they helped develop our logging industry. They helped develop our transportation system. They worked hard on behalf of Canada. Amazingly, they came out of the concentration camps and became very functional people within our society, and made a huge contribution after the fact.
This is a general recognition of all Ukrainians in Canada in developing farming in the west, particularly with the mass immigration during the very early parts of the century, which of course included my ancestors. My great grandfather and my grandfather, with their families, started farming and that of course was a major contribution in ensuring that the Prairies were productive.
The other part of the bill is to ensure that there are proper ceremonies to recognize the opening of the museum, the erection of the different cairns and plaques, and to have those formal ceremonies. We also want to ensure the production of the educational materials, so that at the cairns, when they are having their ceremonies in the schools in the areas where these cairns are erected and of course in the main museum that is going to be established in Banff National Park, they will be able to tell the story.
One of the suggestions in the bill that I really like, which my hon. colleague has brought forward, is the issuance of a stamp or series of stamps to point out this unfortunate event in our history.
Finally, the part of the bill which is very important proposes that a review of the emergency act that we have be carried out by the department that is responsible for it. We must also review how that report comes to Parliament and how we ensure that an atrocity like this never happens again.
The great thing about history is that we can always learn from it. We can look at our past and learn about some of the shortfalls that have happened and about the mistakes that we have made to ensure that we put in place the proper corrective measures, so that we never do it again. This is a great chance for us to do that. The bill creates the initiative to ensure that we do it.
Finally, the bill is directly in line with the policies of the Conservative Party of Canada. Our party policy states that we will recognize and resolve the outstanding redress issues of the Ukrainian Canadian and Chinese Canadian communities. That particular policy can be attributed to the hard work of my colleague from Dauphin—Swan River—Marquette.
This is a great opportunity to correct this injustice. It is good work. Duzhe dobre.
