Wrzesnewskyj Introduces Bill on Holodomor-Genocide

In Ottawa on June 5, 2007, Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj (Etobicoke Centre) introduced into the House of Commons a Private Member’s Bill C-450 the Ukrainian Holodomor-Genocide Remembrance Day Act.

The purpose of the Bill is to establish the fourth Sunday in November as a national day of remembrance for the estimated seven to ten million Ukrainians who died a horrifying slow death from deliberate starvation or Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932-33 in an artificial famine. Master-minded and carried out by the Soviet regime under Joseph Stalin, the famine genocide is an inadequately known historic tragedy. Part of the Soviet strategy also involved suppressing, distorting and wiping out all information about the famine in Ukraine. Now known as the Holodomor-Genocide, it inflicted a deep and lasting scar on the national psyche of Ukraine and Ukrainians.  This famine was an attempt to crush the longing for freedom and to erase all aspirations for an independent Ukrainian state.

“Many Ukrainian-Canadians are the descendents of survivors of the Holodomor-Genocide as well as the descendents of refugees from the Communist atrocities of the Soviet Union.  These settlers found freedom from oppression, freedom from human degradation and freedom from personal destruction in Canada.  In Canada’s wide open spaces, they found freedom and helped to settle not only our country’s prairies, but (also) in our urban centres they helped build a multicultural Canada.  A Canada that today acknowledges and respects the histories, at times tragic, of all her peoples.  By enacting this legislation and recognizing a day of remembrance for this horrific human tragedy, Canada will reaffirm her core values of defending human rights and condemning all injustices committed by humans against their fellow human beings, and will condemn the greatest of all evils; genocide” stated Wrzesnewskyj.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj’s Bill mirrors the unanimous Senate resolution passed on June 19, 2003 and the resolution of the Canadian Ethnocultural Council of June 28, 2003 on the 70th Anniversary of Ukraine's Famine/Genocide of 1932-33.  The Manitoba Legislative Assembly adopted a similar resolution on June 10, 2004. The Bill has also been endorsed by numerous ethnic organizations, most notably the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Mr. Wrzesnewskyj would like to thank M.P. Inky Mark (Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette) for seconding this Bill.