Just Cause by Just Means

By Lubomyr Luciuk

I am going to spill the beans. Tattling won’t matter – this secret is over two decades old.

It was 1985. The Ukrainian Canadian community was under siege. Allegations were made about “thousands of Nazi war criminals” hiding in our midst. While Mr. Justice Jules Deschenes eventually dismissed all the humbug, his findings were as yet in the future.

Our view was, and remains, that any war criminals found in Canada, regardless of ethnic, religious or racial origin, or when or where they committed crimes, should be tried in a criminal court.  Instead, pandering to special interests, Ottawa focused only on “Nazis” – not that it found any – turning a blind eye to how veterans of the notorious Soviet secret police, the NKVD, SMERSH and KGB, came to be here. Some still enjoy their pensions in Canada.

Frustratingly, we got little positive media attention. The liberal-left mindset is that Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis and that such blackguards immigrated here disguised as political refugees. One old poser, a self-titled “Nazi hunter,” even boasted how he had found hundreds of villains by skimming through phonebooks. Absurd, but he was lionized.

Truthfully, some Ukrainians - out of fear, greed, or prejudice – went along with the Nazis, or the Communists, before, during and after the Second World War, as did some Jews, Poles, Latvians, Russians and others. If compelling evidence of an individual’s criminality exists, we said produce it. The accused can then face trial, to be found guilty or not.

But how to get our concerns reported when most journalists were shilling bogus tales about Canada being awash in SS men? Press releases, interviews and the like scored occasional stories for us, but, overwhelmingly, we were ignored.

Then, I came up with a plan to make them listen. Why not rent some trucks and, preferably on a holiday long weekend, block the Don Valley Parkway, temporarily paralyzing Toronto traffic? Arrests would surely follow but we would get our message out.

Admittedly, our tribe’s more timid members found this scheme unacceptably radical. But a few braves did nod assent, which was when I stopped to think. What if, having snarled traffic, we were suddenly faced with a medical emergency – a heart attack or a pregnant woman going into labour – and were unable to get the victim out or emergency services in? Would our cause benefit from inconveniencing tens of thousands or could infuriating them play into the hands of those trying to portray us as the extremists? Almost as soon as I hatched the plot, I retracted it as unwise, indeed immoral.

Now fast forward to June 29, 2007, when aboriginal Canadians staged a “national day of action” to protest unresolved land claims. Armed “warriors” illegally disrupted traffic in Canada’s ‘Main Street’ – the critical rail and road corridor connecting Toronto with Montreal and Ottawa – without serious legal consequences. This Canada Day lesson? Blackmail works. The country will forever be the poorer for it.

Now, starting around 1985, our people also raised a historical grievance with the federal government. We called for an acknowledgement of how, during Canada’s first national internment operations, thousands of Ukrainians were unjustly imprisoned, forced to do heavy labour for the profit of their jailers, suffering disenfranchisement and other State-sanctioned censures. They were branded “enemy aliens” not because of anything they had done but only because of where they came from, who they were.

We also asked for a restitution of the contemporary value of the internees’ labour and confiscated wealth, to be used for educational and commemorative projects. While the “new government of Canada” agreed that Bill C-331 – The Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act, which received Royal Assent November 25, 2005, legally obliges them to negotiate a redress settlement with us, they haven’t. We are dealing with politicians speaking with forked tongues.

Should we now emulate our Native brothers and sisters? We could barricade Banff’s Highway 1A to remind everyone of how internees were forced to build it. Or we could blockade the Trans-Canada railway, near Kapuskasing, Ontario, or La Ferme, Quebec, where Canadian concentration camps once held innocents.  As, obviously, no serious penalties arise out of breaking the law, why shouldn’t we copy the ‘good Indian-bad Indian’ gammon the Assembly of First Nations just used, to squeeze some wampum out of the federal treasury? Given over a million Ukrainian Canadians, mustering a few dozen Cossack insurgents shouldn’t prove difficult.

Of course we’ll do no such thing. Righting historical injustices is about convincing, not coercing. Even if, a century ago, Ukrainians in Canada were scorned for being “from the point of civilization ten times lower than the Indians,” we’re not there any more. And since our cause is about memory, not money, it can’t truly be won using unjust means. No truly just cause ever is.

Lubomyr Luciuk, PhD, is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (www.uccla.ca)