We Shall Not Rest

By Andrew Hladyshevsky

The following is an abridged version of the speech delivered by Andrew Hladyshevsky, President of the Shevchenko Foundation, on November 15 in La Ferme, Quebec, at the site of the Spirit Lake Internment Camp where Ukrainian-Canadian were held during the First World War.

The Shevchenko Foundation, incorporated by an Act of Parliament in 1963, has contributed to hundreds of projects in Canada and has become a well-known part of the Ukrainian Canadian community. Thus, the community asked the Foundation to participate in seeking a mediated settlement and redress agreement with Government of Canada regarding the internment of Ukrainians Canadians during the First World War.

Decades of work towards this end resulted in the Agreement in Principle (AIP) signed with the Government of Canada on August 24, 2005. That document pledged that Ottawa would work with our community towards a formal settlement agreement. An initial pledge of $2.5 million was also made, those funds to be held by the Shevchenko Foundation through the Acknowledgment, Commemoration and Education Program (ACE Program). The AIP also promised “further funding,”  and stated that the Agreement in Principle would not be a full and final agreement, that further agreements were anticipated. 

The passage into law on November 25, 2005, of Inky Mark’s Bill C 331- The Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act, further confirmed that Ottawa would undertake negotiations with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko towards securing a final Ukrainian Canadian Reconciliation Settlement.

Yet, more than a year after the signing of the AIP, almost a year since the passage of the statute, and some 10 months following the change of government, all we have managed to do is have a few brief conversations with the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Beverley Oda. Then, the Government, inexplicably, cut off all discussions with the Ukrainian Canadian community. Thus, our efforts have not led to the conclusive results that we anticipated, given Bill C 331 and the AIP.

Furthermore, the government unilaterally apologized to the Chinese Canadian community, on July 22, 2006 and, on the same day, without consultation with our community, announced that the ACE Program was being replaced with the Community Historical Recognition Program (CHRP) to provide funding for community-based projects linked to wartime measures and immigration restrictions. The government also said that it would be through CHRP that funding commitments identified in agreements signed with the Chinese, Italian, and Ukrainian Canadian communities would be met and, coincidentally, that the $25 million allocated to ACE had therefore been allocated to CHRP.  The government has said that finalizing this new program’s details would take until late fall 2006. To date, the Ukrainian Canadian community has received no further details.

The government has also introduced the National Historical Recognition Program (NHRP); the $10 million allocated to it will be used to fund federal, not community, initiatives.  Federal bureaucrats, we are told, will “help educate all Canadians, in particular youth, about the discrimination and hardship faced by the Chinese and other communities impacted by wartime measures and/or immigration restrictions and the significance of these experiences to the communities in question.  This program will be implemented by the Federal Government and will include initiatives such as the development of public-service announcements, educational tools, and access to web-based archival information.”  Again, our community has not been invited to comment nor would we or other ethnocultural communities be involved in overseeing the disbursement of these funds for the commemorative, educational and cultural projects that we feel are most significant.

As one of the designated spokesmen for the Ukrainian Canadian community, I have joined my colleagues, Dr Lubomyr Luciuk and Paul Grod, in a process of consultations with stakeholders in our community across the country. We agree that we will not be bound by any of these federal initiatives if that means that the contractual and legislative commitments that were already made to us are abrogated or denied. We continue to seek a final redress agreement that is timely and honourable.  Losing patience with the government’s relative silence on this matter, we are lobbying not only the Prime Minister but other MPs as well, including Minister Oda, and are reminding them that we will not be dissuaded from achieving the goals we have set before us–namely, recognition, restitution, and reconciliation.

We call on stakeholders to contact  MPs and to inform them about the injustice of there being no redress settlement.  Meanwhile, we shall not rest.  We shall not slow down our efforts to achieve justice for we have an obligation to those individuals who now sleep silently in their graves throughout this land.

The lives of many internees were mangled by a government that denied them basic human rights and civil liberties. We strive to ensure that Canada will become a country that respects our Charter of Rights, respects linguistic duality and has a Constitution enshrining multicultural respect for its minorities. That is our chore because we know the high price paid for that goal not only by those who fought for Canada in wartime but also by those who were wrongly interned, not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were and where they came from