Letters   Letter to the Editor

“Blood and Belonging continues...” [written] by M. Oleksiuk is quite ridiculous, and actually quite misleading, for the following reasons:

1 - Cabinet ministers and Critics get replaced in shuffles all the time, and frequently. Ignatieff just became leader of the party, of course he’s going to change his circle of advisors. This article
suggests that Wrzesnewskyj was shuffled out because he was Ukrainian-Canadian, and I’m willing to bet that that’s not true. I’ll bet you a million dollars right now that of all the possible reasons to replace MPs from appointed positions, his ancestry was not it. So to make a big deal of an ordinary, everyday, political action sounds like a major exaggeration to the point of being deliberately deceptive - at the very least, a hypersensitive reaction. When an Italian-Canadian MP gets shuffled out, do Italian-Canadians launch an outcry about how that’s an attack on their community?

2 - Wrzesnewskyj was an “advocate for the Ukrainian community”? Prove it. What is the “community”? Am I part of it automatically? Are you? How is this guy, whom I’ve never heard of, an advocate for me? How has he helped me? Do I owe him some sort of allegiance, to the point of getting offended when a perfectly ordinary political move takes him slightly out of the limelight (remember, it’s not like he lost his job as an MP or anything)? What has he done for me? What has he done for you? Were you going to support Ignatieff when Wrzesnewskyj was in his shadow cabinet? Doesn’t sound like it. Sounds like you’re taking every opportunity to display pre-existing prejudices.

3 - I actually agree with most of Ignatieff’s ideas about nationalism. Especially in a country like Canada, it really is “kitsch” and “emotionalism” when you hear Canadians refer to “their country” because they go back to Lebanon or Germany once every two years to visit family. When they have international sports tournaments in Canada, and Canada’s playing, the stands are always full of people cheering for the OTHER team who then go back to the home in Scarborough that they grew up in, [to where] their parents moved to have a better life, and better opportunities for their kids. If that’s not “inauthentic emotionalism”, I don’t know what is. As for his “great Russia” comment, I disagree with him there, but I understand. What if Crimea seceded from Ukraine, as they threaten to do? Would you not always consider it to be part of Ukraine, and come up with all sorts of historical reasons to justify that? Is it factually incorrect to say that Ukraine and Russia were part of the same country for centuries? Aren’t you really jumping to conclusions about Ignatieff’s innermost beliefs because he’s Russian-Canadian, showing exactly the prejudice that this article pretends to decry?

4 - This article is guilty of some pretty sneaky twists of logic. It says that Ignatieff has an “orientation that aligns itself with Russia’s Prime Minister/President Putin” by taking Ignatieff’s
statement that Ukraine was once part of Russia (which it was) and equating it with Putin’s “Ukraine is not a nation” comment, and concluding that therefore Ignatieff = Putin and running with that. This is dishonest because the facts don’t support this. Then there’s the paragraph about the Orange Revolution, which contributes nothing to the argument. Yes indeed, hooray for free elections in Ukraine, but this has nothing to do with Ignatieff, even less to do with Wrzesnewskyj, and is clearly included to cloud the issue by appealing to the reader’s own blind nationalism. And at the beginning, the article says that removing Wrzesnewskyj “underline[s] the fears the Ukrainian community has had with Ignatieff”, which is a total lie. What fears were pre-existing? The article doesn’t say. It also asserts “an enduring problematic relationship with the Ukrainian community”, providing no evidence at all. And again, what’s the “community”? Am I not part of it? I’m not afraid of him, I have no problematic relationship. Again, isn’t this really about anti-Russian prejudice showing itself here? Let’s not forget that Ignatieff isn’t Russian - he’s Canadian, just like me, and just like you.

5 - Who cares? Let’s pretend that all the claims the article makes about Ignatieff are true. I love Ukrainian culture, but I’m not afraid of Ignatieff at all. Is he somehow oppressing
Ukrainian-Canadians? Is he promising to intern us all in camps somewhere? Do we really think that even if he was somehow prejudiced against Ukrainians (for which there is, just to be clear, absolutely zero evidence) that this would somehow manifest itself in Canadian government policy? That’s insane.

Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t make it true!

Steve Denyszyn, Toronto