Ihor Klufas

Toronto. "The Canadian Council of Central and East European Communities" will be sponsoring a Conference later this month on why the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania should be receiving Canadian support in becoming the newest European members to join NATO.

Confirmed speakers from the Baltic countries include: Harri Tido (Deputy Under-Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Estonia), Vytautas Landsbergis (Former Head of State of Lithuania) and Edgars Rinkevics (Secretary of State, Defence for Latvia).

Other speakers from Europe include: James Appathurai (Senior Planning Officer, NATO Headquar-ters in Brussels), Mihaly Varga (Minister of Finance of Hungary)

and Paul Dobrowolski (Ambassador to Canada from Poland).

Also flying in from the United States will be Paul Goble (Director of Communications for Radio

Free Europe, Radio Liberty in Washington).

Although Zbigniew Brzezinski (former National Security Advisor to U. S. President J. Carter) is unable to attend this conference personally, he has presented a brief, which will be read at the Conference.

Canadian speakers will include: Senator Raynell Andreychuk (of Ukrainian descent), who is the Deputy Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee in Ottawa; Anne Leahy (former Canadian Ambassador to Russia); Jean Augustine, MP (Vice-Chair of Standing House Committee of Foreign Affairs and International Trade); David Rudd (Executive Director of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies in Toronto); Admiral John Anderson (former Ambassador of Canada to NATO); Nick Etheridge (Director of the North American and Euro-Atlantic Security and Defense Relations, Department of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa); Graham Greene (Editor, Ottawa Citizen Newspaper); Brian MacDonald (President of the Atlantic Council of Canada); Jesse Flis (former MP) and Chris Korwin-Kuczynski (City Councillor for Parkdale-High Park, Toronto).

Markus Hess, President of the newly formed "Canadian Council of Central and East European Communities" explains why this Council will be sponsoring this NATO Expansion Conference in Toronto: We have a resolve within our communities to look over the ocean at our heritage nations such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. (And) these nations have had a terrible time over the last 50 years, both with the Second World War and with the Cold War. We have family in these nations. We care about what happens there. And the defence of the independence that we have attained and that they have attained is imperative to us. And we want to tell the Government of Canada and those people who have a say on the international scene, that we do care, that this is something of importance to us. We worked with others together to attain that freedom and we will work just as vigorously to help them maintain that freedom.

The Conference on the Expansion of NATO will take place on Saturday, October 20, 2001, from 9 am to 4 pm, at the Medical Sciences Building, 1 Kings College Circle, at the University of Toronto.

Tickets for the Conference are $50, including lunch. Tickets should be purchased in advance from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Toronto Branch at 295 College St. 3rd floor. Tel.: 416-323-4772.