Moved second reading of Bill S-210, An Act respecting Ukrainian Heritage Month.

He said: Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill S-210, an act respecting Ukrainian heritage month. When passed, it will designate September of every year as Ukrainian heritage month across Canada, celebrating the contributions that Canadians of Ukrainian ancestry have made to our country.

This bill is identical to the one that this chamber passed in November 2024. It made it to the House, but was caught there. This bill already has a sponsor in the House, and based on the messages of support for Ukraine that we have heard from our colleagues there, I am hopeful that expeditious passage in this chamber can encourage our friends in the other place to act swiftly.

Acting swiftly is important because, as we know, Russia’s genocidal war on a sovereign and democratic Ukraine is now entering a more vicious phase. Russia is not just fighting on the front, it is attacking innocent civilians, killing them at schools, in their places of business, on the street, in their homes, in hospitals and in places of worship. Russia is stealing Ukrainian children from their communities, placing them in gulags, forcefully eliminating their ethnocultural identity and even indoctrinating some to attack their own kith and kin. It is destroying the environment, planting hundreds of thousands of mines in fields that are essential for growing the world’s grain, blowing up religious and cultural sites and creating hell for people who only want to go about their lives in peace.

This genocidal war is taking its toll. An entire generation of young people has been traumatized. Thousands have lost their lives. Many more thousands have lost their limbs or their livelihoods. The damage is unimaginable. And for what purpose? So that Russia can dream of empire yet again?

The soft-pedalling approach of graduated containment promoted under the Bush administration — letting Ukraine bleed but not completely bleed out — has been made even worse by the inept and corrupt Trump group. Ukraine — and, indeed, Europe — is now fighting for its survival. It is a fight of democracy against tyranny, a fight of hope against despair, a fight for what is right instead of what is might.

This bill celebrates Ukrainian heritage in Canada. It reminds us about what people who identify as Ukrainian Canadians have contributed to the making of our country. As such, it is the same as many other bills that we have passed acknowledging the important contributions of all those people whose hands have built this place.

We know that “heritage” means all that we have gathered from the past, those things that we value and enjoy in the present and that which we strive to preserve and pass on to future generations. Our heritage is a celebration of who we are, what we aspire to be and the glue that binds us to each other.

I am also bringing forward this bill to honour my Ukrainian heritage, with the support and encouragement of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, the Ukrainian diaspora and recently arrived Ukrainians seeking refuge here. As I do this, I want to acknowledge to each member of this chamber that I also want to learn more about your heritage, for in that mutual journey of discovery, we can hope to better understand each other and, by so doing, together define and develop a better tomorrow.

However, I am also bringing forth this bill again now because I am sure that all freedom-loving people who believe in the rule of law, democracy and the sovereignty of states are appalled by what is happening in Ukraine. I am bringing the bill forward again because we, in this chamber, by the small act of passing this legislation, can demonstrate to Ukraine, to Canada and to the rest of the freedom-loving world that we stand for what is right, that we care what happens, that we abhor tyranny and that we want to maintain what is just.

Colleagues, times are tough in Ukraine, and times are tough for all of us who have family in or ties to Ukraine. Friends, every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is check my WhatsApp to see if my family there has survived the night. I am hopeful that this bill will be a boost that tells the people of Ukraine that we have their backs and encourages those people here in Canada who support Ukraine to not give up and to continue the fight as long as is necessary.

I am privileged to stand here to share with you the story of my parents and grandparents. They came to this country from Ukraine, having lost all of their property, most of their friends and most members of their families to Russian and Nazi forces. They were amongst the numerous Ukrainians who sought refuge in Canada following World War II. They found a safe landing for their families so that they could live in peace, without fear, and flourish for generations to come.

Once here, they became part of a greater Ukrainian diaspora that traces its roots to the call from Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior in the Laurier government, who chose to welcome Eastern Europeans to Canada as an immigration strategy to settle the West. What Sifton wanted was “. . . a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations . . . .”

Thousands living in what is now Western Canada answered this call, and by their sweat and toil, helped turn Canada into the agricultural powerhouse that it is today. Indeed, some members of this chamber can trace their family stories back to this time.

The bond between Canada and Ukraine has been forged over tens of decades and is still being moulded. Since February 2022, many Canadians have become more aware of these bonds and the history that underlies them. Indeed, colleagues, this is a history that both defines Ukrainian Canadians and binds us to others living in this country whose heritage includes similar horrific memories. It is a history with deep and tragic roots, including about 4 million deaths during Holodomor, the Stalin-imposed famine, and between 8 million and 14 million killed in World War II. All Canadians whose families have suffered similar circumstances, wherever in the world those occurred, understand this.

There are now more than 1.4 million people of Ukrainian heritage living in Canada, close to about 4% of our population. My family is counted among those numbers, beginning with my maternal grandparents, my parents, myself, my two brothers and then our children and nine grandchildren.

As a boy, I didn’t speak English until I started elementary school. As was the case in many refugee homes, the mother tongue was the language of the household. Since my grandparents never learned to speak English, Ukrainian was the only language that bound me to them. The years passed, and I became more and more removed from my language of origin. My familiarity with the language left. My baba and dido — grandma and grandpa — were the only people whom I spoke Ukrainian to, and after they died, I just stopped speaking the language because I had nobody in my life that I needed to use my mother tongue with anymore.

Since the genocidal war on Ukraine began and Canada started to welcome newly displaced Ukrainians, I have been privileged to meet many people from my homeland. I have come to know a number of these recent arrivals, and this has encouraged me to renew my cultural ties. I have even begun to relearn my mother tongue. I’m improving weekly — thank you, Duolingo — and soon hope to be able to speak Ukrainian at the age of 73 as well as I spoke it when I was 6.

September is a notable month for Canadians of Ukrainian heritage, as it was in September more than 125 years ago when it is believed the first Ukrainians arrived in Canada. Many of these settled in the Prairies and farmed. There are stories of these early Prairie settlers being helped by their Indigenous neighbours. Indeed, these bonds between Indigenous and Ukrainian communities are symbolized by the kokum design. Actually, the tie I am wearing today is a kokum design.

There are countless Canadians of Ukrainian heritage who have made contributions to our country. I will take a moment to highlight only a few. Roberta Bondar, the first Canadian woman and second Canadian in space, was a neurologist who is a pioneer in space medicine research.

Sylvia Fedoruk was also a medical pioneer, working with radioactive isotopes for cancer treatment. She became the first woman Chancellor of the University of Saskatchewan and was inducted into Canada’s Curling Hall of Fame. She became the Lieutenant Governor of Saskatchewan in 1988.

Ray Hnatyshyn’s father was Canada’s first Ukrainian-born senator. Ray served as a member of the House of Commons, in the cabinets of both Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney. In January 1990, he was sworn into office as Canada’s Governor General, where he coined the phrase, “. . . the governor general belongs to the people of Canada.”

For decades, Canadian households tuned in to test their knowledge with “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, whose father was born in Ukraine. There are many athletes of Ukrainian descent, including NHL players such as Wayne Gretzky and my own cousin Mark Osborne. Mark is much less known than Mr. Gretzky. Sadly, Mark spent more than a decade playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs. I saw a sign the other day that said, “Spring is here and the Leafs are out.”

Senators, this chamber currently has members of Ukrainian descent. We have had senators of Ukrainian descent for quite a while. One such distinguished senator was Paul Yuzyk who has been called the “father of multiculturalism.” He insisted that all ethnic groups deserve to be recognized as partners in the Canadian mosaic. In his speech of March 3, 1964, entitled “Canada: A Multicultural Nation,” he pointed out that Indigenous peoples were in Canada long before the coming of French and English settlers. He saw our multicultural reality as “unity in our diversity” and challenged our nation to embrace and celebrate that reality.

I hope that all of us in this chamber recognize the value of unity in our diversity. Our task is to better learn how we can harness the good in the ties that bind us while avoiding the incitements of those who would use our diversity as an excuse to rend us asunder.

Senators, we are living in a time that calls for more celebration of the things that bind us together in the face of the things that pull us apart. We are living in a time that calls for us to bolster the people of Ukraine and those Canadians who value those ties. This is why I am seeking your support to move this bill celebrating Ukrainian heritage quickly through this chamber and over to the other place.

D’akuju. Thank you. Wela’lioq.

Thank you very much for that, Senator Batters, and if it is any consolation, my mother was also a Leafs fan.

Your point is well taken, and I tried to put that phrase in the speech today. I think the issue that you raised for all of us to ponder — and I thank you for raising it — is that the values shared between these two countries have many components: freedom, respect, wanting to do the best that we can do and hard work. My goodness, if somebody had told us in February 2022 that Ukraine would be blowing up jets in Russia by hiding drones in the roofs of houses that took them a year and a half to develop — and yesterday blew the bottom out of a Kursk bridge — we would have said, “There’s something wrong with you because that will never happen.”

Thank you for raising the point that we have many values in common. We have a lot in common, and we have a lot of work to do, so thank you, Senator Batters.

Thank you very much for that, Senator Batters. In the previous speech you made, you did speak about the religious issues and how important they are. I am glad that you will take the time in your speech to educate all of us about that.

On a more personal note about that, my grandparents — are you ready for this? — were Baptists. There was actually a tiny group of evangelical-type Baptists in Ukraine who came to Canada and set up the first Baptist church in Toronto on Tecumseth Street, where I used to have to go as a little kid, and I would sit on these very hard pews for hours and hours. The good fortune in that was that Fortune Bakery was right next door. I would sneak out and go through the back entrance of Fortune Bakery, and they would feed me doughnuts. We have much to celebrate and much to share with each other, and I thank you for continuing to celebrate the culture that you and I both share.

I have information that the senator perhaps would have liked to put in his speech but overlooked. The first Ukrainian cabinet minister in this country was Michael Starr who was the former mayor of Oshawa from 1949 to 1952 ; he was re-elected six times and was the Minister of Labour in John Diefenbaker’s government but lost to Ed Broadbent by 15 votes in 1968. He had a great career and many honours afterwards, and I’m sure you would have included him if you had thought of him, so I wanted to put that on the record.

Thank you very much. Michael Starr was a star, but I couldn’t include everybody. There are so many people, and I just chose a couple. Thank you for bringing that to all of our attention.