Can anyone explain how former Nazi, Yaroslav Hunka was invited to the House of Commons and then given a standing ovation?

The Liberals are falling over themselves to distance the government from Anthony Rota, their Speaker in the House of Commons.  Rota has accepted the blame for having invited Yaroslav Hunka and prompting the standing ovation by MPs across  all parties. 

The question is, who invited Yaroslav Hunka to be an honoured guest in Parliament on Sept. 22? Was it the Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland? Was it another cabinet minister?  Was it an aide to PM Trudeau?  Did the request come from Trudeau’s special guest Vlodymyr Zelenskyy? For context we know Hunka lives in Rota’s constituency in North Bay, and that he and Rota have met before.

Of course the institutional Jewish community, understandably, is in an uproar about the Hunka affair. However the institutional Jewish community is pushing the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition. That definition is designed to protect Israel from criticism. Ironically, nothing in the IHRA definition would label Yaroslav Hunka as antisemitic.

Hunka is a 98-year-old veteran of the 14^th Waffen Grenadier Division (14^th Waffen SS).  That means Mr Hunka was a Nazi, or a Nazi sympathizer.  The 14^th Waffen Grenadiers (also known as the SS Galicia Division) was a Nazi German military formation composed of more than 80,000 mainly Ukrainian military volunteers from the area of Galicia. According to University of Alberta historian John Paul Himka, author of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: OUN and UPA’s Participation in the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry (2021), Ukrainian militias and units like Hunka’s not only were key actors in the Holocaust but the movement behind them has attempted to whitewash this role in the post-war years.

According to Canadian journalist David Pugliese writing in Esprit de Corps magazine , “[SS Galicia Division] had been declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg Trials.” The 14^th Waffen participated in the massacre of Jews in 1941, and was responsible for the massacre of women and children in the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka.  All told, between 700 and 1500 civilians were massacred.

Four more Polish villages were burned to the ground or destroyed. Civilians were burned in a church, shot in their barns, in the cemeteries or in their homes. Parents had to watch their children being executed.  In 1944, the 14^th Waffen was stationed in Slovakia where it also committed war crimes.

In Parliament’s push to denounce Russia and boost Ukraine, it is now permissible to breathe new life into the Nazi cause.

How did Canada’s Parliament allow this outrage? It’s not simply an outrage against Jewish Canadians who suffered in the Holocaust, but a rewriting of history.  This is a whitewash of the Nazis and fascism, which more than 45,000 Canadians gave their lives to stop.

In his posts to a blog in 2010-11, Hunka says the years 1941-43 were the “happiest of his life”. 

Really? In Parliament’s push to denounce Russia and boost Ukraine, it is now permissible to breathe new life into the Nazi cause.

Featured Photo: Yaroslav Hunka of North Bay in Sudbury for a rally for Ukraine, May 2022. (credit: Alana Everson/CTV News Northern Ontario).