Former Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota speaks during Question Period on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, September 25, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Blair Gable

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s state visit to Canada last month was supposed to be a display of Canada’s global leadership in the face of tyranny. The country has been a vocal supporter of Ukraine’s cause, in part due to the efforts of Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, who is of Ukrainian heritage.

A pledge of an additional C$650 million in military aid and a photo op featuring one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s famous hugs was supposed to conclude the state visit on a high note.

But things went awry when the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, rose to acknowledge a special guest, Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old whom he described as “a Ukrainian-Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians,” and whom he declared to be “a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

On cue, the House and Zelenskyy rose to applaud the elderly man. It seems neither Rota nor anybody else in the room bothered to ask which side the Russians were fighting on, or whom they were fighting against.

It didn’t take long for the Internet to figure out that Hunka had, in fact, served with the Nazis in a Waffen SS unit.

Trudeau immediately went into damage control mode. The Prime Minister’s Office claimed that Rota, who is a member of Trudeau’s own party, was in fact “independent”, and in any event, nobody else knew of the invitation.

After a thorough denunciation from the Canadian Jewish community and demands for his resignation from fellow MPs, Rota apologized and explained that Hunka, who lives in his riding, was invited solely on Rota’s own initiative.

In the end, Rota did resign.

Under pressure to say something more, Trudeau broke his silence and offered his own apology — of sorts. To begin with, he made sure to apologize on behalf of all of Parliament, implying that the gaffe was not that of his government alone. The opposition responded with jeers.

He also cast as wide a net as possible in describing the Holocaust’s victims. Specifically, he claimed the Hunka incident “was a horrendous violation of the memory of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust and it was deeply, deeply painful for Jewish people. It also hurt Polish people, Roma people, LGBTQI+ people, disabled people, racialized people and the many millions who were targeted by the Nazi genocide.”

The incident has reopened longstanding wounds from Canada’s history in dealing with Nazi war veterans and war criminals.

A 1950 cabinet decision exempted Ukrainian SS members from Canada’s immigration ban on Wehrmacht and SS veterans. Opposition to the decision from Canadian Jewish groups was ignored, and the Deschênes Commission, a 1986 public inquiry, concluded that these former Nazi soldiers could remain in the country because there was no proof that they had committed war crimes.

Never mind that with so many victims murdered and evidence hidden behind the Soviets’ iron curtain, proof against those who volunteered or participated in the German war effort would have been difficult to obtain.

The 1986 inquiry owed its genesis to reports that Josef Mengele sought to immigrate to Canada in the 1960, and might actually be living there. Although the Deschênes report concluded the “angel of death” never did make it into the country, it noted that, like many of its peers, Canada had “devoted not the slightest energy” to the search for, or prosecution of, Nazi war criminals.

In a 2020 incident that was equal parts tragic and comic, a monument to Waffen SS soldiers in a Ukrainian cemetery in the Toronto suburb of Oakville was spray painted with the words “Nazi war monument.” Local police investigated the vandalism as a hate crime — only to backtrack with an apology when they learned that the graffiti was, in fact, merely descriptive.

In 2021, Helmut Oberlander, a Ukrainian-Canadian who had served as a Nazi Einsatzkommando death squad interpreter, died peacefully at the age of 97 “surrounded by loved ones” while fighting a 26-year-long battle to avoid extradition to Germany for lying about his war record to Canada’s immigration authorities.

In light of this shameful — and apparently little known — history, B’nai Brith has demanded that the federal government open up all of its Holocaust records, including the extensive portions of the Deschênes Commission final report that were redacted.

Freeland, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs before moving to Finance, is uniquely positioned to manage such a truth and reconciliation effort.

With a bachelor’s degree in Russian history and literature from Harvard and a master’s in Slavonic studies from Oxford (where she was a Rhodes Scholar), it’s a decent bet that she is the most knowledgeable person in Parliament when it comes to the history of Eastern Europe.

She has also faced personal questions about her own family’s involvement in the Ukrainian nationalist cause. As the Globe and Mail reported in a 2017 article, her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was chief editor of Krakivski Visti, a Polish newspaper that was confiscated from its Jewish owner and then used by the Nazis to vilify Jews.

There is some debate as to what Chomiak’s role actually was, and some family members have claimed he was in fact an anti-Nazi double agent. Regardless of what he did, Freeland should not be blamed for her grandfather’s work during the war, and the fact that Russian propagandists have used the episode to smear her for opposing their aggression in Ukraine is indeed despicable.

However, the Deputy Prime Minister who took to X (formerly Twitter) to wish Jewish Canadians a G’mar Chatima Tova a mere two days after Hunka’s appearance at Parliament, should help her country make real atonement for its mistakes by taking the lead on B’nai Brith’s request and opening up those war records for public scrutiny.

To fail to do so would not merely be cowardly; it would allow the country and its leaders to wallow in the kind of ignorance that caused Parliament to give a Nazi war veteran a standing ovation in the first place.

Ian Cooper is a Toronto-based lawyer.