“THIS was a mistake that has deeply embarrassed parliament and Canada. All of us who were in this house on Friday regret deeply having stood and clapped even though we did so unaware of the context.”

This was how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attempted to justify his ovation and that of his fellow parliamentarians for the “Canadian hero” Yaroslav Hunka, a former Waffen SS combatant and, as far as the record shows, an unrepentant Nazi volunteer.

This was no mistake, and “deep embarrassment” should be reserved for those who think blackface is funny. Applauding Nazis is simply in a category all by itself.

However, there’s no need for every Canadian to feel shame over their politicians’ ignominious veneration of Hunka. Canadian anti-fascists can hold their heads high.

After all, this is the same country that produced the Mac-Paps, the more than 1,000 Canadian anti-fascists of the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, who fought in the ranks of the 15th International Brigade in Spain in the 1930s.

Canada also gave the world Norman Bethune, the communist and internationalist surgeon, who volunteered to oppose Franco’s forces in the Spanish civil war and who later “died a martyr at his post” in the Chinese war of liberation against Japanese aggression.

Slightly older Star readers might remember the Ukrainian-Canadian-born Baruch Rahmilevich Mendelson, better known as Bert Ramelson, who fought in Spain and later became a legendary industrial organiser of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Ramelson was brought up in the rich tradition of pre-WWII Ukrainian migrants of all faiths who stood firm against fascism and anti-semitism.

They were also targeted by the Canadian state. During 1940, when the Canadian Communist Party was banned outright, around 100 Ukrainian labour-farmer community centres, suspected of pro-communist sympathies, were shut down by the Canadian state and their assets seized.

Beyond the left, indeed pretty much across the Canadian political spectrum, outside of the parliamentary elite, there is a keener awareness of the inescapable historical context that Trudeau and others apparently spurn. 

The adoration of Hunka is a step too far even for generally conservative Nato-loyalist Canadians. Too much Canadian blood was spilt in World War II, around 42,000 Canadians died, for this to go without notice.

The only WWII German war criminal imprisoned on Canadian soil, tried by a Canadian court martial and convicted of the butchery of unarmed Canadian POWs was Kurt Meyer who, like Hunka, was a member of the murderous Waffen SS.

Meyer had joined the Nazi youth group, the Hitlerjugend, in the mid-1920s at the tender age of 15, then he went on to the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS a year later. 

He joined the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler in 1934, with the unit eventually becoming absorbed into the Waffen SS. Meyer served in the blood-stained Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, where his division became notorious for its atrocities against civilians of all ethnic groups and unarmed POWs.

One incident in Ukraine alone, near the city of Kharkiv, recorded the butchery of more than 850 villagers, by this division.

Transferred to Normandy in 1944, Meyer’s new Hitlerjugend division killed numerous Canadian POWs, perhaps 156 in all. He was found guilty after the war for his specific role in the murder of 20 Canadians at the Abbey Ardennes, following the D-day advances, and was sentenced to death by a Canadian military tribunal. 

However, Meyer’s death sentence was commuted at the last minute by the Canadians. Instead of the firing squad, he served just five years in a Canadian prison, followed by a short stint in a jail in West Germany. 

Outrage in Canada and the Soviet Union over this leniency was brushed aside and Meyer spent the remaining years promoting the Mutual Aid Group for Members of the former Waffen-SS (German acronym HIAG), seeking to exonerate his former comrades from war crimes. 

If he had lived longer, Meyer would no doubt have counted the Canadian House of Commons’ celebration as a crowning achievement.

Trudeau’s sorrowful contrition over Hunka does not ring true. Not in the least. 

If there is anywhere outside the territory of Ukraine or Russia where the historical “context” of Ukrainian fascism has been at least formally acknowledged, studied, debated and contested, it is within Canada itself. 

It is fair to say that during the 1970s-90s, a number of Canadian scholars, some of Ukrainian-emigre origin, were at the forefront of highly politicised academic discussions; on the one hand, promoting the concept of the so-called Holodomor — the claim that famine in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was not only “man-made” but also genocidally targeted against ethnic Ukrainians — and, on the other, mitigating the intentions of voluntary enrolment in Nazi brigades.

The cold war saw the proliferation of Soviet and east European studies centres or institutes at most major Canadian universities, often generously funded by nouveau riche Ukrainian emigres and Nato’s military-academic complex of foundations and NGOs.

Aside from numerous universities offering generic Slavic programmes with some Ukrainian elements, the Canadian Association of Ukrainian Studies notes the following major research centres: the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre, MacEwan University, Edmonton; the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies, University of Manitoba; Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre, Toronto; and the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage, St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan. 

One of the most prestigious of these academic foundations was the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. Yet it appears that, despite its declared aim of investigation and research into Ukrainian history and its impact on Canada, the institute somehow missed the glaring fact that in recent years one of its major benefactors was the family of a certain Yaroslav Hunka, and that a research programme, the Yaroslav and Margaret Hunka Ukrainian Research Endowment Fund, was dedicated to him and his late wife.

Verna Yiu, interim provost and vice-president academic at the University of Alberta, issued a statement several days after the scandal, saying: “Following the introduction of Yaroslav Hunka on September 22 in the Canadian House of Commons, the university began a review of a [CAD] $30,000 endowment fund that existed in Mr Hunka’s name.

“In 2019, Mr Hunka’s family provided the donation to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the university. Endowments can be named for the donor or someone else they choose.

“After careful consideration of the complexities, experiences, and circumstances of those impacted by the situation, we have made the decision to close the endowment and return the funds to the donor. The university recognises and regrets the unintended harm caused. 

“On behalf of the university, I want to express our commitment to address anti-semitism in any of its manifestations, including the ways in which the Holocaust continues to resonate in the present. The university’s core values include a commitment to academic integrity and to inclusivity in its research, teaching, and community-building efforts.”

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the university’s sterling research skills, but at least some form of belated apology, if not reparation as yet, to Waffen SS victims. 

Watch this space.

But this whole “embarrassment” could certainly have been avoided if only Justin Trudeau had found someone who had been aware of “the context.”

Why could he not include a reliable academic expert on Ukraine in his cabinet? Someone, perhaps, with personal family knowledge of Ukraine? Better still, a former Rhodes scholar familiar with the history, and culture of the region? An adviser who had studied not only at Harvard and at Oxford but also in Soviet Ukraine? A Liberal Party activist fluent in both Russian and Ukrainian, and who had mixed for decades at the highest levels of Canadian-Ukrainian circles. It would be even better, of course, if such a person had an impeccable journalistic background at The Economist, the Financial Times, Reuters and the Washington Post.

Pierre Trudeau found such an expert in the shape of Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s deputy prime minister. Yet unfortunately, Freeland was also visibly one of Hunka’s most fervent parliamentary devotees.

Sometimes context is indeed everything.