COMMENTARY: We must be just today (02/08/04)

COMMENTARY

We must be just today

by Lubomyr Luciuk

We talked and talked and talked. And then the bureaucrats scuttled it.

We'd been discussing Canada's first national internment operations. Thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans were unjustly imprisoned as "enemy aliens" in 24 internment camps, forced to do heavy labor under trying conditions, deprived of what little wealth they had, disenfranchised and subjected to other state-sanctioned censures. Today there is only one known Ukrainian survivor, Mary Manko Haskett. She was born in Montreal and was 6 years old when she was deported with her family into the Quebec wilderness, to a place then known as Spirit Lake. Her younger sister, Nellie, perished there.

Not wanting this relatively unknown story to be forgotten, Canada's Ukrainians have proposed installing trilingual historical plaques at all internment camp locations. We have also called for educational materials for Canadian high schools and for a permanent exhibit at the Cave and Basin National Historic Site, in Banff National Park.

Yes, reminding visitors how forced labor was used to build Banff is not as gladdening as pointing to its natural wonders. However it is as integral to the story of Banff and many other national parks as are the more often told tales about trappers, traders and teepees. Yet, when I last visited, none of the guides knew much about what happened at Castle Mountain or Cave and Basin during World War I. Sure, they capably described the endangered molluscs of the hot pools, in both official languages.

Descendants of survivors of the internment operations were there with me. They were much less impressed with those snail tales than I. Perhaps that is because my father was never herded into a Canadian concentration camp.

Responding to redress requests, Liberal politicians used to intone a mantra taught by their mentor, Pierre Trudeau. Addressing an aboriginal audience in Vancouver in August 1969, Mr. Trudeau approvingly quoted President John F. Kennedy who, asked how Negroes should be compensated for past injustices, replied: "We will be just in our time. This is all we can do. We must be just today." Trudeau liked that, regurgitating this line whenever similar queries about Canadian wrongdoings were raised: "And what about the Acadians who were deported. Shouldn't we compensate for this? What about the Japanese Canadians who were so badly treated during the last war? What can we do to redeem the past? I can only say as President Kennedy said. We must be just today."

Surprisingly, in June 1993, while leader of the Opposition and looking for votes, Jean Chrétién broke faith with Trudeau's axiom, writing how he would personally support redress to the Ukrainian Canadian community, as would the Liberal Party of Canada. Alas, once in office, he forgot. While the former prime minister's broken pledge is all Ukrainian Canadians need remember about him, a fellow's word should be worth something. Over the past decade the community continued pressing for settlement, citing Mr. Chrétien's commitment.

In Minister Sheila Copps we finally thought we had a champion. Although a Chrétien loyalist, she is a woman of true grit. Genuinely anxious to negotiate on the educational initiatives we put forward, she believed that if an accord could be reached on those points we would have gone a long way together toward closure. Regrettably, that was not to be. Minister Copps was told that settling with the Ukrainian Canadians would establish a precedent other communities would exploit.

How odd. If the Japanese Canadian settlement did not establish a precedent, as we have always been told it hadn't, why would a Ukrainian Canadian one be any different? And what would be wrong with using our model to address other grievances? Ukrainian Canadians have never asked for an apology. It's inappropriate to insist that present-day societies apologize for wrongs done decades ago by other people acting in very different circumstances. We also didn't ask for compensation to individual survivors or to the community as a whole, despite the crippling legacy of the internment operations.

Our campaign was always about memory, not money. Recognition of what happened and restitution of the contemporary value of that portion of the internees' confiscated wealth that was never returned, with the latter sum used exclusively for memorial projects of the kinds we outlined, would not cost any taxpayer even one red cent in redress.

You might think officialdom would caper to set such a precedent, so as to have it available for dealing with Chinese, Italian, Sikh, perhaps even Jewish old wounds. Instead, someone high up thwarted us and undercut the minister. Perhaps there is something to the notion that some senior bureaucrats are so pigheadedly Ukrainophobic that, save for our Uncle Toms, Ukrainian Canadians need not apply to the government, for anything.

Just a few days before he finally left office Prime Minister Chrétien forced an agreement through the Cabinet that will see, Queen Elizabeth II, acknowledging the hardships of Le Grand Dérangement, the Great 1755 Expulsion of the Acadians. Perhaps this was a parting sop to Minister Copps, who has Acadian roots. While I have no quarrel with recalling wrongs done before Canada even existed, including misdeeds perpetrated by the forces of one imperial power against the civilians of a defeated one, it seems more important that we deal with the living, and with Canadians, than with those who are neither.

So, Mrs. Haskett will have to wait. She is 95. If the government of Paul Martin is truly different from that of his predecessor it must act soon to conclude what Minister Copps started but was kept from finishing. Let us remember what a great Canadian once said: "We must be just today."

Dr. Luciuk is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and author of "In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainians Canadians, 1914-1920" (Kashtan Press, 2001).

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