NEWS AND VIEWS: Mary Manko and Ukrainian Canadians still waiting for reconciliation settlement (09/03/06)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Mary Manko and Ukrainian Canadians still waiting for reconciliation settlement

by Lubomyr Luciuk

I do extispicy, auguring through the entrails of what politicians have said about Ukrainian Canadians, hoping to conjure up truths about why our people came here and how they have been treated ever since.

Undeniably, our predecessors were admitted because Canada needed farmers. The Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior, bluntly confirmed: "I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for 10 generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality." Promises of free land and freedom lured in some 171,000 before the first world war, helping secure the prairie West.

Not everyone was enamored of "Sifton's pets" - Mackenzie Bowell, our fifth prime minister, editorialized: "The Galicians, they of the sheepskin coats, the filth and the vermin, do not make splendid material for the building of a great nation. One look at the disgusting creatures after they pass through over the CPR on their way West has caused many to marvel that beings bearing the human form could have sunk to such a bestial level."

During Canada's first national internment operations, thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans from lands controlled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire were branded "enemy aliens" and herded into Canadian concentration camps. What little wealth they had was confiscated. Contrary to the Hague Conventions, these civilians were forced into heavy labor to the profit of their gaolers. Many were disenfranchised and subjected to other state-sanctioned indignities, all because of where they had come from, who they were, not because of anything they had done.

Two politicians' pronouncements expose the temper of the times. In July 1919, Hugh Macdonald, son of our first prime minister, wrote Arthur Meighen: "Fear is the only agency that can be successfully employed to keep them within the law and I have no doubt that if the Dominion Government persists in the course that it is now adopting, the foreign element here will soon be as gentle and as easily controlled as a lot of sheep."

In 1924, Herbert S. Clements, MP, offered up an equally intemperate prescription: "I say unhesitatingly that every enemy alien who was interned during the war is today just as much an enemy as he was during the war, and I demand of this government that each and every alien in this dominion should be deported at the earliest opportunity ... Cattle ships are good enough for them."

While speculation about whether Ukrainians are "white people" would engage the minds of xenophobes for decades, ours is a more tolerant society. Perhaps because Ukrainian Canadians never asked for an apology for the injustices they endured - calling only for acknowledgement and a restitution of the contemporary value of the internees' confiscated wealth, those funds dedicated to initiatives aimed at ensuring that no other ethnic, religious or racial minority suffers as they once did - sympathetic words have been secured from politicians, of all persuasions.

Kingston's own Peter Milliken, now speaker of the House of Commons, was first to champion redress, in September 1991. In Winnipeg, in October 1992, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney promised a settlement.

Meanwhile, campaigning to bring the Tories down, Jean Chrétien wrote on June 8, 1993: "The Liberal Party ... supports your efforts to secure the redress of Ukrainian Canadian claims arising from their internment and loss of freedoms during the first world war and interwar period. You can be assured that we will continue to monitor the situation closely and seek to ensure that the government honors its promise." Once elected, Mr. Chrétien spent the decade following ignoring his pledge.

Matters improved when Paul Martin approved an Agreement in Principle, in Regina, on August 24, 2005, with Ottawa then budgeting $2.5 million for commemorative projects and $10 million in additional funding for longer-term educational programming. Not a nickel of that was ever seen for, soon thereafter, a new government was elected. Even so we remained optimistic.

Inky Mark, a Chinese Canadian and Conservative MP representing Dauphin-Swan River-Marquette, a Manitoba riding with a large Ukrainian Canadian constituency, has been the community's best friend on this file for over a decade. Closure, we felt, was imminent.

Even the leader of the Conservative Party, Steven Harper, supported Mr. Mark's Bill C 331 - the Ukrainian Canadian Restitution Act: "I rise today to address an important and unfortunate chapter in Canadian history. I am pleased to give my support ... to Bill C-331. The last remaining survivor of these internment operations, Mary Haskett, is still alive. She will be turning 97 this summer. I sincerely hope that she will live to see an official reconciliation of this past injustice."

Mr. Harper spoke on March 24, 2005. Bill C 331 received Royal Assent November 24, 2005.

Mary Manko was 6 years old when she was interned at Spirit Lake, Quebec. She watched her younger sister, Nellie, die there. Mary never forgot what happened to her family, and others. While able to, in March 1993, she climbed Parliament Hill. She did not do so to demand compensation. She only asked that what happened be remembered.

Mary can no longer travel but she recently celebrated her 98th birthday. Why our prime minister did not mark that happy occasion with the gift of an honorable reconciliation settlement I cannot divine. So I'm writing to ask.

Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk is a director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and author of "Without Just Cause: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914-1920" (Kingston, Kashtan Press, 2006).

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