OTTAWA – In a year marking the 125th anniversary of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, and eight years after the Alberta legislature passed legislation recognizing the fourth Saturday of every November as Holodomor Memorial Day, the province’s sole Ukrainian Canadian Cabinet member hopes that opposition members of Alberta’s Legislative Assembly have learned from community outrage over their comparison of his government’s carbon tax initiative to Joseph Stalin’s genocidal famine that cost over 7 million Ukrainians their lives in 1932-1933.
Alberta Economic Development and Trade Minister Deron Bilous, whose grandparents were born in Ukraine, says he was “outraged” when Member of the Legislative Assembly [MLA] Rick Strankman last month posted a blog, co-authored by eight of his colleagues from the Official Opposition right-wing Wildrose Party. It referenced a 2012 article by Thomas Sewell, a senior fellow in public policy at Stanford University, arguing that pilgrims “nearly starved” and “learned the hard way that people would not do as much for the common good as they would do for their own good,” and that “similar experiments” in “equal sharing” resulted in people starving to death in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Communist China.
In their since-removed blog titled “How Much is Too Much,” the nine Wildrose MLAs wrote that Mr. Sowell pointed out how North America’s early settlers “considered all lands common property with no incentive for an individual to produce, and that “the same situation existed in Russia during the 1930s resulting in the starvation of nearly 6 million people that lived on the most fertile land on the planet.”
They said the Alberta’s left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) government’s carbon tax, which became law in June, would not and could not “create incentive for anyone exporting products outside of Alberta.”
Mr. Bilous told The Ukrainian Weekly that he was “absolutely offended” by the blog post’s linking the levy with the Holodomor, which he studied while attending one of Edmonton’s two Ukrainian-English bilingual elementary schools.
“We’re talking about a policy of death by intentional starvation and one of the most horrific acts in world history,” said 40-year-old Mr. Bilous, who also serves as deputy government house leader and represents an Edmonton riding for the NDP in the provincial legislature. “There was a lot of shock and surprise and disbelief in the Ukrainian Albertan community when people read the blog post.”
He explained that, as someone of Ukrainian descent, he was “outraged” to have the Holodomor “so flippantly” compared to a government policy.
Dave Hanson, one of the Wildrose MLAs who signed onto the post, apologized in the Alberta legislature.
“A column went out with my name on it that inadvertently made light of not just my history, but the story of Albertans of Ukrainian heritage across this province,” he said in his member’s statement. “This was wrong and I speak for all members involved. We apologize unreservedly for this post.”
“We believe for any political party to try and push an agenda or an attack using the tragedy of the Ukrainian people and the Holodomor is deplorable,” he added.
Mr. Hanson noted that one of his great-grandmothers was born in Kyiv and came to Canada just a few years before the Holodomor, “narrowly escap[ing] this atrocity” and then had to contend with “rampant” anti-Ukrainian sentiment in Canada.
The Wildrose Party also issued an apology, acknowledging that “the Holodomor was an atrocious and intentional act that saw the death of millions upon millions of Ukrainians,” and that “any interpretation of the column collaborated on by the nine Wildrose MLAs as dismissing the Holodomor as a horrendous act was completely unintentional, and we unreservedly apologize.”
Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean told The Lethbridge Herald that he thought the controversial blog-post was “totally inappropriate” and “unintentional,” and that the MLAs who compared the carbon tax to the Holodomor “feel totally terrible for it, as I do.”
He said that he called Olesia Luciw-Andryjowycz, president of the Alberta Provincial Council of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, and apologized for the post. He told The Herald that he grew up with Ukrainian Canadians in northern Alberta.
“I’m very proud of that heritage being part of Canada’s background, and Canada’s future,” said Mr. Jean, who did not respond to an interview request.
Opposition MLAs from other parties, who voted against the carbon-tax bill, also found the Holodomor reference offensive.
Richard Starke, who represents the Progressive Conservative Party in the legislature and who traces his German ancestry to Ukraine, told the assembly that the “suggestion that the Holodomor or the other atrocities carried out on innocent people living in the [sic] Ukraine were somehow relating to a bill that we are debating is an outrage.”
“It insults the memories of those who died. It insults the suffering of those who survived,” he said.
Mr. Bilous estimates that more than 300,000 Albertans are either Holodomor survivors or are their descendants.
“When the Holodomor is used in such a callous way, without recognizing the pain this causes people of Ukrainian descent throughout the world and at home, we all have a responsibility to stand up and say it is not acceptable,” he said in a statement responding to the blog-post in which he called for an apology from the nine Wildrose MLAs.
Now that several apologies have been made, he wants to see action back the words.
Mr. Bilous would like to see those MLAs “learn about the horrific history Ukrainians went through” and attend Holodomor commemoration events in November, which he said Ukrainian Albertans also have called for.
“But it does beg the question of how did it get to this?” said Mr. Bilous, who previously served as minister of Municipal Affairs in Alberta.
“How does an MLA write something like this and eight others sign off on it thinking it’s okay until they get such a reaction from the community that it was probably offensive and that they’re sorry about it,” he said. “It shows a lack of judgment, quite frankly.”
Alberta’s carbon tax takes effect on January 1, and will be reflected in the price of gasoline at the pumps and in home-heating bills.