Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday senior bureaucrats are reviewing the Deschenes Commission report — a 1980s-era independent inqu
[CBC is Canadian State Funded Media]
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday senior bureaucrats are reviewing the Deschenes Commission report — a 1980s-era independent inquiry that looked at alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada — with an eye to making more of it public. Governor General Mary Simon also said today Rideau Hall is sorry for honouring Peter Savaryn — a former chancellor of the University of Alberta who served in the same Nazi unit as Yaroslav Hunka — with the Order of Canada [in 1987].[...]
The vice-regal office is also examining the Golden and Diamond Jubilee medals previously awarded to Savaryn, who also served as president of the Ukrainian World Congress, a group that represents the Ukrainian diaspora.[...] The first [part of the report], which included recommendations to make it easier to extradite war criminals, was released publicly. The second was marked secret and the names of alleged Nazis in Canada were never released. Jewish groups, including B'nai Brith and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre (FSWC), have said the second part should be unredacted and disclosed publicly so that Canadians can learn more about the country's shameful history of admitting an untold number of Nazi collaborators after the Second World War.[...]
"There are top public servants looking very carefully into the issue, including digging into the archives," Trudeau told reporters. "We're going to make recommendations."
Reports suggest as many as 2,000 Ukrainian members of Hitler's Waffen-SS were admitted to Canada after the war — after some British prodding. The commission said the number is likely lower than that.[...]
Quebec Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said it's a delicate issue because the government doesn't want to "bring pain to a lot of Eastern European communities." Hunka, for example, has framed his war service as a fight for Ukrainian independence. The unit he fought for, the 1st Galician division, is also memorialized by Ukrainian expatriate groups at different sites across the country.[...]
The Deschenes report has also concluded that allegations of war crimes committed by this division have "never been substantiated."
That finding conflicts with what the post-war, Allies-led Nuremberg trials concluded about SS units like that one.[...]
"We have to recognize we have a horrible past with Nazi war criminals. We opened our country to people after the war in a way that made it easier to come if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew," Housefather said.[...]
Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, the party's deputy leader, said Canadians need to know more about the country's "dark history" of "letting Nazis through the door to live here in peace and security." Lantsman represents the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, a riding with one of the country's largest Jewish communities. In an interview with CBC News, Lantsman said the party supports revisiting the Deschenes report and its findings in some way.[...]
Asked if it might be too painful for some communities to revisit alleged Second World War-era crimes, Lantsman said "history is painful but that doesn't mean we don't need to reckon with it."[...]
Quebec Conservative MP Gérard Deltell, Poilievre's environment critic, said Wednesday he's not open to revisiting the issue right now.[...]
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said he supports releasing the commission's report.
4 Oct 23
Amazing that all of this is happening because one extremely dumbfuck MP decided to invite a 98 y/o SS volunteer to a meet and greet with Zelenskyy. In the middle of a war where counteracting the Russian "propaganda" of the legacy of Nazism in Ukraine is supposed to be a major point of informational warfare. If I was him I'd literally never show my face in public again lmao.

















