Thanos Thanos:
It's the duty of the Speaker's Office and of the sitting government to vet any person who appears in the Commons to receive a recognition or acknowledgement. It's not the job of the Opposition to do this task. Poilievre is what he is but despite your inane attempt at whataboutism none of this embarrassment is any of his fault at all.
It just shows how genuinely stupid some of our politicians, including the House Speaker, can truly be. This is what happens when history is regarded as unimportant by our ruling class, you end up seeing a chamber full of gullibles giving a round of applause to someone who volunteered to help out the Third Reich with their activities at places like Babi Yar, Rumbula, Ponary, or a thousand other murder sites. It's entirely credible to imagine that the current crop of MPs are that genuinely unware of history to completely not know that Eastern Europeans who were old enough to serve in World War Two & and who emigrated to Canada or the US after 1945 are a problematic lot. No, not all of them were war criminals who willingly massacred defenseless civilians as part of an auxiliary or police force for the Third Reich. But some of them definitely were. To not giving them at least a cursory examination to get a general idea of the background from their younger years before applauding them is a major dereliction of duty.
Here's
a summary of just how big a fiasco this was:$1:
When I think about this fiasco statistically, I am almost tempted to sympathize with Rota a little bit. Yaroslav Hunka is almost certainly the last surviving Canadian citizen to have fought for the SS in any theatre. There would probably have been no question of him receiving a parliamentary accolade unless he happened to live in the same parliamentary constituency as the Speaker, and perhaps to know him personally. What, I ask you without a shred of irony, are the odds? Thousands to one? Millions?
It may very well be that the Liberal government is blameless in what adds up to a dreadful Canadian foreign-policy fiasco; no doubt the access-to-information requests for the potential background of this scandal are being revved up as we speak. Rota, as Speaker, undoubtedly had the constitutional ability to recognize Hunka in his own remarks without even googling his background, which might have turned up the old chap’s
own written account of the reasons and context for his SS service. (Hunka’s article mentions that, as a 16-year-old student, he wondered why Jewish classmates were “running away from such a civilized western people” as the Germans.) The very text of Rota’s own speech — “Hey, you know who else fought against the Russians back in the early ’40s?” – would surely have rung alarms in the mind of any semi-educated person who glanced at it.
The guy's page is in what's presumably Ukrainian, but Google Translate clears it up well enough. Not to mention that his talking about "fighting the Russians during World War II" should've been a red flag the size of Prince Edward Island right from the start.
I'm actually starting to get a headache trying to imagine how anyone could've possibly thought this was a good idea.