Canada’s political leaders have expressed shock and shame that their Parliament honored a Ukrainian immigrant who fought in a Nazi unit during World War II. But a Forward investigation found that the Canadian government has given some $2.2 million over the last seven years to at least eight groups that have championed the same unit’s veterans or otherwise lauded Nazi collaborators.
Some of those groups rushed to defend the immigrant, 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, and the ovation he received last month, even as it sparked the resignation of the House speaker who invited him to the Parliamentary session and an apology from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Most of the money went to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, a sprawling umbrella group that has praised Hunka’s unit — known as SS Galichina or Galizien — and defended a monument to it in the Toronto suburb of Oakville. The congress is listed on public records as the recipient of nearly $1.5 million between 2016 and 2022, much of it for translation services for new immigrants.
Then there is the Ukrainian National Federation of Canada, a 40-plus-year-old cultural organization whose logo contains the insignia of a faction of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. The group got the equivalent of $140,000 in grants between 2015 and 2022, mainly to provide summer jobs for youth. Last month, its president said of Hunka: “The fact that he was a soldier doesn’t mean he was a Nazi” but conceded that applauding him “maybe wasn’t correct” given the circumstances.”
And the New Pathway newspaper, which once said a Canadian Jewish newspaper was fanning “ethnic discord” by calling for the removal of a monument to a Nazi collaborator, received about $68,000 from a fund that supports local publishers. The newspaper also wrote in 2020 that SS Galichina veterans were “subjected to unwarranted attacks labeling them as ‘Nazis’” and that the division was “wrongly accused of ‘Nazism’.” (more...)
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