You may have recently read a passionate defence of Sir John A MacDonald (one of Canada’s worst prime ministers) in the Atlantic. It came on the heels of a series of defacings and removals of monuments to Canadian historical figures with ties to our residential school system, a re-education camp/concentration camp hybrid designed primarily for the systematic genocide of First Nations children. The inciting incident for those protests was the discovery of the unmarked graves of 215 children on the grounds of a former school in Kamloops BC. That school is one of 150 such dotted across the country. It is believed that the grisly discovery there is not an isolated incident. More recently Cowesses First Nation made a similar finding on the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan. For many Canadians, like the Atlantic’s David Frum, the larger social ill here is destroying a hunk of metal, not the centuries of horror the men represented in them have inflicted on Canada’s First Nations people throughout history and up to the present day. (The last residential school closed as recently as 1996, the same year the last episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air aired.) Many First Nations people will tell you Canada’s Foster Care system is the new way that Canada inflicts pain on these communities.
What’s always curious in discussions about Canada’s ‘monuments’ is that many of them honour pretty dubious figures. Canada’s right wing will yell at you that there is a monument to Justin Trudeau’s dad, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (and there is, strangely, in Thornhill, Ontario, a place which holds no special connection to the man’s life) and while Pierre may be remembered for his groundbreaking statement that “There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” he’s also a man who declared martial law on his home province in the FLQ crisis, turning the might of the state and the police on its own citizens. His statue has been vandalized many times as well, to far less outrage in the media than Sir John A or Egerton Ryerson, another recent removal after weeks of defacement.
Another particularly curious statue defacement happened last year, and if you blinked, you may have missed the coverage of it. In July, police began investigating a hate crime. The crime in question? A defacement of a statue commemorating SS Troops from World War II. In layman’s terms: Someone defaced a memorial to Nazis. A memorial that has been standing proudly in the middle of Oakville for decades.
Oakville is a city in Canada. Canada was not a site of World War II.
In the country which was a primary battleground of the war, you are legally barred from commemorating Nazis in any way, let alone erecting a statue to them. And yet here, for some reason, the police investigated the defacement of this statue, which should not exist, as a hate crime.
How did Oakville, Ontario come to be the site of a statue commemorating Nazis anyway? Oakville is the home to many Ukrainian immigrants. The cemetery which hosts the monument is a predominantly Ukrainian one, connected to St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral. But the story of the division commemorated is unequivocal: They were Ukrainian nationalists, who joined forces with the Nazis, and they are accused of not only slaughtering Polish people but Jewish women and children. It is not currently known who opted to erect the memorial in the first place. Strangely enough, no one from the church is in a rush to come forward and explain it.
What’s worse is it’s hardly the only monument to Nazis or Nazi collaborators in Canada.
In Edmonton, Alberta, a city which is no stranger to racist controversy (it recently changed the name of its CFL team due to it being a racial slur against Inuit people), there sits a bust of Roman Shukhevych. There is no equivocation about the history of Shukhevych. He lead a bloody battalion, which, as part of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), is estimated to have massacred up to 100,000 Polish people. (St. Volodymyr also has a monument to the UPA.)
These statues are not aberrations: they are a holdover from a time when Canada was very welcoming to Nazi Collaborators. While people are mostly familiar with America’s Operation Paperclip, a system designed to brain drain Germany of its best Nazi scientific minds, Canada similarly looked the other way at Germans immigrating after the war despite their records as concentration camp guards, elite Nazi operatives, and the aforementioned collaborators from Ukraine. There are two reasons for this the government has admitted to: to ‘aid in the Cold War’ and to break labor movements at home. There is another one that looms over that remains unsaid, however: Anti-Semitism. Canada is the country after all which uttered the famous phrase “None Is Too Many” when it was debated how many Jewish refugees from the war to take in.
“Surely these monuments are isolated incidents, and are ‘blips in the system’ which give us a window into a far darker time in Canada’s history,” you might be thinking. “Surely nobody today would be looking to fund, let alone build a monument to Nazis in Canada now.” You would be wrong. Since 2008, there have been efforts to build a Victims of Communism Memorial in Canada. The name is a veil under which lies its true goal: it is an attempt to re-write history by minimizing the role of fascism in World War II, and highlight Communism as the larger evil, mourning the deaths of Nazi collaborators in the process. In the most direct reading of this: it is holocaust denial couched in anti-Communism, funded largely by groups with close affiliation to ex-Nazi collaborators, similar to those depicted in the Nazi monuments. It also just received 4 million dollars in federal government funding (adding to the 3 million pledged by the previous hardcore conservative administration) announced by Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister, herself a PROUD (as she will tell you in her own words) granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi, Mykhailo Khomiak who ran an anti-semitic, pro-Nazi newspaper during the war, and who described Poland as being ‘infected by Jews.’ It should be noted that Chrystia Freeland’s party’s slogan is “Sunny Ways”, a shorthand for their ‘egalitarian’ and ‘progressive’ approach to Canada.
Canada is now actively participating in the erasure of an important part of World War II history: that it was the Communists, not the Allies who liberated the concentration camps. This is holocaust denial. Erasure of this point sets a dangerous precedent. It sets the stage for a complete re-writing of the events of the war to demonize Communists and burnish the reputations of fascists and collaborators. It is an echo of the rewriting of history that led Canada to its brutal reckoning with the 215 children’s bodies in Kamloops. Governments working with institutions and churches can help demonize the defenceless and venerate the diabolical to such a point where they will have you showing reverence to the villains in monuments, under threat of legal repercussions. This is what David Frum, known primarily for his war criminal role in re-writing the threat of WMDs as a pretext for the Iraq war, resulting in a million deaths, would have you celebrate: a drunk Prime Minister who set up the conditions to “kill the Indian in the child,” a policy that never truly ended in Canada, and which is on display now on the world stage.
Canada has always been a brutal settler colonial nation, no stranger to genocide and white supremacy — it supported Apartheid for decades, and Pierre Trudeau sympathized with the oppressors, not the oppressed — and one which really doesn’t have much of a problem with fascism, or antisemitism. The proof is sitting in cemeteries and parks across the nation, in the names of schools and streets, and in the continued approach we take politically at home toward our First Nations people, as well as abroad, as we gleefully confirm fascist coups in South America. It’s time for the world to realize that Canada is just as corrupt and bloodthirsty as what Canada’s idea is of America.
Karen Geier is a writer and content strategist living in Toronto with her dog Pee Wee. Find her on Twitter.