Chris Selley: Why not a monument to the victims of Canadian ignorance?

More than half of the 550 names attached to Canada’s long-suffering memorial to the victims of communism are now under investigation for ties to Nazis and other fascists, Postmedia’s David Pugliese reported this week. It’s a quintessentially Canadian mess with no obvious good solution near to hand. On X, however, conservative commentator Howard Anglin — former senior aide to Jason Kenney, who was a key proponent of the monument — proposed an interesting devil’s-advocate approach to the dilemma.

“It’s the Victims of Communism memorial, not the Good Victims of Communism memorial. A Victims of Fascism memorial would have the same problem in reverse,” Anglin suggested. “That central and Eastern European (20th-century) history is ugly and complicated is hardly a new problem.”

It’s an important point, well made. But that dog won’t hunt in Ottawa, I’m afraid.

If there was ever an appropriate moment for such a nuanced argument, it would have been during the memorial’s conception and design — not now that the bloody thing is built and paid for, sitting there, forlornly awaiting an unveiling date. (None is currently available.)

Right now, by contrast, is just about the worst conceivable time to attempt such an argument.

Ottawa’s political class is still reeling from the House of Commons’ accidental feting of Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka in September last year. The immediate consensus was that then House Speaker Anthony Rota made an unforgivable mistake inviting him and singling him out in the House for applause — a standing ovation — and that Parliament itself had been shamed in the process. Rota lost his Speaker’s job over it.

Moreover, Jewish groups such as the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center have been front and centre interrogating the pasts of some of the victims of communism honoured by the memorial. Hamas launched its pogrom in southern Israel two weeks after the Hunka debacle. It has become an acutely touchy time to argue it’s OK to honour anyone who fought with the Nazis under any circumstances, because history is complicated.

Mind you, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — who is Jewish, let’s not forget — was happy to applaud Hunka in the House of Commons for his role in the Ukrainian war of independence. Unlike seemingly everyone else in the House that day, Zelenskyy must have understood whom and what he was applauding. Rota laid it all out for everyone — at one point pausing as if he realized too late the implications of what he was saying: “We have here in the chamber today a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98.”

It’s testament to how sheltered Canada’s homeland has been from world history, I think, that seemingly no one else twigged to what Rota seemed to sense: that anyone fighting the communists was aiding the fascists. And it’s especially ridiculous when you remember the arguments and debates we did have about the communism memorial.

The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) pitched an absolute fit, arguing the memorial’s original planned location next to the Supreme Court building — where its members hoped to see a new court building — would ruin every Canadian’s vision of a “judicial triad” in Ottawa.

“As everyone knows, the Parliamentary Triad is complete with the Centre, East and West Blocks firmly established as an iconic expression of Canada’s democracy,” the RAIC wrote in a magnificently precious press release. “However, the Judicial Triad is yet to be realized. The Supreme Court of Canada … lies to the north; the Justice Building … to the east and the parcel in question to the west. … The RAIC believes that only a building of the scale and urban presence of the Supreme Court of Canada, such as the long-planned Federal Court Building, accomplishes the goal of a Judicial Triad.”

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin complained the monument “could send the wrong message within the judicial precinct, unintentionally conveying a sense of bleakness and brutalism that is inconsistent with a space dedicated to the administration of justice.” One suspects she just didn’t like the idea, period. And indeed, many clearly felt the whole idea was stupid and gauche, and mustered the dumbest arguments they could against it.

By my count, roughly 5,000 Canadians felt themselves extremely clever for asking — as Roy McGregor did in the Globe and Mail — “why not a Memorial to the Victims of Christianity (or) Victims of Capitalism?”

Ultimately, I think Canadians — certainly Canadian politics — are simply unsuited to the discussion we would need to have to have this memorial make any coherent sense. As the Hunka debacle illustrated in spades, we neither know nor think much about history — not our own, and not the rest of the world’s — and when we do we generally like it to be as Manichean as possible: Communists bad, anti-communists good (or the opposite, if you prefer). There’s a reason why “American-style” is an all-purpose epithet in Ottawa. America bad, Canada good.

There’s absolutely no good excuse for this state of affairs. It shouldn’t have taken a nonagenarian Ukrainian to visit the House of Commons for us to remember that history is complicated. Canada fought on the same side as the Soviet Union in the Second World War, and that’s supposedly one of the seminal events in our national history. But here we are. If nothing else, we have a brand new memorial to our crippling national unseriousness. Unveiling date TBD.

National Post

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