The Hon. the Speaker: Honourable senators, I wish to draw your attention to the presence in the gallery of members of the Parliament of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines. They are the guests of the Honourable Senators McCallum and Galvez.

On behalf of all honourable senators, I welcome you to the Senate of Canada.

Hon. Colin Deacon: Honourable senators, the Auditor General of Canada has just sounded the alarm on federal government inaction in the delivery of effective and cost-efficient digital services to Canadians. The findings of Report 7, Modernizing Information Technology Systems, and Report 8, The Benefits Delivery Modernization Programme, reaffirm why I introduced Motion No. 107 in this chamber. They also highlight the immense work still needed to advance a whole-of-government approach to modernizing digital service delivery.

Report 7 focused on the Treasury Board of Canada and Shared Services Canada’s efforts to drive IT transformation across all departments and agencies efficiently. The report found that in the 24 years since aging IT systems were identified as a significant service delivery risk, both Liberal and Conservative governments have failed to implement an effective strategy to digitize service delivery across all departments. Additionally, only 38% of the government’s IT systems were in good health. This means that 6 out of 10 applications remain in poor condition because they are running on highly risky, aging infrastructure.

Furthermore, one third of mission-critical applications — essential to the health, safety, security and economic well-being of Canadians — are still considered in poor health. Without decisive action, this government is set to miss its own target of having 60% healthy applications by 2030.

Colleagues, think about what this means for the millions of Canadians who are trying to access benefits from the government, especially our seniors or those whose jobs are insecure.

Report 8 focused on the Benefits Delivery Modernization program and it showed that a lack of action could jeopardize $125 billion in Old Age Security and Canada Pension Plan payments and $25 billion in Employment Insurance benefits in this current fiscal year.

It’s crucial for this government to act collaboratively to deliver the highest standards of services to Canadians. Doing so will require the Treasury Board to adopt key performance indicators and standards centred on citizen experience, security and ongoing agility. This will also require departments and agencies to collect data needed to assess and continuously improve the citizen experience. As legislators, we can also examine existing legislation to address potential barriers to the adoption of digital government services and learn from successful jurisdictions.

Colleagues, the Auditor General recently said that “. . . the government should not need a crisis to understand the importance of prompt action.” I wholeheartedly agree. I am optimistic that the new President of the Treasury Board, Anita Anand, and Minister of Citizens’ Services, Terry Beech, will take the recommendations in these reports, and the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s report last month, to act decisively on this all-important issue. Canadians are depending on their leadership.

Thank you, colleagues.

Senator Housakos: Well, you have axed the tax. You’ve paused it, but for a certain segment: Atlantic Canada regarding home heating. Your minister — Minister Hutchings — was on Question Period this weekend, and she said clearly that the only reason they’re doing the segmented cut is because they’re only helping Liberal voters in Liberal sectors of the country, and if the other parts and sectors of the country want the same kind of relief, they should be voting Liberal. Is that the position of this government, or will the Prime Minister and your government reel in this minister for either lying or telling the truth?

Senator Wells: Of course, Senator Dalphond.

Senator Wells: Thank you. Let me explain.

The opportunity to defeat a report, and the amendments that came with it, at committee is part of the normal rules — you would know that. This is one avenue we can take. I think, if your amendment is valid and worthy of consideration by the chamber, it should be debated on that merit. If you would like to bring that amendment back at third reading, where everyone can have a chance to debate and discuss it, I think that’s the appropriate place to do it.

Hon. Marty Deacon: Honourable senators, today I rise to celebrate the life and contributions of a centenarian from Waterloo Region. Mildred Seibel, from Knox Waterloo Presbyterian Church, turned 100 years old last Thursday. Ellen Yessis recently shared Mildred’s story with the church community. These are some of her words:

Born in 1923, Mildred was asked what she felt from her early years influenced the lady she became. From Mildred:

Cars were just coming into vogue, most people travelled in horse and buggy, so the times made you accepting of your circumstances.

She began her teaching career in 1942. At that time almost all teachers worked in a village school, comprising grades 1 through 8. In that first school she had a fireman, meaning a senior student —

— a boy —

— from grade 8, who came in every morning to get the two stoves started to provide heat for the rest of the day. Mildred had no knowledge of wood stoves and found the collaboration with this young lad very significant. It made her realize that working together with the community and others around you brings success and accomplishment. Amazingly, she is still in contact with four people from that first year in teaching.

Mildred has continued with that philosophy of thankfulness and contribution throughout her life. Following her retirement from active teaching at Three Bridges Public School, she spent another 23 years volunteering there. She also learned to play the organ, faithfully practising the music and playing the organ for the joy of others.

When she was asked, “What wisdom would you like to share with us as a woman of 100 years of age?,” Mildred noted that women now have a much stronger voice in society than they did in the past. She has used that voice in trying to be helpful and to give back to her community. In particular, she has taken up a card and letter ministry in her church. It is important to her that older members, some of whom are no longer able to get out and about, still know that they are remembered and appreciated.

Our elders in the community must never be seen as invisible.

Her writing ministry also extends to the youth of the church, in particular, students who are away from home and their church connection when they leave for university. Several of these students have continued the correspondence for years and years. From one of those students who received letters and wrote to Mildred:

I received my first letter from Mildred in 2015 when I began my first year as an undergraduate student at Laurier. Eight years later, as a PhD student, I still get excited opening the mailbox and looking for her letters. The pandemic lockdowns were a particularly difficult time for everyone, yet the letters from Mildred always brightened my day. I continue to enjoy learning about Mildred and her experiences throughout the years in Waterloo as well as keeping up to date on how her garden is doing and how she enjoys the holidays. I look forward to continuing our correspondence and wish Mildred a very happy birthday!

Happy Birthday, Mildred. Congratulations on a very full life well lived.

Meegwetch.

Senator Gold: Far from it. It means that a caucus as broad and diverse as the caucus of this government includes diverging interests and an openness to discussion aimed at reaching an appropriate solution under the circumstances.

Senator Gold: Again, I am not really able to answer that question except to underline, as we all know, how challenging this particular circumstance is, given the position that the government and those in control of Afghanistan have taken — not only toward the outside world, but also with their citizens.

Senator Gold: The government has no intention of doing what you suggested. My 15 seconds have expired, so I’ll leave it at that.

Senator Simons: I’m not going to ask you today, Government Representative, when those seats will be filled, but I also can’t help but note that all of the seats for the people who are on the Selection Committee for the four Western provinces are currently vacant. Can you tell us when you intend to fill those seats?

Hon. Senators: Hear, hear!

Senator Simons: I think it’s a matter of public record that the current Premier of Alberta does not intend to nominate people because she believes in the previous government’s senators-in-waiting election process. Does that mean that Albertans will be denied representation in the Senate until there is a change of government in Alberta, or does the government intend to do something to fill those seats?

Senator Simons: I rise today to speak in support of Bill S-276, an Act respecting Ukrainian Heritage Month. After all, I come from Edmonton where pretty much every month is Ukrainian heritage month.

There’s a simple reason for that, because the area just northeast of Edmonton is where Ukrainian Canadians first came to be.

On September 7, 1891, Iwan Pylypow and Wasyl Eleniak landed in Quebec City and began a trip across Canada, looking for a place that Ukrainian pioneers could settle and farm. They criss-crossed the Prairies, assessing for suitability. They made stops in Winnipeg, in Langenburg, in what is now Saskatchewan, and in Calgary. In the end, they decided to follow the lead of some of their Mennonite friends and neighbours from the old country and founded a colony northwest of Edmonton, near what is now the town of Lamont.

The first group of six families — Canada’s very first Ukrainian pioneers — arrived in Edmonton in June of 1892. The colony they established grew to become the largest agricultural bloc settlement founded by Ukrainians in Canada. By 1914, it stretched 110 kilometres east to west and for 70 kilometres north to south.

Life was not easy for those first Ukrainian settlers, who had to break and clear their homesteads, build shelters against the unforgiving cold and try to hold on to their language and their faiths in the face of the forces of xenophobia and assimilation.

But they persevered.

In 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, the government of Canada declared the War Measures Act, and under its powers, imprisoned thousands of Ukrainian males as enemy aliens in internment camps across the country. Many were forced to perform hard labour, working on projects such as the building of Banff National Park, as well as in mining and logging operations. Another 80,000 “enemy aliens,” most of them Ukrainian, were forced to carry identity papers and regularly report to local police.

The irony is that the land we now call Ukraine was then split between the Russian Empire, which was a wartime ally of Great Britain and Canada, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was on the opposing side.

While thousands of Ukrainians were interned, hundreds of Ukrainian Canadians volunteered to serve in the war. Ukrainians, for example, made up one of the largest contingents in Edmonton’s own 218th Canadian Overseas Infantry Battalion, which dubbed itself, rather inaccurately, the Canadian Irish guards.

Among those who enlisted in the Canadian Irish guards was Andrew Shandro, Alberta’s first Ukrainian-Canadian MLA and the first person of Ukrainian descent to be elected to any provincial legislature in Canada. It must be said, though, that Shandro’s decision to enlist may not have been entirely selfless. He was already a sitting MLA in 1914 but stood accused of bribing voters to win his seat, which, given Alberta politics at the time, was probably not so unusual. But when the war began, Alberta changed its electoral law to say that any MLA who joined the military would be allowed to retain their seat by acclamation in the 1917 election. And Lieutenant Shandro thus proudly wore his uniform into the legislature, despite being told that that was against the rules.

While Shandro left a mixed legacy in the legislature, in 1926, an Alberta teacher and community activist, Michael Luchkovich became Canada’s first Ukrainian MP, representing the district of Vegreville as a member of the United Farmers of Alberta. He served two terms with distinction, spoke out passionately for the rights of Ukrainians in Canada and in Europe and went on to become one of the founders of the CCF, or Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of today’s NDP.

William Hawrelak, who just happened to be Andrew Shandro’s son-in-law, became Edmonton’s first Ukrainian-Canadian mayor in 1951 and the first Ukrainian Canadian to be mayor of any large Canadian city. He held office until 1959, again from 1963 to 1965 and again from 1974 until he died in office in 1975.

In some ways, he was Edmonton’s greatest mayor, responsible for the building of our modern post-war city. But his years in office were controversial ones, as he was repeatedly accused of unethical and illegal behaviour and forced to resign twice. But his popularity was such that he kept getting re-elected, including in 1963, when the campaign culminated in a genuine riot between Hawrelak’s opponents and backers.

Nonetheless, when William Hawrelak died in office, the city renamed its most important river valley park in his honour.

Today, the influence of Ukrainian culture and heritage is everywhere in Edmonton and the wider Edmonton region. Some of those symbols are creative — a giant statue of a pysanka Easter egg in Vegreville; a giant statue of a kubasa sausage in Mundare; a giant perogy on a giant fork in Glendon — and some are more mundane, like Cheemo perogies in every supermarket freezer case.

Other legacies are less obvious, perhaps. Ukrainians weren’t just among the first settlers to break the land. They worked in mines and packing plants. They built railway lines and worked on road crews. And they built other things too, such as Edmonton’s Al Rashid Mosque, the first mosque in Canada, which was designed and built by Ukrainian Canadian Mike Dreworth, who created a mosque with a uniquely Eastern Orthodox vibe, another example of how Ukrainian culture permeates the city.

We see that cultural legacy too in the story of the Holowach family. Sam Holowach originally came to Alberta to farm in the Bloc Settlements, but gave up the country life to open a tailor shop and dry cleaners in downtown Edmonton, where he became one of Edmonton’s first Ukrainian entrepreneurs. His son Walter was a gifted musician who returned from studying violin in Vienna to become first violinist and then the concertmaster with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.

With his younger brother Ambrose, Walter co-founded Edmonton’s Empire Opera Company in 1940. Ambrose, with a flair for the operatic, perhaps, then went into politics, first as a federal MP in 1953 and then an MLA, in both cases for the Social Credit Party.

In the House of Commons in the early 1950s, Ambrose Holowach spoke out strongly about Indigenous land rights and living conditions on-reserve. He also gave speeches about the importance of funding for the arts.

In 1959, he ran provincially and became Alberta’s first Ukrainian cabinet minister. He was the moving force behind Alberta’s provincial museum — now the Royal Alberta Museum — choosing the site, hiring the architect and pushing for the completion of the project.

But strangely and poetically, the Holowachs are best remembered now for their magnificent tree, a horse chestnut which was planted in 1920 by the father, Sam, from a seed that Walter, the violinist, brought home from Europe. Today, the Holowachs’ family business is just a memory — but the tree, more than 100 years old and 30 feet high, still stands, gloriously, in downtown Edmonton, a symbol of beauty and survival against all odds.

There is so much more I could tell you about Edmonton and Alberta’s Ukrainian heritage and legacy. I could talk about the splendid writings of popular historian Myrna Kostash and novelist Todd Babiak; the glorious whirlwind of the Shumka dancers; the art of William Kurelek or Ron Kostyniuk; the acclaimed cuisine of Metis-Ukrainian chefs Brad and Cindy Lazarenko and the remarkable courage of outspoken trans activist Marni Panas.

Ukrainian cultural leaders from Edmonton and Alberta were a vital part of the third-force coalition of Canadians who pushed past the binary of Canada as a bilingual and bicultural country. They helped to create the template for multiculturalism itself, which made room for all the other cultural communities to find a place for themselves in the Canadian mosaic.

Let me give you a concrete an example. Let’s take Mike Strembitsky, the first Ukrainian superintendent of Edmonton Public Schools. As a boy, growing up in Smoky Lake, Alberta, he was beaten for speaking Ukrainian at school. As superintendent, in the 1970s, he pioneered Ukrainian bilingual immersion programs in Edmonton Public Schools. Those programs were so successful that Edmonton Public Schools expanded its heritage language programs to include immersive bilingual schooling in Arabic, Mandarin, German, Hebrew and Spanish, while the Edmonton Catholic School Division, to follow suit, has programs in Ukrainian, Tagalog and Cree. But this groundbreaking multicultural educational philosophy pioneered in Edmonton was only possible because Mike Strembitsky led the way.

For more than 130 years, Ukrainian Canadians preserved their culture and language in Canada, including during times when the Soviet Union sought to destroy it. That same commitment to their homeland explains why so many Albertans have opened their homes, hearts and wallets now to support a new wave of Ukrainian refugees and settlers.

I am not Ukrainian, but I grew up immersed in Ukrainian culture because my German family and my Jewish family all came to this country from Ukraine. Relations amongst those communities weren’t always easy in the old country, or here in the new one. These are complicated, interlocking stories, and sometimes they are deeply painful, but — together — Germans, Jews and Ukrainians left the old world behind them, travelled to the Prairies and endeavoured together to build a new community here, where we could all be equal and accepted. It’s been a long journey, and it’s not yet complete.

As a child growing up in Alberta, I grew up immersed in the triumphant, mythic story of Ukrainian settlement — the story of doughty pioneers who left poverty and oppression in their homeland, settled on the Prairies, faced down both the bigotry of their Anglo-Saxon neighbours and the harshness of the Alberta elements, hung on fiercely to their culture and language, and triumphed as advocates for multiculturalism. It is a great narrative, and one worth celebrating.

But I never fully realized in my Alberta youth how much that settler narrative erased the story of the original peoples of this place, or how much our province’s official glorification of its Ukrainian pioneers relied upon the official forgetting of the bitter truth of First Nations and Métis cultures all but destroyed.

That’s why I want to end this speech by telling you the story of Ancestors and Elders, a truly remarkable work of dance theatre co-created by Edmonton’s Shumka Dancers and the Running Thunder Cree Dancers.

I first saw this show on stage at Edmonton’s Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in the spring of 2019. It was a revelation, and I wish I could show it all to you. It combined Eastern European and Indigenous dance traditions in a theatre piece that explored reconciliation, resilience and cultural preservation — the pains of racism and the parallels between two cultures under threat and struggling to survive. It made traditional Ukrainian folk dance into something entirely new and contemporary — fresh and fierce, politically relevant and absolutely Canadian. It filled me with hope for the country we are striving to build together.

So when I voice my support for a Ukrainian heritage month, I’m not just talking about preserving the past; I’m talking about the hard work of creating our future — a nation where we recognize all the painful history that we share, but where we work together with joy and perseverance to make a better Canada for all Canadians.

Thank you, hiy hiy and spasibo.

(Debate adjourned.)

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Boehm, seconded by the Honourable Senator Galvez, for the second reading of Bill C-248, An Act to amend the Canada National Parks Act (Ojibway National Urban Park of Canada).

Senator Dalphond: Senator Wells, you said that if the report is adopted, that changes nothing; amendments can be moved at the third reading. If the report is adopted, you could move a motion to have this amendment removed from the bill, so why do you want to kill it at the report stage and not debate it fully, as we normally do, at third reading? Then we will all have the opportunity to take part in the debate.

As the sponsor, you would then have 45 minutes to explain and convince colleagues that your amendment is worth receiving and should be adopted. That is when we, as critics, will have 45 minutes to explain why it shouldn’t be adopted.

Why don’t we debate according to normal rules? That will not prevent you from bringing an amendment. If this report is adopted as is, it doesn’t preclude you from bringing an amendment. I don’t understand.

Senator Gold: The temporary exemption for heating with oil applies across the country, wherever people find themselves forced to do that without the alternatives some of us enjoy. By helping people switch through the rebates to heat pumps, the government is making sure that families across the country have an affordable and sustainable way to keep their houses warm.

Senator Gold: Thank you, senator. The Online News Act is designed to build on and strengthen existing supports for journalism — including the Canadian journalism labour tax credit — and increase funding to the Canada Periodical Fund that many local media rely upon, along with other local journalism initiatives. These are all important steps the government is taking in its commitment to continue to support local journalism in its role in keeping Canadians informed and safe.

Senator Batters: That tiny rural supplement is your government’s admission that rural Canadians are unfairly walloped by the carbon tax. While you give Atlantic Canadians a break on oil heating, this does nothing for those of us in the often bitterly cold West where we must heat with natural gas. In fact, you and your Trudeau government have stalled and gutted a bill to exempt egg operations from carbon tax as you again penalize Prairie farmers. Why does this government continue to punish Western Canadians, farmers and rural Canadians? Don’t they elect enough Liberals?

Senator Gold: Of course, there are norms of international law and norms of humanitarian law. There are also norms that prohibit human shields or hidden weapons factories in schools and hospitals.

The Israeli army is facing an enemy that does not respect any norms of humanitarian or international law. This is a tragedy for all those who are victims of this war. However, we must be realistic and well informed before drawing conclusions.

[English]

Senator Miville-Dechêne: I would like to come back to the question of hospitals in northern Gaza. I find the whole issue disturbing.

Israeli forces are demanding that they be evacuated. However, staff are refusing because it would mean certain death for many patients who need ventilators. Are the principles of international humanitarian law not at stake? Does Canada have an opinion on this situation, which is quite simply unacceptable?

Senator Plett: It’s a lot colder in Winnipeg than it is in Atlantic Canada, and natural gas isn’t cheap.

A Trudeau cabinet minister, the Minister for Rural Economic Development, has made it clear this is pure politics and nothing else. Minister Hutchings told CTV that Canadians need to “. . . elect more Liberals in the Prairies . . .” to get carve-outs from the Trudeau carbon tax policies — elect more Liberals.

An old saying about a carrot and a stick comes to mind, leader. Is that the role of the carbon tax, a carrot for those who vote Liberal and a stick —