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Member of Parliament

Marcus Powlowski

  • Member of Parliament
  • Member of Parliament
  • Liberal
  • Thunder Bay—Rainy River
  • Ontario
  • Voting Attendance: 64%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $144,359.62

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 37 - Feb/28/22
Mr. Marcus Powlowski (Thunder Bay—Rainy River, Lib.)
  • Feb/28/22 8:00:47 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, many Canadians have a connection with Ukraine. There are a lot of new immigrants from Ukraine in Canada, and first and foremost my thoughts are with them, because they have immediate family and friends in Ukraine. I can certainly imagine what it is like for them every time they hear the phone ring, wondering who is calling and about what. There are many other Canadians like me. I spent the first number of years of my life living with my parents and grandparents in a part of Fort William, which is now Thunder Bay and which has a large Ukrainian-Canadian population. My baba was from near Horodenka and my dido, or grandfather, was from Kamyanets-Podilskyy. I spent many summer evenings as a child sitting with my baba on the steps of her corner store, which actually was not on the corner, partly because baba used to brazenly bribe me with Fudgesicles and Creamsicles from the store in order to get me to sit with her. She would sit for hours singing old Ukrainian hymns and telling stories about what used to happen in the old country. That was in between going in and out of the store and selling people cigarettes and candy. Because so many of my early memories revolve around Ukraine and Ukrainians, even though I do not speak Ukrainian and even though I have only visited Ukraine once in my life, I feel very much that Ukraine is part of my soul. Of course, people do not have to be Ukrainian in order to sympathize with what is happening in Ukraine or with Ukrainians. We all see the pictures, but the pictures are only a very small part of what is happening in Ukraine. Certainly, we have statistics, contested statistics, about the number of deaths and injuries, but let us remember what Joseph Stalin once said, which is that a million deaths is a statistic and one death is a tragedy. Certainly, for each statistic, every death is a tragedy; it means a phone call to a parent telling them a child will not be coming home or that a child will not have their parent coming home as they told the child they would. All of this tragedy is the direct and total responsibility of Vladimir Putin and the people who support Vladimir Putin. It is Vladimir Putin who decided to walk in the steps of Joseph Stalin. Ukrainians and Russians are, in fact, brothers and sisters, but this is brother killing brother. The only brother who kills his brother is a madman like Putin, but let us not forget, in this immense human tragedy worthy of Dostoevsky, the suffering of many Russians as well, many of whom are dying fighting their brothers and sisters in Ukraine. Let us also not forget about the mothers and fathers of Russian soldiers who are anxiously awaiting their children's return from Ukraine. As a doctor who has certainly dealt with death and has worked in places where I saw a lot of trauma, including close to war zones, I can absolutely tell members that the suffering of a parent losing a child or the suffering of a child losing a parent are exactly the same. It does not matter whether one is from Ethiopia, Haiti, Thunder bay, Ottawa, Ukraine or Russia. In my allotted time I could have talked about more lofty issues, such as the fact that this invasion presents an existential threat to the international legal order, which it certainly does; how that international legal order grew, in no small part, out of the Second World War; and the fact that in so many ways the UN charter and international legal order were the result of the Second World War and the sacrifices so many Russians and Ukrainians made in that war. I also do not have too much time to talk about what we can and cannot do, other than to repeat what a number of people in our party have said, which is that all options remain on the table. To my family in Ukraine, some of whom, as I speak, are waiting with guns for the Russians to come; to their parents who are worried and praying for them; to the people of Ukraine; to the very many good Russian people: I support you, my family supports you, the Canadian people support you, good people all around the world support you, and certainly this Parliament supports you. Slava Ukraini.
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