Ambassador Gennady Gatilov on the scandal at the Canadian Parliament

#Opinion by Ambassador Gennady Gatilov

For an entire week, the world has been following Canada's shameful scandal with a Ukrainian Waffen-SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka honoured in the local parliament. What two conclusions can be drawn from Canada’s experience so far?

1) The fate of the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons serves a good lesson for those wishing to repeat such a brazen stunt.

The now former Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, Anthony Rota, was not “born yesterday”. Such a high-ranking political figure simply cannot be unaware of the history of his own country and the reasons behind the sharp increase of its Ukrainian diaspora after the Second World War.

Having taken full responsibility for the incident, Mr. Rota has resigned in disgrace and will now be remembered as the House Speaker who brought an elderly Nazi to the parliament. This is a good lesson to other "fans of alternative history " from the countries that, along with Canada, consistently do not support the annual UN General Assembly resolutions on combating glorification of Nazism.

2) The world has not yet lost its historical memory and does not allow the World War II events to be so boldly and openly revisioned.

The Canadian legislators were, undoubtedly, fully aware of whom they had brought into the parliament. They simply decided to take advantage of the rampant Russophobia in the West in order to quietly continue rewriting history and whitewashing the WWII Nazis from Ukraine, presenting them as some kind of "freedom fighters". However, the scale of the global outrage turned out to be so vast that Ottawa now does nothing but "sprinkle ashes on its head".

I can only imagine how nervous it was for the nationalists in Latvia and Estonia, who aslo glorify their Waffen-SS legionnaires, to follow this story. It is high time to draw the attention of the international community to the honouring of Nazis and their collaborators in the Baltic states.