Honourary Delegation from Ukraine Visits Queen’s Park
Queen’s Park – Today, Dave Levac, MPP Brant was presented with a prestigious award from the League of Ukrainian Canadians for his outstanding work on the Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933.
Also, present at the awards ceremony were the First Lady of Ukraine, Her Excellency Kateryna Yushchenko, Dr. Ihor Ostash, Ambassador of Ukraine to Canada, and Mr. Olexander Danyleiko, the Consul General of Ukraine in Toronto at the showing of the Holomodor: Genocide by Famine Exhibit as part of Holodomor Education Week held at Queen’s Park.
“I am truly honoured to receive such a prestigious award …” said MPP Dave Levac. “This would not be possible if we as a people, as a province, of a conscious mind were not making the right step forward to educate and bring awareness of these horrors from the past so that they may never repeat themselves in the future.”
The Holodomor is the name given to the man-made famine that occurred in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, in which as many as 10 million Ukrainians perished as victims under Joseph Stalin’s regime, with 25,000 who died each day at the peak of the famine in 1933.
The Government of Ukraine, the United States, UNESCO, the United Nations and over 40 other jurisdictions around the world, including the Senate of Canada, have officially declared the Holodomor a Genocide.
Ukraine has established the fourth Saturday in November in each year as the annual day to commemorate the victims of the Holodomor. This year is the 75th year of the commemoration of the Holodomor, which fell on Saturday, November 22, 2008.
Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish scholar who was the father of the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide and coined the term “genocide,” applied it to the destruction of the Ukrainian nation as follows: “This was not simply a case of mass murder. It was a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation.”
