A good apology. I don’t think they knew.
I went to a remembrance day ceremony in a church last year and then later found out one of the soldiers we honored was SS. The person that put his name in even made excuses like “everybody thought they were fighting the good fight” etc etc. It’s a good thing it was a posthumous honor, because if he was there I would have been on the phone.
There are a lot of people who are still unsure about whether the Nazis were really evil, or just on the other side of a bad war, and trying to erase, or whitewash their relatives crimes. It isn’t a partisan thing either, as the church group is very much not Liberal leaning.
This sounds like an article title straight from the Beaverton 🤔
I’m not an anti Trudeau idiot … I don’t mind the liberal party … I support the Trudeau government … I’m an NDP supporter personally
But in an age of mass communication, information at everyone’s finger tips, government agencies with endless personal data, legions of communication professionals and government researchers, assistants upon assistants checking, double checking everything …
How the hell does something like this happen?
It either shows how dumb the government can be
Or
It was deliberate and just another distraction for all of us to fight about.
In a time when everything is so meticulously monitored, catalogued and manufactured … I really have my suspicions about all this.
Now the headlines, especially conservative ones will talk about this for the next month.
Was it just another planned event to clog up the conversation for another month? Or is the government really this dumb?
The Speaker of the House, who is a Liberal MP, has taken full responsibility for it, so yes they are that dumb. Or, at the very least, he is.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Speaker of the House Anthony Rota apologized Sunday for honouring a man who fought in a Nazi unit during the Second World War.
Rota was responding to condemnation from Jewish groups and others stemming from a moment during Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s visit to Parliament on Friday.
I wish to make clear that no one, including fellow parliamentarians and the Ukraine delegation, was aware of my intention or of my remarks before I delivered them," Rota said.
"The independent Speaker of the House has apologized and accepted full responsibility for issuing the invitation and for the recognition in Parliament.
“The fact that this individual, and by proxy the organization he was a member of, was given a standing ovation in the House of Commons is deeply troubling,” Dan Panneton, a director with the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, told CBC News on Sunday.
In a statement on Friday, Pierre Poilievre accused the prime minister of responsibility for the incident and called for him to apologize.
The original article contains 516 words, the summary contains 163 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m so confused on what the hell happened here 😆
The speaker invited Hunka to Parliament on the day zelensky was there. Then praised the former Nazi?
Was this some house of cards season 11 move?
I get the strong impression that this is a case of the Speaker not doing their due diligence on understanding Hunka’s background and everyone else not having the knowledge of history to understand what they were applauding. A monumentally stupid screw-up rather than parliament all turning out to be crypto-fascists.
But the speaker went to school for political science. Its not like he’s some random real estate agent turned politician. This is somebody who studied politics in school and worked in government his entire life.
That doesn’t mean he took any particular interest in the eastern front of WW2. Particularly here in Canada where we are very much western front dominated in terms of how we tend to cover that era of history.
I just would assume that he would have studied that area at some point and have been aware
I don’t think that’s a safe assumption. Political science and history will cover some of the same ground out of necessity, but getting down into the details of unit leader names is a bit out of scope and too in the weeds for a poli-sci major to study unless they took an interest and specifically took a class covering it.
But the speaker went to school for political science.
Like 40 years ago. Even if he did happen to study this guy back then, who remembers such things? It is not like we’re talking about Hitler here. The person honoured is not particularly notable.
It looks like they found a Ukrainian veteran who had fought the Soviets, and didn’t bother to consider the context.
I’m struggling to believe they’re that negligent. Its like an episode of the office or a Beaverton article
It’s absolutely some clown shit, but I find it distressingly believable.
Beaverton is on the case actually. https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/09/house-of-commons-speaker-relieved-japanese-veteran-who-fought-against-china-couldnt-make-it/
I honestly think this might be the last straw for the LPC.
They were doing their big Hail Mary play. They had favorable articles in the G&M about their housing plan, had Sean Fraser kicking ass and taking names in city halls across Canada on that file… They had Zelenskyy in the House singing Trudeau’s praises. Trudeau and Poilievre threw down the gauntlet on the subject of protect/rat-out trans kids.
This was the big play, the big moment of redemption.
And the Speaker just executed the biggest political own-goal I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He praised a man who fought for the Nazis in front of a Jewish president, and got everybody to clap along. You think Zelenskyy isn’t going to get shit for that at home too?
And Freeland is Trudeau’s successor and has already been tagged on the “Ukrainian Nazi” problems twice.
Russia Today is already exploiting this. Russia’s whole justification for this war is Ukrainian Nazis, and they already hate Freeland too.
This man has fucked up so hard it will have geopolitical impact.
It doesn’t matter what else Rota accomplished in his life. This is his legacy now. He’s not the MP or the Liberal or the politician or even the Speaker for the House. From now on, he’s the guy who brought an SS soldier into the House of Commons.
And the rest of the LPC let him.
They’re gonna get minivanned, and they deserve it. Which means we’re all gonna get Poilievred, and we don’t deserve that. Fight climate change. Protect trans kids. Fuck.
I would be astonished if anyone’s talking about this by the time the next election rolls around.
It’s not so much the specific event itself, it’s just the peak of the crescendo of stupid gaffes like Trudeau’s vacation mishaps, and it’s happened right in the middle of their big play.
The party’s in trouble, there’s no question about that - I’m not convinced that this will be the turning point, but I also don’t think that’s really the point of this story, y’know?
World War II was complicated, especially on the eastern front. The Ukrainians were trapped between Hitler and Stalin, both of whom wanted them exterminated, and nobody had any way of knowing which one history would be written by. Frankly, I find it completely par for the course to get tangled up trying to figure out who was the good guys, I don’t see how this particular gaffe is such a big deal.
Perhaps you can add it to a pile of other existing gaffes and call that the final straw, but without that pile already existing this wouldn’t really register.
