Mr. Chair, first I would like to express my deepest condolences and sorrow for those heroes who lost their lives or were badly injured in Ukraine, and for their families. I join with others in my great concern for the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. The true price of freedoms and democratic values is paid too many times with the blood and lives of patriots.

I have visited Ukraine 10 times and been there for eight elections. I will take us back and reiterate some of the points I have seen progressing on this. This is the second time in 10 years that we have seen what I would call a revolution. There was the Orange Revolution, and now we have the Euromaidan revolution. The tactic then was the same as it is now with the same actors and the same players. It was Yanukovych and Putin both times. Yanukovych was removed both times.

The tactics at that time included ballot-box stuffing. I was at a prison in southern Ukraine and have pictures of an empty ballot box brought into a voting area and a bag of ballots. I have the actual picture of it. It was incredible. At that time, there was no consideration or thought that they were doing anything really wrong. As a matter of fact, no one in the area said anything until the person who brought in the ballot box saw me standing there, whereupon he quickly ducked into a corner and put a coat over it. Of the 20 other people who were in that area, no one said anything. It was just another act of the day.

Things have changed since then. Now in the current circumstances after the election of 2010, we have the same actor, but one who now knows how to keep the cheating invisible. They know enough now not to do it visibly like that, where people can take pictures and report it.

During the Orange Revolution in 2004, when I stood on stage in front of 500,000 people, I felt very comfortable being there because I saw the cheating and could directly speak about how their vote was stolen.

After the 2010 election, he was duly accepted by the international community. However, during that election the opposition, Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, split the vote. That was really the problem they had; they could not get together. They lost because they could not bring their factions together. All they did was fight among themselves, which was very unfortunate.

Now Yanukovych is in power. What does he do? He drops all of his promises and commitments, and changes the constitution so that he can have even more power to do more wrong, against the people's wishes. This of course led to Euromaidan and to the beginning of the unrest. The second problem was that the demonstrators were fewer in number. It was said that they were going to disappear and tire of demonstrating, but he could not wait. He had to send in his thugs, who split skulls and spilled blood. That brought out the veterans from Afghanistan who were there to protect their children. That still could have been negated. He still could have made concessions and maybe slowed that down, but as we all know, he accelerated his hideous crimes to the point where he eventually brought out his snipers. That was just revolting to the entire world. He became a pariah to the world, and that made it very easy for them to remove him as a president, which is the way it should be.

Where we do we go from here? We are into an election now. What can we do? Some comments have been made here and ideas suggested. There are a number of things we can do, but certainly most Canadians here in this room, and I would say on all sides of the House, are committed to doing what we can to bring this issue forward and return Ukraine to being a country with the international status it deserves, and shall have some day.

Peter Goldring

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