MP Yvan Baker on the rifght, his mother Myroslava Oleksiuk on the left. Credit: MP Yvan Baker’s Facebook page

Written by: Aidan Jonah

An investigation by The Canada Files has found the Liberal MP Yvan Baker is not the only member of his family who can’t condemn the honouring of a Nazi SS division. In fact, his mother, Myroslava Oleksiuk, has gone further by denouncing Oakville’s Mayor Rob Burton for condemning a Nazi SS division memorial in Oakville, back in 2020.

Previously, The Canada Files found MP Baker had been either directly adjacent to or attended three UCC honourings of the Waffen SS 14th Division between 2007 to 2021 and wouldn’t condemn them, and had not condemned Canadian parliament’s standing ovations to Ukrainian Nazi Jaroslav Hunka, nor apologized for himself applauding Hunka with other parliamentarians.

The activism of MP Baker’s mother is another piece in the puzzle, of figuring out what has driven him to consistently refuse to condemn the Waffen SS 14th Division or the honouring of it.

Oleksiuk’s ePOSHTA newsletter through the 2000s

A 2014 Eesti Elu article introduces Oleksiuk as “one of the co-founders of the Central and Eastern European Council in Canada”, in 2008. Yet this is not Oleksiuk’s most notable act of the decade.

At the start of the decade, 2000, Olekiuk founded a newsletter called ePOSHTA (also referred to as ‘E-Poshta’), whose purpose is made clear by an advertisement put in the Ukrainian Golf Association of Canada (UGAC). At the time of this advertisement in the UGAC, Oleksiuk was a member of the “Committee for Justice” of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress’ Toronto branch. This likely has much to do with how Liberal MP Yvan Baker first joined the UCC and found the desire to run for a VP position within the branch.

The academic John-Paul Himka explained in a 2006 journal article, “she [Oleksiuk] indicates that a primary purpose of the newsletter [ePOSHTA] is to defend older Ukrainians like John Demjanjuk against deportation and to defend the reputation of Division Galizien.”

Demjanjuk was a Nazi prison guard and war criminal convicted in 2011, whose repeated denials of working at the Nazi occupation’s Sobibor death camp in Poland were finally shown to be false in 2020 via images of the camp which contained matches of his face.

The character of Oleksiuk’s newsletter would be showcased further in 2002, as two examples detailed will show.

The first was when it re-published a July 2, 2002 op-ed by Lubomyr Luciuk, then research director for the “Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association” (UCCLA) who is now a professor at Royal Military College of Canada. The op-ed for Montreal Gazette called for a “Commission of Inquiry on Soviet and Communist war criminals in Canada” and complains about the “lobby” that “ceaselessly claims” that there’s thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada, never detailing who this “lobby” is. But this “claim” is a fact; historian Irving Abella and other showed that Canada intentionally imported 2000 Waffen SS 14th Division members in the years after WWII, while Howard Margolian shows that Canada was seeking Baltic fascists as early as 1943, and had the RCMP seeking out Ukrainian fascists in 1947, before dropping the farce that Nazi SS volunteers couldn’t be admitted to Canada in 1950.

Luciuk’s obsession with unnamed “lobbies” and “lobby groups” becomes less baffling, when his then-employer, the UCCLA says its “roots trace back to 1984, when the Civil Liberties Commission (CLC) was constituted to deal with unfounded allegations about ‘Nazi war criminals’ in Canada.”

Additionally, a 2020 article by journalist David Pugliese would dispel the idea of the Deschenes commission as being rigorous, with it instead going on to ignore the Waffen SS being “declared a criminal organization by the International Military Tribunal during the Nuremberg Trials.”

Luciuk would complain about two individuals, “Joseph, a former NKVD Lieutenant, and Nahum, a onetime Communist partisan”, who “wrote books, in English, boasting of their roles in liquidating anti-Soviet Lithuanians and Ukrainians,” being allowed into Canada.

In the same newsletter, the Alberta Ukrainian Self-Reliance League’s letter to Canada’s justice minister contains two revealing sections, elements that this group wants to be investigated by an anti-communist commission for “Soviet and Communist war criminals”:

“What has been the precise extent of influence exerted by both lobby groups and members of the Prime Minister’s top unelected advisors in lobbying the government to pursue persons identified in point #1 above, to the exclusion of any other potentially culpable individuals, no matter where or when their crimes against humanity were perpetrated, and against whom?”

“What have been the precise sums of donations, paid trips abroad or any other favors made by lobbyists pushing for the prosecution and for denaturalization and deportation proceedings against Canadians of Ukrainian and Baltic descent identified in point #1 above, and directed to Cabinet Minister in this government since 1993?”

Again there are mentions blunt and vague to a lobby outside of Canada’s government, this time “lobbyists pushing for the prosecution”, “influence exerted by both lobby groups”. Of course, who exactly these lobbyists or lobby groups are isn’t explained. The Montreal Gazette, which made clear that it can edit letters while preserving the core of an argument, would publish a reader’s letter the following day about Luciuk’s op-ed, allowing the title “Scapegoats take fall for criminals”.

Never once in the referenced sendouts is it acknowledged that Canada fought alongside the allies including the USSR, against the fascist Axis during World War II.

Later in July 2002, another ePOSHTA newsletter sendout contained a condemnation of the New York Times Magazine for including a long-form article titled “What Happened to Uncle Shmiel”, by then-Princeton lecture Daniel Mendelsohn, on the grounds that his sharing of his grandfather’s recognition of the fascist machinations of right-wing Ukrainians during WWII (OUN-B continued to kill Poles and Jews after the Nazis cut them off and jailed their mass-murdering leader Bandera, while OUN-M collaborated with the Nazis all the way through WWII until the Soviet Union forced the Nazis out of Soviet Ukraine).

Against the article, Oleksiuk’s newsletter said:

“You are strongly urged to write a letter to the editor: letters@nytimes.com

There are many points that can be raised. You don't have to touch on every troublesome aspect of his article: just choose one and stick to it. No matter how incensed you are, make your letter brief (no more than 150 words) and polite.”

One letter to the magazine, sent before the newsletter sendout by then-Ukrainian World Congress’ President, Askold S. Lozynsykj, contained incredibly problematic references to Jewish people. While falsely claiming that “When the Soviets were forced to retreat from the invading Nazis in June 1941, they slaughtered their prisoners,” he chose to mention that “This was accomplished with the assistance of local Communists, primarily of Jewish ethnicity.”

Further, in speaking about Ukraine’s supposed status of the country losing the most people in the 20th century right at the end of this letter, Lozynskyj states (bold added by this writer):

“To a large degree this was a result of both Communist and Nazi activity in Ukraine. The Russians and the Germans were savage. But the Jews were the worst. They betrayed their neighbors and did it with such zeal!”

In a Webarchived ePOSHTA About Us page from March 2007, Oleksiuk said (bold added by writer):

“organizations like the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, Ukrainian World Congress and others could use ePOSHTA as a conduit to elevate the consciousness of the Ukrainian community on a broad range of issues.”

ePOSHTA’s efforts to gain reach in the Ukrainian Canadian community were assisted by “the Shevchenko Foundation” who were thanked “for their financial assistance in support of the promotion of the ePOSHTA newsletters and website.”

When this support from the foundation began isn’t confirmed. The Taras Shevchenko Foundation did not respond to The Canada Files questions about their support to ePOSHTA. A review of available Webarchive pages shows the foundation supported ePOSHTA between at least March 2007 and June 2009.

Note: There are many dozens more of ePOSHTA newsletter sendouts. TCF may explore this further in a future article.

In December 2009, at a Ukrainian National Federation – Toronto branch event (9:10 to 10:05), Oleksiuk stated that amid Germans protesting about the “immorality of John Demanjuk’s trial” (again, Demanjuk was convicted of working at the Sobibor death camp run by the Nazis), the Lyiv Oblast Rada had condemned the “political persecution” of John Demjanjuk and sought to escalate their complaint to higher levels of government and the Ukrainian World Congress.

Oleksiuk proudly said this came “about due to the information and encouragement that was provided to them from the diaspora. And so the symbiosis is playing itself out, we but need to guide it astutely, and thereby support the cause of today’s independent Ukraine wisely, it’s only to our mutual benefit.” Oleksiuk did not reply to The Canada Files’ request for comment.

However, not all of the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora supports the political aims of Oleksiuk. When reached for comment, Glenn Michalchuk, National President of the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians said:

“In the aftermath of Parliament's honouring of a member of the Waffen SS new light is being shed on the sordid activities of Ukrainian Canadian ‘nationalists’ to honour a history that Canadians so rightly condemn. This is a positive development that must be supported.

This history can not be swept aside just because the news cycle has moved past the Junka affair.

There needs to be a concerted effort to ensure that these issues are dealt with once and for all. It means removing the monuments to these individuals and the racist and fascist ideology they stood for. It also means that those who defend this history are held responsible for their views through public censure or the applicable laws against promulgation of racist ideology.”

Oleksiuk’s idea of providing information to Ukrainians in Ukraine during the 2000s included re-publishing op-eds and letters in ePOSHTA saying: that “the Jews” were worse than the Nazis to Ukrainians, that there are unnamed “lobbies” and “lobby groups” pushing for persecuting Nazi war criminals in Canada. In 2020, even after more Canadians learned about the Oakville memorial to the Waffen SS 14th Division, she attacked a denunciation of the memorial. That Oleksiuk managed to attain a notable reach in the Ukrainian Canadian community, enough for academic John-Paul Himka to notice her, doesn’t bode well for Ukrainian Canadian political consciousness.

The direct impact of Oleksiuk’s views can be seen in Canada’s parliament. Her son, Yvan Baker, is now a Canadian MP who won’t condemn repeated UCC honourings of the Waffen SS 14th division nor the honouring of Ukrainian Nazi Jaroslav Hunka in Canada’s parliament, who he stood up and applauded twice along with 336 of 338 Canadian MPs. Oleksiuk reached many Ukrainian Canadians through her activism, yet her son has gone far further, with her ideas imbued into him, reaching the Canadian masses by serving as an MP.

Editor’s note: Introducing Operation 135, The Canada Files’ campaign to go from 65 to 200 consistent financial supporters. The Canada Files is the country's only news outlet focused on Canadian foreign policy. We've provided critical investigations & hard-hitting analysis on Canadian foreign policy since 2019, and need your support.

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Aidan Jonah is the Editor-in-Chief of The Canada Files, a socialist, anti-imperialist news outlet founded in 2019. Jonah has broken numerous stories, including how the Canadian Armed Forces trained neo-Nazi "journalist" Roman Protasevich while he was with the Azov Battalion, and how a CIA front group (the NED) funded the group (URAP) which drove the "Uyghur genocide" vote in parliament to pass in February 2021. Jonah recently wrote a report for the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council, held in September 2021.

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