Legislative Debate (7 March 2022)

From Hansard (7 March 2022)

 

Emergency Motion in Support for Ukraine

The Assembly was debating the following motion moved by Premier Scott Moe:

That the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan express its unwavering support for Ukraine’s people, sovereignty, and territorial integrity and that this Assembly condemns Russia’s wholly unprovoked and wanton invasion of Ukraine and calls on Russia to cease and withdraw all military options within Ukraine immediately.

Mr. Keisig: — Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m happy to join in the Chamber today in the debate on the bill brought forward by the Premier. I have the unique position, Mr. Speaker, of growing up in a Ukrainian town and being the only non-Ukrainian in it. Ituna was kind of my hometown. And you know, it’s a very unique part of Saskatchewan and it was always referred to as entering the garlic curtain. It was a kind of a play on words of the iron curtain. And you know it took in a lot of towns: Ituna, Canora, Melville, Yorkton. A huge area of northeastern Saskatchewan was always referred to that .

One of my earliest memories of attending school was in kindergarten. So I’m off to kindergarten and all my friends are talking about Gido and Baba. And they go to their house and they bake and they play games and this is just great. So after school I’m talking to my mom and I’m like, how come everybody knows Gido and Baba, but I don’t? Like, I want to meet them; they sound like great people. So then my mother explained, well that’s grandma and grandpa in Ukrainian and that doesn’t really, you know, affect you.

So many schools have a secondary language in their schools, and in Ituna, Ukrainian was the second language taught there. So there was a lot of my friends that were very fluent in it. And it’s really surprising in that section of Saskatchewan, of people that I interact with, since Ukraine became a democracy, the amount of tourism that went on there. Like, there was a pile of people went back to Ukraine, you know, they traced their family tree, they met their cousins and it was, you know, a really great set-up.

You know, I want to thank the government and the Premier for the $100,000 of humanitarian donations. That was great to see. I want to thank the Minister of Immigration for all his hard work. My office has literally been flooded with people telling me, I got a farmhouse that’s sitting vacant right now and we could take a family or refugees or anything. And you know, we have an apartment that’s empty. And a lot of people would take them into their own homes. And just a huge groundswell of people wanting to help, not knowing how to help. But you know, wanting to do something.

You know, I want to thank the Minister of Crown Investments. The calls and texts. Tons of people have said that that has been, you know, really a positive move forward and has worked out really well. You know, it’s funny, you watch the news and you . . . I always kind of look in the background, and the Ukrainian people are very well dressed; everyone’s got a cell phone. You know, they’re actually a fairly wealthy nation.

It’s very important to commend the member from Canora-Pelly. I mean, he was awarded a largely ceremonial role and all of a sudden with the war and the invasion, he’s been thrust into a pile of work and he’s really, really handling himself well and really making the government look very well.

So I’ve been thinking about this, Mr. Speaker. What more could we do? What more can I do? What more can we do? And I’ve really thought about this, and there is something we can do — educate. We have to educate all of Canada and we have to be able to get our energy products to port. We have to educate the globe on how well produced our energy products are, because we have to stop the funding of Vladimir Putin. There’s an old saying that an army marches on its stomach, but in the modern era that we live in now, an army marches on its wallet. We have to creatively come up with a way to stop the funding of Vladimir Putin, stop his war machine, and stop his killing of innocent Ukrainian citizens.

It’s very important to note, Mr. Speaker, that the Russian people are good people. This is a totalitarian regime; this is Vladimir Putin doing this. This is not the Russian people attacking Ukrainian people. They’ve lived harmoniously for generations. This is political figures doing political damage in a real war. So I really want to support the motion brought forward by this government, and slava Ukraini, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.

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