In recent days, Freeland came out in support of making permanent certain aspects of the "Emergencies Act" invoked earlier this month by Trudeau to crackdown on the "Freedom Convoy" truckers. Specifically, Freeland wants the government to be able to use financial pressure -- freezing bank accounts -- against political opponents.
That seems awfully tyrannical, given that Canada is, or was, a model Western democracy. What would compel her to push for that?
Her background, perhaps?
According to multiple reports, Freeland's maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the editor of a pro-Nazi newspaper that regularly vilified Jews, per The Globe and Mail:
Ms. Freeland's family history has become a target for Russian forces seeking to discredit one of Canada's highly placed defenders of Ukraine.
Ms. Freeland, who has paid tribute to her maternal grandparents in articles and books, helped edit a scholarly article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies in 1996 that revealed her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was a Nazi propagandist for Krakivski Visti (Krakow News).
Krakivski Visti was set up in 1940 by the German army and supervised by German intelligence officer Emil Gassert. Its printing presses and offices were confiscated by the Germans from a Jewish publisher, who was later murdered at the Belzec concentration camp.
The article was titled, "Kravivski Visti and the Jews, 1943: A contribution of Ukrainian Jewish Relations during the Second World War," and it was written by John-Paul Himka, Freeland's uncle, who is now a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
The forward to the article features Himka crediting Freeland for "pointing out problems and clarifications."
But Freeland has never publicly acknowledged that her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator, and on Monday during a news conference, suggested that such claims were part of a Russian disinformation campaign, the same fallback excuse used by Democrats anytime proof surfaces that Hillary Clinton created the 'Trump-Russia collusion' narrative out of thin air.
“American officials have publicly said, and even Angela Merkel has publicly said, that there were efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies, and I think it shouldn’t come as a surprise if these same efforts were used against Canada,” Freeland told reporters after they raised questions about the articles regarding her grandfather.
Others have also used the 'Russian disinfo' explanation.
“It is the continued Russian modus operandi that they have,” Paul Grod, president of the Canadian Ukrainian Congress, told the Globe and Mail. “Fake news, disinformation and targeting different individuals. It is just so outlandish when you hear some of these allegations – whether they are directed at minister Freeland or others.”
But, according to The Ottawa Citizen:
The Ukraine Archival Records held by the Province of Alberta. It has a whole file on Chomiak, including his own details about his days editing the newspaper Krakivski Visti. Chomiak noted he edited the paper first in Crakow (Kracow), Poland and then in Vienna. The reason he edited the paper in Vienna was because he had to flee with his Nazi colleagues as the Russians advanced into Poland. (The Russians tended to execute collaborators well as SS members).
Also, Himka wrote about Chomiak's work in 1996, noting that the Ukrainian-language paper often published anti-Semitic garbage including "certain passages in some of the articles that expressed approval of what the Nazis were doing to the Jews."
And by the way, it's not as if Ukraine's leadership today isn't authoritarian; political opponents are detained there, as they have been in Canada in recent days, thanks to the trucker crackdown.
Canada is being led by would-be dictators, and their history and heritage prove as much.
Sources include:
Please contact us for more information.
