Can Ukrainian Canadians “See FAR”?

PART 2

Wolodymyr Derzko

Last week, I proposed the idea of establishing a community think tank - The Ukrainian Canadian Foresight and Research office or UCFar (pronounced “U See Far” or “Ukrainians See Far”) - capable of professional foresight, that would manage current and emerging issues that will affect the Ukrainian Canadian community for the next decade or two. It should have both a research and education / community out-reach mandate.

Issues that need to be addressed professionally (not one group’s responsibility) cover the entire spectrum of society’s concerns and include:

- Succession planning – how do we ensure a smooth transition from today’s organizational leadership base to tomorrow’s platform for younger leaders to stand on?

- Community leadership development  - who should be charged with grooming new leaders who possess a range of leadership skills, including conflict resolution? Individual organizations either do not have the “know-how” or resources nor have the motivation to do it.

- Political and business power - how can Ukrainian Canadian organizations and the community have access and leverage Canada’s decision-making power structure?

- Media savvy - who will train tomorrow’s leaders to understand the role of the media better than the level of today’s leaders?

- Lessons learned - how do we transfer experience from one situation (such as our long political lobbying experience) to the next one, instead of re-inventing the wheel over and over again?

- Career in politics - how do we encourage young people to think of politics as a career choice?

- Ukrainians teach others – what can visible minorities in Canada learn from the Ukrainian experience of discrimination?

- Funding for the future - how do we encourage our few philanthropists to collectively support a project that focuses on the next generation of Ukrainian Canadian community leaders?

Other important Ukrainian Canadian community issues include:

- Control over history - As one community activist states “we are letting others write the history of Ukraine and the history of Ukrainians in Canada”;

- Soviet War Criminals - Nazi war criminals get all the attention to be brought to justice while Soviet war criminals are ignored, getting away with living in peace and comfort around the world;

- Loss of our cultural identity- a technology problem. Wasyl Sydorenko at the Peter Jacyk Research Centre, UofT, warns of the danger of losing our “… collective memory, identity preserved through media.” He states   “We are in desperate need of digitizing our community history and our cultural achievements. There are tons of photographs, audiocassettes, film reels, videotapes … the type of media our Ukrainian libraries and archives did not collect in the past.”

- Ukrainian Language in Canada

- As fewer young people are bilingual - English and Ukrainian - the use of Ukrainian continues to decline compounded with a growing number of recently arrived immigrants who use Russian and English, not Ukrainian, as their working languages;

- Community and the Internet

- The future of Ukraine and the Ukrainian Canadian community is dependent on free flowing information, facilitated by the Internet and various web tools (such as Blogs, Podcasts, RSS feeds). Vested interests support hackers and denial of service attacks that target our organizations’ computers, slowing their capability to function down to a crawl.

To the list of important issues, Montreal Professor Roman Serbyn adds five thoughts:

- Integration of immigrants from Ukraine into our community – requires much more academic research, strategic thought and community attention;

- Satisfactory settlement of Ukrainian Canadian Internment  – Among incidents of discrimination against immigrants to Canada, the Internment of Ukrainians during WWI from 1914 to 1920 needs to be addressed. Currently, the Denaturalization and Deportation policy has affected Ukrainian Canadians, among others, since 1995. 

- Place and role of the Holodomor in Ukrainian and Canadian “collective memory” - People refuse to refer to the 1932-33 Famine in Ukraine as genocide, the Holodomor or “murder by starvation”;

- Low Ukrainian participation in Canadian political (and academic) life - Our history in Canada and our numbers should give us a greater presence but we have become more assimilated and complacent, uninterested in working at keeping the community a vital and influential political presence in Canada.

- Evolving Ukrainian-Canadian relations with Ukraine

In the area of “wild cards”, issues highly uncertain but have high impact on events, we have:

- Immigration issues - could haunt recent Ukrainian immigrants and refugees in Canada.

- Potential intra-community tensions- historically with Ukrain’s neighbours.

- Russia as World Super Power.

The individual interest, in-kind resources, motivation and effort are present to put in place the UCFar project. We just need the political and collective community will to take the first steps.

Wolodymyr Derzko is an Associate of CERES, Munk Centre University of Toronto and an expert on strategic thinking and planning and foresight.