Press Release

20-22.02.2009 – The League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) was pleased to take part in SUSK’s 51^st National Congress.  SUSK, also known as the Ukrainian Canadian Students’ Union, is a student body that represents Ukrainian students nationally.

The League of Ukrainian Canadians conducted a short workshop on the topic what to do after you have graduate! and presented the League of Ukrainian Canadians and League of Ukrainian Canadian Women (LUCW) as viable options for the future.  As an example of the type of projects in which LUC and LUCW are involved, the Holodomor Education Project under the name “Let’s Build 1000 Holodomor Monuments” was offered as one of the most telling challenges facing the Ukrainian nation.  For more information, please visit www.holodomoreducation.org.

The Executive Director of LUC, Volodymyr Paslavskyi, made the presentation and said that LUC is consistently reaching out to the youth, and SUSK is the type of organization that has a lot of potential. 

The League of Ukrainian Canadians also took part in the banquet, where LUC President Oleh Romanyshyn was the keynote speaker and delivered a message on Ukrainian Power and how students are always at the forefront of important events in the Ukrainian community.

Ucrainica Research Institute, LUC’s partner in the Holodomor Education Program, was also represented during the Congress by Taras Paslavskyi, Director of Project Development. 

The League of Ukrainian Canadians (LUC) is a registered non-profit organization dedicated to the continued growth and development of a prosperous Ukrainian community in Canada. It maintains strong ties with Non-governmental Organizations in Canada and Ukraine, recognizing a strong interdependency and the mutual benefit of communication and cooperation.

LUC Press Service – 416-516-8223

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Keynote address delivered by Oleh Romanyshyn, President of the League of Ukrainian Canadians, on 21 February 2009 at SUSK’s 51^st National Congress

Ukrainian Power

You may wonder about the blue and yellow button I am wearing on my lapel. Its caption reads “Ukrainian Power.” Actually, this was a button worn by all activists of the Ukrainian student movement of my generation back in the 60s and 70s. To my generation, this button represented the best of times of the Ukrainian student movement in Canada, the US, Western Europe, Australia and even Latin America. This was a powerful student movement united at the time under a world umbrella organization called the Central Union of Ukrainian Students, which I had the privilege to chair from 1970 to 1973.

The caption on this button –Ukrainian Power- summarizes the motivating sentiment that drove our student movement in those days. We wore this button on the street, in the classroom, at rallies, demonstrations and hunger strikes. We smuggled a Ukrainian version of this button by the hundreds into Soviet-dominated Ukraine. Similar buttons turned up even in student tent cities which had sprung up across Ukraine on the eve of the fall of the Soviet Union.

In Canada we wore this button when SUSK was at the forefront of our community’s successful effort to have the state policy of multiculturalism enshrined in the Canadian Constitution.

We wore this button when our student clubs fought hard and successfully for the introduction of Ukrainian language, literature and history courses at their respective universities.

We wore this button at our national and international actions demanding independence, national and human rights for Ukraine and freedom for Ukrainian political prisoners - which helped preserve their lives and in some cases even secure their release from Soviet concentration camps.

To us, the gist of this caption –Ukrainian Power –was not to allow anyone to walk all over us as Ukrainians.

Let us now turn the page to our present.

As an active member of the Ukrainian community, it seems to me, that today we all have become more complacent, more disengaged, more self-absorbed, more satisfied, and more laid-back. Perhaps this is partly due to generational change and a sense of “mission accomplished” after Ukraine regained its independence. If this is true, then this is a false sense of security, because the challenges facing our people, our nation and our community today are just as great as they were in the past.

Back in our homeland, the Ukrainian state faces very dangerous geopolitical challenges from Russia and very serious internal challenges in nation-building. In the diaspora, including Canada, our community faces critical issues of heritage preservation and community development, protection of its interests, and the securing of respect for Ukrainians – that is to say, for ourselves as an ethnocultural community.

The issue of Holodomor recognition as an act of genocide of our people is perhaps one of the most telling examples of extremely challenging geopolitical, historical and social implications facing our nation, which we have to deal with today.

And the resolution of all of these challenges, my friends, boils down to the idea of Ukrainian Power. We simply must come to believe in it, we must live it, and, above all, we must act on it, while being ready to make personal sacrifices and even take risks.

Students and youth were always in the vanguard of revolutionary, political and social changes in the world.

It was a Ukrainian student Mykola Mikhnovsky - founder and leader of the student organization, the “Brotherhood of Taras [Shevchenko]” – who in 1900 delivered a fiery history-making speech in Kharkiv and Poltava, titled “Самостійна Україна” (“Independent Ukraine”). His speech and his personal example lit the fire of a national revolution which lasted four generations and culminated in Ukraine’s independence in 1991, with students always at the forefront of the struggle.

Dear friends, I call upon your generation of students to draw upon this unique Ukrainian student heritage, light the fire of activism again, and boldly blaze new trails for our common Ukrainian good.

In your endeavour, you will never stand alone, for you can always join forces with those community organizations whose proven mission has always been and is to be at the forefront of Ukrainian issues.

I call upon you to embrace student and community activism for another important reason as well. Your activism will turn you into better citizens and professionals in your respective fields, and it will prepare you for the challenges that await you in your lifetime.

From my generation of students to yours - best of luck to you all!

Щасти Вам Боже!