CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY

I am delighted to be here today for the Tryzub Awards Gala.

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, we have gathered at an important time for Ukraine and for the future of the rules-based international order.

Last week, I was in Kyiv, where – among other things – we announced the reopening of the Canadian Embassy in Ukraine.

I saw the horror and destruction caused by the illegal war that Vladimir Putin is waging against the Ukrainian people.

But we also met with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And President Zelenskyy personifies the strength, persistence, and resilience of an entire nation.

By standing up for their freedom and democracy, the people of Ukraine are standing up for all of us.

And once again tonight, by gathering here, we are showing that Canada is standing with Ukrainians.

So let me tell you all about one moment during our trip to Ukraine just last week.

After our Prime Minister and President Zelenskyy made their opening remarks during our principal bilateral meeting, the Prime Minister turned to me and asked me to say a few words.

And, speaking as Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister in an elegant reception room at Mariinskyi Palace, I spoke to the President of Ukraine and his ministers in Ukrainian.

I did so, I told them, because President Vladimir Putin has been clear that his goal is to wipe Ukraine off the map, and to ensure that Ukrainians, as a nationally conscious people, cease to exist.

In the face of this openly genocidal ambition, it was important for me to address our Ukrainian counterparts in Ukrainian.

I wanted them to be able to say that Ukraine is a sovereign, internationally recognized state, which conducts diplomatic relations with a G7 partner in Ukrainian.

Now, in speaking to the Ukrainian government in Ukrainian, I was, of course, speaking for so many people in this room – for our whole Ukrainian-Canadian community.

I was speaking for the parents who take their long-suffering children to the Ukrainian school here in Toronto every Saturday.

I was speaking for the activists who created the bilingual Ukrainian program in public schools, like the one I attended in Edmonton.

And was speaking for those amazing Ukrainian pioneers who turned the frozen prairies into fertile farms while living in sod huts, and who took the time to teach their children to dance and to build that wonderful Pysanka in Vegreville, and monuments like it across the west.

So I want to begin my remarks here tonight by recognizing the hard work of many generations of Ukrainian-Canadian community leaders – work that is being carried on by so many people here in this room.

And I also want to recognize our Ukrainian-Canadian community for our contributions to the idea of multiculturalism itself. It was no accident that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced the groundbreaking policy of multiculturalism at a Ukrainian Canadian Congress meeting in Winnipeg in 1971.

When I sat across from President Zelenskyy and spoke to him in Ukrainian as Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, I did so as a daughter of the Ukrainian-Canadian community, and a daughter of Canadian multiculturalism.

At a time when some people doubt the ability of diverse societies and liberal democracy to coexist, Canada – and our policy of multiculturalism – are living proof that they can. Our community should be proud of our contribution, both historically and today, to this policy.

So now, let me say a few words about one of our guests of honour here tonight – someone who has been my friend, and before that, my mother’s, for many years now, and someone I admire hugely – Tim Snyder.

It took a very long time to get to Kyiv last weekend. We had a long plane trip, and then an even longer train ride.

I brought two of Tim’s books with me – Bloodlands and On Tyranny – to help me prepare for our meetings, and to help me think about what I would say tonight.

So, here are three reasons – and it was really hard to limit myself to just three – that Tim’s work is so important.

First, because Tim insists that facts matter – that truth matters.

Tim explains to us why the work of the historian and the work of the journalist are so foundational to liberal democracy; why one of the central objectives of tyrants and would-be tyrants is to establish a false narrative; and why the really ambitious tyrants deny that truth itself actually exists.

As Tim writes: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.”

This is an essential insight. It applies to Vladimir Putin, and it also applies to all those who seek to erode established liberal democracies from within.

Tim’s second great contribution, and one of the reasons he’s especially honoured by so many of us here tonight, is that, as a historian and as a writer, you put Ukrainians at the centre of our own story.

As a community, we have worked hard for many years – and for many generations, in fact – to do that.

It is why, as a community, we have made it such a priority to build academic institutions and fund intellectual work.

Yet, for so many years, this was a lonely effort, and one which was often looked at askance by thinkers outside our own community.

But Tim has always put Ukrainians – and Belarusians and Jews and everyone else he writes about – at the centre of their own story.

In so doing, he has helped lay the intellectual groundwork for a transformed world in which a democratic Ukraine, fully in charge of its own state, is the protagonist of its own story; Ukraïna today is the hero who will determine her own future.

Thirdly, Tim’s work is important because he understands how tyranny works, how liberal democracy works, and the work we all need to do – and the ways we all need to think – to resist the former and to bolster the latter.

Tim argues that there is nothing permanent or inevitable about liberal democracy. He knows that liberal democracies can rise and that they can fall.

And that brings me to my conclusion, and to the vital importance of the war being fought in Ukraine today.

Meeting with President Zelenskyy; meeting with Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal; meeting with Oleksandr Markushyn – the mayor of Irpin, who led the brave defence of a city where the Ukrainians were outnumbered eight-to-one, but held the line – was personal confirmation of one crucial truth:

The Ukrainians will, as President Zelenskyy said to the British House of Commons, never surrender.

They will fight as long as they must. They will fight and they will win.

And they must win.

For them, this war is, quite literally, an existential struggle. They are fighting for their lives, for their homes, and for their freedom.

This struggle is much less visceral for us, of course. But, though the physical threat is less immediate, this fight is no less existential for us here in Canada, and indeed for all liberal democracies.

In seeking to conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is seeking to overturn one of the founding principles of the rules-based international order established after the Second World War – that borders cannot be altered by force and that national sovereignty is inviolable.

If Putin succeeds, we will revert to the older principle of “might makes right.” We will all be back to the days of the Bloodlands.

That cannot be allowed to happen and that is why Ukraine must win.

In seeking to conquer Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is also seeking to demonstrate that tyranny can defeat democracy. He wants to show – he needs to show – that Russian tyranny can defeat Ukrainian democracy.

He also wants to show that Russian tyranny can defeat Canadian democracy, American democracy, European democracy, and indeed the very idea of democracy itself. He wants to show us that he is strong and that we are weak; that he has conviction and stamina and that we are uncertain and easily distracted.

Putin wants to show that tyranny works better – as a political system, as an ideology, as a war machine – than liberal democracy.

We cannot allow him to succeed. We will not allow him to succeed.

Ukrainians are fighting for their democracy, and they are fighting for ours, too. We are so grateful to them for fighting our fight – and for doing it so well and so bravely. And as a Canadian Minister of the Crown, I must say it’s an honour for me to be able to support them – and to support them on your behalf.

We will continue to support them with weapons, with money, and with sanctions. We will be there for as long as it takes. We will not waver. We will not be distracted. Our conviction and stamina is certain.

Слава Україні!