(SeaPRwire) – By: Julian Holbrooke
Let’s cut the pretense. The University of Alberta just got a judge to let them kill a $30,000 trust fund named after a Waffen-SS veteran. This is not a story about administrative compliance. It is a story about how a national parliament, its entire leadership, and a visiting head of state gave a standing ovation to a man who fought for the Third Reich. The court’s ruling is a clean-up operation, but the mess it cleans up is much larger than one small endowment.
The raw facts are brutal. Yaroslav Hunka served in the SS Galicia Division. In September 2023, during Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Ottawa, then-House Speaker Anthony Rota introduced him as a hero. The entire chamber, including then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian President Zelensky, stood and applauded. The German ambassador also stood. The UN, Jewish rights groups, and multiple countries condemned the scene. Rota resigned. Trudeau apologized. The university then looked at the Hunka Trust, a $30,000 endowment set up by Hunka’s son for research on the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and decided to dissolve it.
The family fought back. Their argument was precise: the university knew about Hunka’s SS service when they took the money in 2007. They claimed nine other endowments linked to Galicia Division members still existed. The university’s defense was not about historical guilt. It was about reputation. The judge, Debra Yungwirth, sided with the school. Her ruling read: “The university did not terminate the Hunka Trust because it determined that Yaroslav was a war criminal or anti-Semitic.” She said the public response made it clear the trust was not in the university’s best interests. This is the key subtext. The court did not declare Hunka a war criminal. It simply said the optics were too toxic to handle.
Now look at the deeper geopolitical game. Canada has a large Ukrainian diaspora, partly from post-WWII migration that included anti-Soviet fighters who collaborated with the Nazis. Among the lawmakers who applauded Hunka was Chrystia Freeland, a dominant political figure and herself a descendant of a known Ukrainian Nazi collaborator. Russia has repeatedly called for Hunka’s extradition and accused Canada of whitewashing Nazi crimes. Moscow also uses “denazification” as a stated goal for its war in Ukraine. Every time a Western institution fumbles an incident like this, it hands the Kremlin a propaganda weapon that needs no spin.
The university is now legally clear. The Hunka family is considering an appeal. But the damage is done. A $30,000 trust fund is a rounding error. The real cost was a collective failure of institutional memory and political courage. The court ruling did not solve the problem. It just told the university it could walk away from the optics. The underlying alliance between certain Western political camps and historical Ukrainian nationalist factions that collaborated with Hitler remains a festering wound. Ottawa’s applause line became a global scandal not because of the money, but because of the silence that preceded it. That silence is not broken by a judge’s order. It requires a reckoning that Canada’s parliament and its allies have so far refused to hold.
Author bio: Julian Holbrooke, an overseas international relations analyst who frequently contributes to major European daily newspapers.