How Canada’s parliament ended up celebrating a former Nazi

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February last year. By the end of March, the streets of cities all over the world were spontaneously draped in blue and yellow. It was a moving moment. The outpouring of solidarity seemed to reveal that the instinct to stand up to tyranny has not yet been forgotten in the complacent and self-indulgent decades that followed the second world war.

But it also felt rather vicarious. We live in an age in which the drive to express national pride has been driven underground by memories of empire in Europe and the shadow of slavery and segregation in America. For many, especially on the left, imported Ukrainian nationalism has become a kind of patriotism by proxy, a sublimated expression of a repressed desire.

On Friday, one prominent Canadian liberal became so consumed by the ecstasy of release that he made a bit of a fool of himself. I write, of course, of the House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota, who brought deep embarrassment upon ‘the parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians’ (in the words of prime minister Justin Trudeau) during a visit by Volodymyr Zelensky.