Quote:
Originally Posted by belsarius
Man, the media loves to make something out of nothing.
Speaker invites Hunka to Parliament for visit. Some staffer in his office sends an email out that this person will be a special guest of the speaker for the events in the House.
Staffer from the Office of Protocol, seeing the speaker's guest, sends out form invitation to the event.
There is no bombshell here that JT had any clue who this guy was anymore than the 999 other guests, it doesn't event prove the PMO knew, the invitation was from the Office of Protocol, the coordination branch for events involving foreign dignitaries. It makes perfect sense that Rota invited him, didn't vet him properly, and then he got invited to this mass reception, all without any involvement of the Prime Minister or his office directly.
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Shocking (but not that shocking really) that the outrage chamber can't conceive of how these things actually work.
I would imagine that somewhere in this process the guest list also goes to CSIS/RCMP for a security check. Probably a cursory process in this case, but likely enough that anybody with a criminal record or CSIS file would get flagged and reviewed in more detail. It seems Hunka didn't manage to get up to a whole bunch of dastardly stuff in the last ~78 years...but maybe he was just biding his time? Or maybe his character and actions over that span are more relevant than finding himself on the wrong side of a geographical line at the wrong age.
I also find it funny how these 'history buffs' find 'fighting against the Russians' to be such a slam dunk demonstrating...anything. The western powers "alliance" with Russia was never anything more than enemy of enemy = friend. Which somewhat ironically is the exact situation Hunka and his compatriots found themselves in with Nazi Germany (though admittedly there may be more nuance there, but not enough for me to GAF what an 18 year old Ukrainian did in 1943).
There was plenty of Cold War posturing before WWII ended (in fact one of the often overlooked reasons behind Hiroshima/Nagasaki - not sure if they covered that in Oppenheimer as I haven't seen it). One could even argue that from a western/Canadian standpoint it was preferable for Russia to face some degree of resistance once the tide had really turned on the Germans.