The memorial, which was known was “Monument to the Glory of the UPA” – a nationalist paramilitary force formed in Ukraine to fight the Soviet Union during the Second World War – was built in 1988 in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery.
Shortly after the monument’s construction, a cenotaph displaying the emblem of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS was erected beside alongside it. The cenotaph bears an inscription that reads, “For Those Who Died For the Freedom of Ukraine."
The monument’s existence was first brought to public attention by the Russian Embassy in Ottawa in 2017, when it shared via X, which was then known as Twitter, images of the memorial and a bust of SS Roman Shukhevych, a commander of Ukrainian Nightingale Battalion and the UPA, in Alberta’s Edmonton.
Journalists, activists and Jewish organizations such as B’nai Brith Canada and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, had long called for the monument’s dismantlement due to its controversial nature. Such calls were echoed by Mayor Rob Burton who had expressed his disgust with the memorial’s existence but said his hands were tied by provincial legislation prohibiting its demolition.
Calls for its removal were renewed following the major scandal that occurred in September 2023 at the Canadian House of Commons when the entirety of the country’s federal legislature gave two standing ovations to 98-year-old Ukrainian Nazi SS veteran Yaroslav Hunka, an individual who fought for the 1st Galician. Hunka had been invited to attend Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's address at the Parliament.
Canada has had a long and controversial history of granting safe haven to former Nazi veteran, oftentimes including those convicted of crimes in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, the Canadian government launched the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, also known as the Deschenes Commission, to investigate the immigration of individuals with a Nazi-background into the country.