- by Jim Farmer

When I pay $2.00 per litre at the pump for the first time, I have decided to take the following stand.

I will think about a grandfather, just like me, in the Ukraine. He has lived under the iron fist of the USSR. He remembers helping create the modern democracy in 1991 and demonstrating in the streets to support the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ that saw to the overthrow of that Russian leaning Yanukovych, and a reestablishment of true democracy. During the demonstrations he remembers telling others the stories he heard of his grandfather, who successfully fought the Russians in 1917 to help create the Ukrainian Peoples Republic and that he died fighting them again in 1922 when the Russians crossed the border with their army and with a crushing blow created the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.

As February started, he was concerned but not worried. Russia was massing on the border, but Putin repeatedly claimed that they would not invade. He thinks back to the weekend when the Russians negotiated a cease fire. This drew his daughter and daughter in law and his grandchildren into the street to flee, to join the other refugees on a trek to safety, only to be driven back by Russian shells. More Russian treachery. He has just been visited by a neighbour, who has come to the relief station where he volunteers to tell him his house just disappeared in a flash of light and dust; his family unaccounted for. Standing there numb, he at least knows that his son and son in law are for the moment safe. His son in-law is a reservist and training accountants, truck drivers and musicians how to fire Canadian supplied anti tank weapons. His son is on the front lines as a medic. Last reports were that they both still lived.

Today my income tax is being used to send an RCAF Globemaster and 80 tons of Canadian humanitarian relief and munitions to the Ukraine. My Prime Minister, independent of the colour of his tie, is helping drive the sanctions that mean we will all pay more to heat our houses and pay more to drive where ever in our Country we care to go. We will pay more at our well stocked grocery stores. We will have our grandchildren over for a family supper, before they go safely home to their warm beds.

Please keep the people of Ukraine in your prayers.