Remarks by
The Honourable Anita Neville, P.C., O.M.
Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba
COMMEMORATION OF YOM HASHOAH (HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE)
Manitoba Legislative Building
Thursday, April 24, 2025, 11:45 a.m.
(please check against delivery)
Friends and fellow Manitobans, Canadians united against hatred, welcome to this ceremony of remembrance.
We are gathered this afternoon in the heart of Treaty One land and the homeland of the Red River Metis, in a province born through a coming-together of peoples.
This beautiful and diverse province is also the ancestral and the present-day home of the Anishinaabe, Cree, Dakota, Dene, and Inuit peoples. As Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba, I am honoured to serve in a province committed to truth, reconciliation and collaboration among all of those who call this place home.
On any spring day, as our fields and forests hum with new life, we feel the timeless spirit hope that accompanies this season. Spring is here, the light has returned, and all good things sometimes seem possible.
But this spring day is also a reminder of the darkest time, a time when the human capacity for hope was turned into another source of torment.
Eighty years ago this month, the final vestiges of the death machine of the Holocaust were captured and a shocked world struggled to understand the magnitude of evil that had been unleashed.
And so this day, the 27th of Nisan in the Jewish calendar, became established as Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day.
Over these last eight decades, generations have grown up learning of the great evil unleashed by antisemitism, by all forms of racism, by ideologies based on conspiracy thinking and on scapegoating.
But we have also seen in recent years and in our own community how hard it is to eradicate those forms of thought. In the internet age, we’ve seen how the most ancient hatreds and lies can circle the globe at the speed of light.
And so, eighty years after the nations of the world united to defeat the ideology that launched the Holocaust, we gather here to reaffirm our commitment to remember and to oppose that evil, in whatever new guise it may have.
Thank you for coming together on this day. May this memory and our coming together today be a source of strength and determination for you all.
Thank you. Merci. Meegwich. Shalom
