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Title: Orest Kruhlak Interview
Narrator: Orest Kruhlak
Interviewers: Roger Daniels (primary); Tom Ikeda (secondary)
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: August 3, 2010
Densho ID: denshovh-korest-01-0005

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RD: Let me go back a little farther again. Although I know that large numbers of Canadians come to the United States for higher education, but that's still a minority, a minority phenomenon. How did that happen, and how'd you wind up in Bellingham?

OK: Oh, that's interesting. A friend of mine that I'd played football with had received an invitation to come to Western to play football from Edmonton, and he wasn't guaranteed a scholarship, but he was a pretty good football player, and so he was going to gamble. He had heard that the university, or it was a college at that time, was going to establish a hockey team. I was a better hockey player than I was a football player, and so I thought, well, maybe if they establish a hockey team I can catch on as a hockey player, maybe get a scholarship. And so I came with him, I applied and was accepted, and as a bit of an aside, I had rather an undistinguished high school career that I was not a very good student, and so I had not matriculated sufficiently to get into the University of Alberta. You had to have a certain set of grades and courses, and I had kind of ignored some of those things in the interest of other interests. But I was accepted at Western, and I thought, "Well, if I get a scholarship, I'll try it out." I must admit that I was not, I did not go with any great academic aspirations. It was only when I got to college that I discovered a love of learning that I had not had up until that time. They didn't have a hockey team, but I stayed anyways and was extremely fortunate and thankful that I did. I mean, it was, I'll always thank Bob Steckle for having hauled me along with himself, and he did eventually play football. Didn't get a scholarship, but he played football. [Laughs] So that, you know, is why I ended up in Bellingham. A lot of people that I did play hockey with ended up going to places like Colorado where they actively recruited kids to come and play hockey at the University of Colorado and other schools like that, Minnesota, Michigan, and some of the eastern schools. But I also wasn't a good enough hockey player to get into those places. I was always kind of meddling in a lot of things. So that's a bit of my background. As I mentioned, in 1970... late '71, I was asked to come to the Department of the Secretary of State to work in the Multiculturalism Program to, again, help set it up. That the prime minister of the day, Trudeau, had made the announcement in the house. And in October of 1971, Bernard Ostry, who was the Under-Secretary of State, had recruited me to come to work there.

RD: He would have been a full-time bureaucrat, right?

OK: He was, yes. He was probably the man most responsible for establishing the Multiculturalism Program in Canada. That it was not a program that was well-received in the bureaucracy, in fact, it was strongly opposed in the bureaucracy. He was able, through the force of his personality and his strong political connections to people like Trudeau, to get it established.

RD: Was he a Quebecer?

OK: No, he was originally from Manitoba. And, but he had been educated in the east, had... I don't even know how he came to know Trudeau. I never did ask him that, but he was very, very well-connected into the liberal party. Had written a history of Mackenzie King, the former prime minister of Canada, and it was maybe through those kinds of things that he got into contact with the people in the liberal hierarchy. When I was asked to come to work when I was still with the Commissioner of Official Languages, who, incidentally, is a very close friend of mine but strongly opposed my going to work in the Secretary of State's Department in Multiculturalism. Because being responsible for official languages, he thought that the whole Multiculturalism Program was in some way a threat to official languages in Canada, and that it was an attempt by --

RD: What were the official languages?

OK: English and French.

RD: That's all?

OK: That's all. No other languages had any status of any kind, and I think what Keith Spicer and others thought, that with the Multiculturalism Program, that other languages might be given some sort of status, and that would be a threat to mainly the French language. He was preoccupied, he wasn't worried about what was going to happen to English, there was no need to be worried about that. But he was worried about what that might do to the French, the status of the French language in Canada. Even though he prevailed upon me not to go, I went, and one of the first things -- even before I was officially in the department -- I was asked to do was review the speech that the prime minister was going to give in the House of Commons. And shortly thereafter he made his first major speech to the Ukrainian community in Winnipeg. And I went over that speech with him, and that was the first time I ever met him, and offered him some changes and corrections. The speech was basically drafted in the prime minister's office, not in the department. That was an interesting experience dealing with him over something like that. He was a very forceful individual, and very, very bright and very intimidating.

RD: I can imagine.

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