Вінніпеґ Український № 7 (53) (July 2019)

J. B. RUDNYCKYJ
AND CANADA
Thomas M. Prymak
University of Toronto
J.
B. Rudnyckyj (1910-1995), pronounced “rud-NITSkee,”
was one of the most important and most controversial
figures in the history of Ukrainians in
Canada. A highly cosmopolitan linguist and broadly
educated academic, he was a post-1945 immigrant to Canada,
who adapted well to his new Canadian home, and quickly shot
to the top of Ukrainian Canadian society. For many years, he
served as the head of the Department of Slavic Studies that he
had founded at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, at the
eastern edge of the three Prairie Provinces of Canada. Before
1970, Winnipeg was still the fourth largest city in the country,
and a significant part of the city’s population was of Ukrainian
origin. Winnipeg, in fact, was then generally acknowledged
to be the “Ukrainian capital of Canada,” and since Rudnyckyj
lived and worked at the heart of both Ukrainian academic and
political life in Canada, this was reflected in both his academic
and political careers.
Those careers coincided with an important phase in the general
history of the country. By the 1960s, Canada was already beginning
to feel quite independent of the British Empire, of which it
had been an integral part since the 1760s. Over the course of first
half of the twentieth century, the Empire had been gradually
replaced by the newer concept of the British Commonwealth
of Nations, its jewels being the self-governing “Dominions” of
Canada and Australia. But in the early 1960s, most of the rest
of the old Empire had broken away and acquired political independence.
Consequently, the self-governing dominions began
to change their former imperial identities to newer ones, less
dependent upon London and the British element in their own
populations.
In Canada, this change was complicated by the large and important
French fact in Quebec, and in that unique French-speaking
province, a new nationalist movement arose, which soon went
beyond legal parliamentary methods and turned to political
violence to achieve a more narrow political independence, one
centred on the province itself. In response, the federal government
in Ottawa called a Royal Commission on Bilingualism
and Biculturalism to deal with the crisis, and Rudnyckyj, who
fluently spoke both French and English, and was known for his
cosmopolitanism, was soon appointed to the Commission. He
was expected to represent the non-British and non-French element
in its deliberations. From this lofty perch, the Ukrainian
linguist from Winnipeg pushed hard for recognition of the then
27 percent of the country that was not of British or French origin.
The result was the new federal policy of “Multiculturalism
within a Bilingual Framework.”
The linguist, Professor J. B. Rudnyckyj in 1963, when he was first
appointed to the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism.
Courtesy of the University of Manitoba Archives, Winnipeg.
Rudnyckyj did not do this entirely on his own. He was greatly
helped by his colleague from the University of Manitoba, the
historian and Conservative political activist, Paul Yuzyk, who
at that same time had been appointed to the Senate of Canada,
and by numerous Ukrainian Canadian political figures and activists,
all of whom worked for the recognition of their group.
The combined effort of both the older “waves” of immigrants
(which had been primarily economic in nature), together with
their children and grandchildren, and also the newer, post-1945
immigrants (who were better educated and intensely political),
and their children too (who remained equally politically
committed) turned out to be immensely successful, and official
multiculturalism was their reward.
Moreover, there is no doubt whatsoever that it was the Ukrainians,
more than any other “ethnic group” that led the charge in this battle for
multiculturalism. They presented more briefs to the Royal Commission
than did any other group, they pushed harder for changes than did anyone
else, and their youth protested and demonstrated for their cause more
effectively than did the youth of any other group. Throughout the entire
history of the Ukrainian group in Canada, in fact, multiculturalism was
probably its single most important political achievement. And Jaroslav
Rudnyckyj stood at the very centre of this great effort.
But politics was not Rudnyckyj’s main interest. Rather he was primarily
a scholar, and he always remained at heart a linguist, or a “philologist.”
Although he knew many languages well, he specialized in the Ukrainian
language and its varied dialects, and he did a great deal of research into
the origin of Ukrainian words, especially personal and place names. He
also made significant contributions to the history of Ukrainian literature,
to library studies, and to Ukrainian bibliography. Moreover, when he first
arrived in western Canada, he was fascinated by the language of those
earlier Ukrainian pioneers, which, for over half a century, had missed a
revolution and two world wars and developed independently from that
in the Old Country, and consequently, had acquired a distinctiveness all
its own. This led him to the study of Ukrainian folklore in Canada, and he
contributed enormously to the establishment of that new field as well.
On another level, Rudnyckyj was an enthusiastic scholar with enormous
self-confidence and great teaching abilities and was able to inspire an
entire generation of students to carry on his legacy. His graduate students
found positions (some in academia, and some elsewhere) across North
America, and they continued his work for years afterwards. In fact, the
tradition of academic study of the Ukrainian Canadians, which had been
inspired and developed by the linguist Rudnyckyj (and augmented by
his contemporaries and colleagues, also post-1945ers, like the historian,
Mykhailo Marunchak in Winnipeg and the poet Yar Slavutych in Edmonton)
stood in clear contrast to the situation in the United States, where
no such tradition was ever clearly established, and where academic
institutions such as the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute generally
ignored the history of the community that had funded and founded it.
Professor Jurij Darewych of Toronto, a former Rudnyckyj student, tells
an interesting story about the nature of Rudnyckyj’s interest in the language
of the children and grandchildren of those old Ukrainian Canadian
pioneers. He stressed the professor’s great sense of humour and once told
me about several examples of items that Rudnyckyj had collected over
the years. And these examples too were not without a certain degree of
humour. They linked language to folklore, and they included the unusual
political expression: “Vin bezhyt na maioru.”
12 Український Вінніпеґ - ЛИПЕНЬ 2019 -
- JULY 2019 - UKRAINIAN WINNIPEG 13