George Lázár’s call for the removal of the Hungarian autocracy’s former US ambassador, Réka Szemerkényi from her post at the prestigious Washington based Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) is an important initiative that should be embraced by all Americans, regardless of Party affiliation, because it is a step in the direction of the path that leads towards justice, the […]
In the last couple of months Budapest has increased its lobby activities in North America and now not even a friendly soccer tournament is spared. This year’s Árpád Kupa in Toronto became a political propaganda show. Soccer is Hungary’s national pastime and many emigrants continue to play the game. There are Hungarian teams in several cities throughout Canada and the […]
June 4th is the day when Hungary and many Hungarians in the diaspora remember the Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920, which led to the loss of two-thirds of historic Hungary’s population and almost three-fourths of its land. The Ottawa Hungarian Community Centre (OHCC) held its commemoration, including an exhibit, a cultural program and a meal, this past Sunday. I […]
My father, Arthur Schwartz, arrived in Canada 70 years ago as one of the 1,123 Jewish orphans that Canada admitted after the Holocaust. Born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, in 1923, he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish working-class family. In 1938, Kosice was annexed to Hungary. Hungarian Jews were subjected to persecution and anti-Semitic laws such as work restrictions and the […]
The State Secretariat for National Policy of the Prime Minister’s Office has produced a break-down of unprecedented government subsidies provided to Hungarian Canadians between 2014 and 2017, following a query sent to State Secretary Árpád Potápi from our Hungarian-language publication, the Kanadai Magyar Hírlap. On October 20th, we had specifically asked the State Secretary what measures it had in place […]
Statistics Canada released numbers pertaining to ethnicity and immigration from the 2016 census this week, including revealing data on the number of Canadians who listed Hungarian as their sole ethno-cultural background, or one of several. There is one number, which can be misleading and is often used to justify the Hungarian government’s significant public spending in Hungarian-Canadian communities. This includes […]
Millions of people across the world participate in demonstrations to mark May 1, the International Workers’ Day. It is estimated that 80 thousand Hungarian immigrants arrived to Canada in the last century. The number of Hungarian immigrants to the US was higher, several hundred thousand Hungarians ended up in the United States. They escaped Hungary’s oppression, poverty, the lack of […]
Hungarian, British, Filipino, Jamaican, German, Slovak, Indo-Caribbean, Syrian and Muslim–these are some of the peoples and cultures that you can explore on November 26th, 2016, at the International Day Festival hosted by St. Joseph’s Parish. The Roman Catholic community is celebrating its 160th anniversary this fall and while it was originally built on parishioners of primarily Irish and French background, […]
Hungary’s government, criticized internationally for trampling on the civil liberties of its citizens and for attacking artists and civic groups that dare to criticize it is staging its largest and most expensive public relations campaign in Canada since the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries in the sixties. The million dollar PR extravaganza kicked off at the end […]
Leaders of the European Union have been scratching their heads for years about Hungarian strongman, Viktor Orbán’s civil rights abuses, and anti-liberal conduct. This past week, and on the eve of the Hungarian government’s biggest PR show in Montreal, EU leaders, along with some members of the Montreal Hungarian community, are tearing their hair out. Many are wondering, why the […]
