Polish President Duda in Canada visit

Monday’s programme includes wreath-laying ceremonies at the Katyn Memorial in Toronto, which commemorates Polish officers murdered by Stalin’s NKVD police in 1940, and at the cemetery of Polish soldiers who trained for World War One in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.

The latter site is known as General Haller’s Army Cemetery, Niagara-on-the-Lake having served in 1917 as the main assembly centre for over 20 thousand Poles who were shipped to join General Józef Haller’s Polish Army in France.

During their time of training, an epidemic of influenza broke out and took the lives of 26 recruits. They were buried on the Niagara frontier.

The President and the First Lady will also meet representatives of the Polish diaspora at the John Paul II Centre in Mississauga.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, President Duda will have talks with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General David Johnson. He will also meet members of the Canadian-Polish Parliamentary Friendship Group and a group of Canadian soldiers who have served in Poland on a NATO mission.

Minister in the Presidential Chancellery Krzysztof Szczerski told Polish Radio that preparations for a NATO summit in Warsaw in July will figure prominently on the agenda of the talks.

“Canada is Poland’s second most important ally in NATO and it is important that it plays an active role in the decisions of the Warsaw summit, also in the practical sense, that is the presence of Canadian troops and military equipment in the eastern flank of the alliance.”

According to Szczerski, President Duda will also take up economic issues in the talks. Two Polish companies, the PKN Orlen petrochemical company and the KGHM copper-mining giant, are major investors in Canada.

“Duda will meet representatives of both of them,” Szczerski said. (mk/rg)