The Waffen SS Ukrainian division was mostly destroyed but about 8,000 were rescued by the UK and many were resettled in Canada.

Anti-semitism in Canada was intense. Eg only 5,000 Jews were given asylum during the entire Hitler and post-WW2 era so being a Waffen SS Ukrainian was about as good as being a Holocaust survivor or a Jewish person escaping Hitler.

During an inquiry into this in the 80s, one historian wrote that showing an SS tattoo was a great way to demonstrate you were an anti-communist and therefore a valuable recruit. The plan was to cultivate a “5th column” of Eastern European nationalists as a means of undermining the USSR, ethnic-nationalism being a useful way to encourage separatism.

In fact Bandera back in the late 1920s was himself patronized by the militaristic and expansionistic interwar Polish government that wanted to expand into Ukraine and Belorussia. It’s this nationalist separatist network that the Nazis capitalized upon and following their defeat the Canadians and UK were simply picking up that torch.

There are many threads to this story.

To touch on them briefly:

• Bandera and his Polish-backed forces led a campaign of slaughtering livestock and horses and burning grain in the early 1930s which historian Mark Tauger identifies as one of the major human-based causes of the famine in the 1930s, in particular the devastation of the horse herds which were essential for transport and animal labor. Bandera did this with the intention of worsening the famine in order to incite resistance against the USSR.
• The expansionist Polish state of the early 1920s had a kind of lebensraum type ideology and saw Belorussia and Ukraine as part of a Greater Poland, so in the early 1920s they waged a war of aggression against the USSR which was in a state of weakness due to the civil war to seize large parts of Belorussia and Ukraine. They then reduced the local population to slave-like serfdom and imposed a regime of terror with dozens of daily public executions to “fight bandits” and imposed harsh Polonization measures such as forcing the use of Polish instead of local languages and only providing education to Polish speakers.
• Those are the territories that Stalin took under the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact so whenever someone throws that in your face to claim a history of russian aggression against Poland be aware that the territory taken by Stalin was not Poland but was Ukraine and Belorussia. None of the areas taken here were polish in the ethnic or linguistic sense (with the small exception of Lvov which is still part of Ukraine today) so the MR pact being presented as Russian aggression intentionally obscures Polish revanchism for the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and seeks to deny the fascist militaristic and expansionistic state that Poland was in the 1930s.
• It was the brutal mistreatment of Ukrainians and Belorussians as serfs by a colonial Poland that Hitler pointed at when claiming the German minority in Poland was being mistreated to justify his invasion of Poland. In fact they were treated well and Hitler was lying but the brutality of Poland towards their eastern colonies gave him his justification for war that convinced the Germans.
• Also just because I’m on a roll here let’s mention that Poland was also happy to take a piece of Czechoslovakia during the Munich conference and in 1938 was de facto an ally of Nazi Germany and there is a very strong case to be made the the British were seeking to engineer a Polish-German alliance against the Soviet Union as part of their balance of power geopolitics and the British would have been very happy had the Germans launched Barbarossa alongside Poland in 1940.