In the Notre Dame Cemetery on Montreal Road, in the Ukrainian section, you’ll find a small, unpreposing brown granite headstone labeled “ In Memory of Paul Gegeychuk. Born May 13 1872 in Swydowa. Died August 20 1952 Aged 73 years”. Little known now, in his day Paul Gegeychuk was at the centre (well, actually, on the right, but more on that later) of activities that would define the structure of the Ukrainian-Canadian community for generations.

In Canada, Paul Gegeychuk studied at the Manitoba Agricultural College and the Ruthenian Training school. He started his working life here as a weed inspector, becoming a school inspector in 1910 on the recommendation of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of St Boniface (now a suburb of Winnipeg), Louis-Phillipe-Adelard Langevin. In this period, the civil service was a highly politicized body. Many government appointments changed with each election. Government employees were expected to be supporters of the party in power, and to take an active part in getting it re-elected. In spite of his title, Paul Gegeychuk had two tasks: the Conservatives expected he would organize their vote among Ukrainians in the rural areas of the province. Archbishop Langevin expected him to actually keep public schools from being organized in the areas under his supervision until Catholic ones could be set up. Manitoba had been formed as a bilingual province in 1870, but an influx of English-speaking immigrants had inflamed ethnic tensions. These were somewhat ameliorated by the famous Laurier-Greenway Compromise of 1895, which stripped the French of many of their rights in the province. The Roman Catholic Church hoped to use Ukrainian (then called Ruthenian) immigrants to weigh in on the French side of the political scale in defence of minority language and religious rights.

Gegeychuk performed well as a school inspector cum political organizer. He served as vice-president of the company publishing the Ukrainian-language ‘Canada’ weekly, funded by the Conservatives and appearing from 1913 to 1915. Working in the Gimili area of the Interlake, he used liquor, promises and Hoffman’s Drops (a horse medicine much favoured by those who couldn’t afford liquor) to encourage the mainly-Ukrainian voters of the area to elect Conservatives in a number of elections and by-elections. Things got so outrageous that his name was brought up in the Manitoba Legislature after a 1913 by-election renown for its corruption. Manitoba had enough: in 1915 the Conservatives were defeated by a reformist Liberal wave. Tory Premier Sir Rodmund Roblin eventually went to jail for his role in financial shenanigans involving the construction of the Manitoba Legislative Building.

With the arrival in Winnipeg of the first Ukrainian bishop, Nykyta Budka, the stage was set for serious splits in the community. The Bishop was used to the situation in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. There the Catholic Church was a powerful social and political force. He wanted to duplicate that status in Canada and began to try and control both secular and religious life in the Ukrainian-Canadian community. Imbued with Canadian ideas about society and Protestant ideas about church democracy, many intellectuals (mostly teachers, some lawyers and other professionals) rebelled at this attempt. In 1917 many of them would go on to found what became the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which tended to ally itself with the Liberals. Catholics tended to stay with the Tories.

In the early 1920’s two representative bodies were formed within the Ukrainian-Cnadian community. True to his earlier leanings, Paul Gegeychuk became involved in the Catholic-dominated Ukrainian National Council, serving on it’s Enlarged Council. He also worked for a time with an association, sponsored by the CPR, dedicated to assisting Ukrainian immigrants to Canada.

1923 prominent Ukr Catholics in Winnipeg support Robert Jacobs, business slate, rather than Ukrainian.

Paul Gigeychuk would eventual move to Ottawa to join his brother Father Wasyl, who was suspended and forced to leave the Ukrainian Catholic Church ‘because of his mania for money and sex’.