The Hunka affair has embarrassed Canada — how bad is it, historically speaking?

In the days since parliamentarians unwittingly applauded a Ukrainian veteran who fought in a Nazi unit, political parties and observers have found one thing to agree on — Canada has embarrassed itself.

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has called it the "biggest single diplomatic embarrassment in Canadian history."

Politicians across party lines have condemned the impact the incident has had on many people in Canada and around the world, including Jews and Poles.

But how does the Yaroslav Hunka incident's effects on Canada's reputation compare to the fallout from previous diplomatic pratfalls?

Historians and foreign policy experts say Canada has endured its share of humiliating moments on the world stage. Many of those moments, they add, have had serious real-world consequences for people and policy.

"I haven't seen anything quite like [the Hunka incident] but I've certainly seen equally embarrassing incidents happen," Janice Stein, founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs, said in an interview with CBC's The House.

"There are a number of incidents. Some just count as boo-boos and some ... are perhaps more serious in terms of policy," said historian Robert Bothwell.

Stein, who has observed Canadian politics for decades, said one incident that comes to mind is the 1997 controversy involving two Israeli spies who — following a failed assassination attempt — were caught with fake Canadian passports.

"It was embarrassing because it was a fraudulent Canadian passport and what came out was that there was a black market in Canadian passports and we had not secured our passports adequately," Stein said.

Bothwell pointed to another miscalculation that scuttled a major Canadian diplomatic initiative with global significance. In 1935, a Canadian proposal to place oil sanctions on fascist Italy collapsed because the Canadian diplomat who proposed it failed to get the federal government to buy in. Mackenzie King's government soon disavowed it.

The sanctions regime eventually disintegrated, Bothwell said.

"This is one where dysfunction on the Canadian side, contradiction on the Canadian side, made Canada an international ... not laughingstock, because it was too serious for that ... but it certainly didn't contribute to our standing or prestige in the international arena," he said.

"It shows that Canadians should get their ducks in a row. They should actually know what they're saying and they should actually have a sense of what the consequences might be."

Bothwell also cited the example of French President Charles de Gaulle's 1967 speech in Montreal. The statesman's use of the phrase "Vive le Québec libre" was seen an endorsement of Quebec's separatist movement and it sparked a major diplomatic incident. While de Gaulle was not a Canadian, the event had profound consequences for politics in this country.