Wartime rhetoric: How Zelensky's address compares with other speeches by foreign leaders

Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky's address to Parliament this week was the latest in a long line of speeches by foreign leaders hoping to build ties with Canada, promote policies or plead for aid.

Dozens of prime ministers, presidents and other key figures are part of a tradition of addressing Canada's House of Commons, but Zelensky's speech was remarkable for its timing, context and virtual delivery.

"These are all players, when they're addressing the House of Commons, who are at the height of their powers and have their greatest influence on the world agenda and international relations," said Patrick Boyer, a historian and former MP who wrote a book on addresses by world leaders, Foreign Voices in the House.

"And that's true of the most recent speech," Boyer said. "But that's not unique."

Canadian historian Robert Bothwell is more skeptical of the lasting impact of the addresses: "I could come up with four or five that were actually important, where there's something more than ceremonial."

He said that for much of its history, as a colony of the United Kingdom, Canada hosted few foreign visitors.

"When we did have foreign visitors, they never came to Ottawa because there was no point," he said.

Prior to Zelensky's speech, the House of Commons lists 58 addresses by foreign dignitaries since 1941, starting with Winston Churchill. But you don't have to go back that far to find some interesting parallels to Zelensky's address.

Two other Ukrainian presidents have spoken to the House of Commons. Boyer, who led a Canadian delegation that helped monitor Ukraine's independence referendum in 1991, said it's clear that the dynamics we're witnessing today were already present in 2014, when Petro Poroshenko came to Ottawa, and in 2008, when then-president Viktor Yushchenko spoke.

"Ukraine's admission to NATO is not a step meant to challenge anybody or to inconvenience any of our neighbours, immediate or distant. We are governed solely by the national interests of Ukraine," Yushchenko said, not naming Russia. Just months before, Ukraine had applied to the alliance, asking it to consider Ukrainian membership.

Only six years later, the ground had shifted substantially.

"Today Ukraine pays a very high price for defending what we believe in: democracy and the freedom to choose our own future," Poroshenko said, speaking six months after Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine.

"For more than two decades, we proudly stated that Ukraine gained its independence without shedding a single drop of blood. Now that is no longer true. Now we are engaged in a true battle for our independence. Now we are paying the real price."

Those speeches are jarring when read beside another address by a foreign leader, that of the president of the newly constituted Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, who spoke to the House in June 1992, just six months after the Soviet Union dissolved.