Judge threatens to shut down Air India inquiry
The head of the Air India inquiry says he will shut down the probe into the 1985 disaster unless a dispute about how much evidence will be made public is resolved.Former Supreme Court justice John Major called a halt to proceedings Monday until March 9 and said he would not resume the hearings if portions of documents from the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service remain secret.
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Major has said repeatedly he wants most of the proceedings to be accessible to the families who lost loved ones and to the media.He said Monday it would take years of court proceedings to get the thousands of documents declassified, which would make his inquiry "disappear into the quicksand of bureaucracy."
The impasse over what evidence can be made public has a mild resemblance to the Maher Arar inquiry, the CBC's Terry Milewski reported.
A mild resemblance? I seem to recall an 89 page report from CSIS in which every single word was blacked out until public pressure forced a do-over. I also recall a long hiatus in the public hearings while thousands of supposedly secret documents were reviewed and testimony took place in camera. There were frequent expressions of frustation by O'Connor and the inquiry's counsel about the feds insistence on keeping secrets. Apparently we've made little progress since.
The Blogging Tory reaction to this so far has been silence. And just the other day they were going on and on about how the Inquiry was under threat by those who opposed the anti-terror laws. I wonder why they are so quiet now? Where's the outrage? Oh, right.
Why the hold-up when it comes to a twenty year-old bombing? That was twenty years ago... it bothers me that the government is still sitting on their hands and I'm not even Indian so I can imagine how that group must feel.
Harper and Canada's New Government better react soon aside from that sidestepping he did in Parliment yesterday.
What I find interesting about all of this is that since the disaster happened in Mulroney's second year as PM it is virtually certain that the bulk of the misconduct and the following lack of punitive actions will primarily be due to the fault of the Conservative government in power at the time. By the time the Libs came to power the case was nearly eight years old, and that is a fairly cold trail down which upon to start, yet they did do so over their thirteen years. The fact that the results to date were far less than satisfactory especially regarding criminal convictions does not change the fact that actions were taken by the Libs. This makes me think that a good chunk of the ass covering is either civil service and/or political in nature/basis given the connections between the CPC and Mulroney both directly via consultations between him and Harper before during and after the last election and through the PCPC as a predecessor party of the CPC.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
Harper responds:
Good on the Judge. This will help show Harper for who he really is.