The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals, headed by Justice Jules Deschênes, completed an important report into its investigation on Holocaust war criminals living in Canada in 1986. It was accompanied by an assessment by scholar Alti Rodal, a document that Justice Deschênes said deserved “wide distribution.”
But it’s been 38 years, and we’re still waiting to read Ms. Rodal’s report as well as the full version of the Deschênes report itself. To this day, many Canadian Holocaust-related records and investigations are inaccessible.
This past April, David Matas, senior counsel to Jewish human-rights organization B’nai Brith Canada, spoke at a Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics hearing about access to Holocaust-era related records. In dialogue with Mr. Matas, MP Lisa Hepfner said, “I think I understood – and correct me if I’m wrong – that the U.S. has a more open system,” and then asked what the U.S. does “differently.”
To call the American system “more open” or “different” is a charitable way to describe the two governments’ approaches, precisely because they are not comparable. The U.S. government provides researchers and the public various avenues of access to Holocaust records through its National Archives and the robust Freedom of Information Act, where scholars and others are empowered to access sensitive documents about Nazi war criminals who took refuge in the U.S. No such system exists in Canada, neither through Library and Archives Canada nor via the federal Access to Information Act. (more...)
By opening up the archives, Canada can finally address its past with Nazi war criminals
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