A dark truth that Ottawa hid for too long

OPINION A dark truth that Ottawa hid for too long THE EDITORIAL BOARD PUBLISHED 7 MINUTES AGO COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER The wonderful thing about the courts is that, at their best, they cut through the speculative, the specious and the downright bogus when governments defend the keeping of certain secrets. And that is what Federal Court Justice Simon Fothergill did this month when the Canadian government sought to preserve redactions in a historian’s report about Nazi war criminals in Canada. The redactions mostly concerned events of more than 70 years ago, when U.S. intelligence agencies helped Nazi collaborators settle in Canada. Open this photo in gallery: The cover of the Rodal Report, Nazi War Criminals in Canada: The Historical and Policy Setting from the 1940s to the Present. SUPPLIED It’s an important subject. As the historian, Alti Rodal, wrote in her report, it was a formative period in Canada’s history that cast a shadow over subsequent decades. It’s painful to consider that at a time Canada was still barring most Jewish refugees from Europe, it was opening its doors to Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe. If now isn’t the time to open up the secrets of that past, when? Under federal law, the onus is on Ottawa to show that public disclosure would cause injury – for instance, to national security, or relationships with other governments. Injury, in legal terms, does not mean embarrassment to the country, to the government or to individuals. It isn’t meant to forestall an understanding of our history. It’s striking how long this powerful, even hair-raising, report was kept under wraps. Forty years ago, Ms. Rodal was director of historical research for the 1985 Deschênes Commission of Inquiry on Nazi war criminals in Canada. As late as 2023, only a heavily redacted version of her 600-page report was available. Good for B’nai Brith Canada, a Jewish advocacy group, for fighting for the redactions to be dropped, pressing Library and Archives Canada, then the Office of the Information Commissioner, and finally Federal Court. Some redactions were dropped before the case reached the court. Those that remained included descriptions of historical events, statistical information and the names, roles and duties of foreign intelligence officials. As Ms. Rodal wrote, a U.S. army branch that was a cover for the CIA persuaded Canadian immigration officials not to conduct background checks on some individuals with criminal records, including…