Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) – The Air India inquiry ended yesterday as it began 16 months ago, with charges of systemic racism and comments about infighting between the RCMP and Canada’s spy agency that plagued the terrorist probe.
In the final day of evidence, Commissioner John Major heard that a University of Toronto sociologist believes racism led to the minimizing of warnings before the bombing and a less-than-adequate response afterwards.
“When police, political and media elites all consistently treated the Air India bombings as a foreign event, it is not surprising that Canadians do not recall June 23, 1985. As a nation, we were not shaken, transformed and moved to change our own institutional practices for a tragedy we considered had little to do with us,” said a report by Professor Sherene Razack entered as an exhibit by victims’ families.
Major also heard from Margaret Bloodworth, national security adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, about the tension between the RCMP, charged with collecting evidence and prosecuting terrorism cases, and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which gathers intelligence at a lower standard.
“I think the question of intelligence and evidence is without doubt the major issue. I am hoping this commission is going to have the answer,” Bloodworth said as the last of 214 witnesses at the Ottawa inquiry.
She said she did not necessarily agree that legislative changes called for by many earlier witnesses would prove an automatic fix for the information-sharing dilemma between CSIS and the RCMP.
“I don’t think legislation can fix culture,” she said.
The inquiry opened in September 2006 with gut-wrenching testimony from victims’ families, who said they felt they might have been treated different if they weren’t predominantly Indo-Canadians.
Lawyers representing various parties at the inquiry will make their final submissions in writing by the end of January before Major completes his report for the government of Canada in the spring.
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