New Documents: The Government of Canada’s Disappearing Commissions
Commissioner Frank Iacobucci
For some reason, the Harper Government™’s policy is to take down websites of royal commissions a while after they’ve reported their findings. It’s not all bad news — the final reports then get stored on a server at Library and Archives Canada. But it’s bad news if you’re trying to find a report. Try and find the Iacobucci Report, the secretive counterpart to the Arar Commission (and looking at several other innocent Canadians caught up in the American counterterrorist fishing net to be tortured by Middle Eastern dictatorships). I’ll wait while you do. Or the complete reports of the Arar Commission, for that matter.
I’m going to make some links available here as a public service. There are several reasons for this, which is why I will have to preface this with some remarks. First, I have to wonder whether the government is being entirely up-front about which commissions get “archived” and which don’t. The Air India Commission (2006) website is gone. The Oliphant Commission is still up, but will disappear in June. So is the Gomery Commission (2005), whose website has expired but redirects to its LAC archive. That’s the commission that embarrassed the Liberals, you recall. But the Iacobucci Commission (2006) and the Arar Commission, which investigated the government’s attack on Canadians’ human rights, are long gone. The former website of the Arar Commission is now a website for a loans company.
The problems don’t stop there, though. Library and Archives Canada dutifully archives the websites and, most importantly, the final reports of commissions as the government shuts down their websites. But you can’t search the reports on LAC’s website using Google or other standard search tools. The robots.txt file on LAC’s website specifically excludes archived websites (and a couple of other sections of its site) from search engines. Now, as to why they would do this, I can only speculate. But the consequence is that if you wanted to find, say, the transcripts of the Arar hearings, or the report of the Iacobucci commission, you can’t. The fact that these commissions went first makes me highly suspicious, but in the end it’s irrelevant: all the commissions are going down the same memory hole. You will only be able to find them if you know where to go in the first place.
I want to make it clear that these are not minor, trivial government adventures that don’t particularly matter to Canadians. These are modern-day McDonald Commissions, uncovering serious abuses by Canadian government security forces. They are explorations of corruption, like the Gomery and Oliphant commissions. They identify crimes which, in most cases, nobody has ever been charged with. They are a part of our history which we cannot afford to forget, not when the power to commit similar crimes still rests with the government.
I am going to correct the attempt at erasing this past from the searchable Internet by providing links that search engines will recognize — namely, here, where there isn’t a robots.txt file to get in the way. As other commissions go offline, I will continue to provide this service.
- Oliphant Commission (2010) — The Commission of Inquiry into Certain Allegations Respecting Business and Financial Dealings Between Karlheinz Schreiber and the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney was created by the Harper Government in 2008 to investigate aspects of the Airbus affair, involving alleged corruption by former prime minister Brian Mulroney. It found that Mulroney was paid $225,000 in cash to conduct improper lobbying on behalf of Schreiber’s arms company, but never performed the actions he was paid for.
- Major Commission (Air India Inquiry) (2010) — The Air India Commission investigated flaws in CSIS and RCMP practice which may have contributed both to the Air India bombing by Sikh-Canadian terrorists in 1985, which killed more than 300 people, as well as which may have impeded prosecution of members of Babbar Khalsa afterwards. Major found that a series of mistakes made by both organizations, and other federal departments, contributed to the disaster, without which the attack might have been avoided and/or successful prosecutions could have been made.
- Iacobucci Inquiry (2008) — Frank Iacobucci’s inquiry found that the RCMP improperly shared information on numerous innocent Canadian citizens in addition to Maher Arar, at least three of which were then arrested and jailed in Middle Eastern dictatorships, where they were tortured and interrogated, in certain cases with the knowledge and indirect assistance of CSIS. The inquiry was a closed one which generated much less attention than the similarly focused Arar Commission.
- Gomery Commission (2006) — John Gomery’s investigation of Liberal patronage and corruption in the Quebec advertising sponsorship fund paved the way for the downfall of the Martin government. It found that only $2 million in improper contracts had been awarded to Liberal insiders through the actions of program head Chuck Guité and public works minister Alfonso Gagliano, although Jean Chretien and Paul Martin were personally not implicated in the dealings. (Chrétien was faulted only for not setting up appropriate safeguards to prevent corruption.)
- Arar Commission (2006) — Dennis O’Connor’s inquiry was ordered by the Liberal government to investigate intelligence officials’ treatment of Syrian-Canadian dual citizen Maher Arar. It found that Arar had been abducted by the FBI in early 2002 on the basis of information supplied to them by the RCMP after 9/11; they then deported him to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured as a suspected terrorist until his release in 2003. O’Connor dismissed self-serving claims by diplomats that there had been no reason to believe Syrian military intelligence abused Arar during his detention.
This first group of reports will be followed in subsequent weeks by other, older commissions of mostly unrecognized national significance.
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pogge
I’ve noticed the way some of this stuff moves around. I’ve held on to my own copies of some of the reports from the Arar inquiry. And the final report of the Iacobucci Commission.
Interesting to see PmWiki turn up there.
Sixth Estate
A good idea, pogge, and exactly the same one I had. However I figured I might as well let other people benefit too.
My website host has a list of applications available for one-click install. Pmwiki seemed like a useful way of organizing various materials.
pogge
If you have any questions about PmWiki, let me know. I have some experience with it.
Alison
The original link to http://www.iacobucciinquiry.ca/pdfs/Supplement-to-Public-Report_2010-01-23_EN.pdf
was apparently sold to a site that sells masturbation aids.
Alison
Argghh. Sorry, didn’t consider that would turn into an actual link.
Sixth Estate
Thanks, pogge, I’ll keep that in mind.
Alison — Yes, the links are being snatched up by various business concerns of dubious distinction. Unless someone in the PMO is in the porn business, which I somewhat doubt, I suspect it’s simply that someone in the business of buying domains for ads and redirects is snatching up ex-government sites with potentially high traffic.
Sam Gunsch
re: “They are a part of our history which we cannot afford to forget, not when the power to commit similar crimes still rests with the government.”
The work you are doing at the federal level also needs to be done here in Alberta. You’ve inspired me to try.
As I attempted this past winter to reengage in the environmental campaigns in Alberta, it is only because I’ve studied some history of Alberta’s politics, that I now get the meaning of Cicero: “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child.
It seems to me now, an easy conclusion, that it was in large measure my lack of education in history and especially political history that handicapped my work as an environmental activist in Alberta during the 1990′s. I just didn’t grasp at all, what was fundamentally going on here as Alberta’s politics were fully taken over by corporatism. My B. Comm. education in ‘technique’ was of little use in helping me understand what was going on.
In 1996-7, I read J. R. Saul’s, Unconscious Civilization, and Mark Lisac’s the The Klein Revolution, but did not grasp the meaning of their insights. This despite Lisac in one column and chapter describing corporatism being installed here in what seems to me now very clear plain language. I think now, had I some history education in high-school or in my undergrad it likely would have made all the difference.
When I read about the value of teaching history at this site I am quite certain.
http://www.studentsfriend.com/onhist/uses.html
“The student who reads history will unconsciously develop what is the highest value of history: judgment in worldly affairs. This is a permanent good, not because “history repeats” – we can never exactly match past and present situations – but because the “tendency of things” shows an amazing uniformity within any given civilization. As the great historian Burckhardt said of historical knowledge, it is not ‘to make us more clever the next time, but wiser for all time.’” -Jacques Barzun, Begin Here
Sixth Estate
Best of luck with your advocacy, Sam. Interestingly I count Saul as crucial in my own political education, although I found my respect for him slipping a bit as I read his most recent book, which I have a few problems with.
Despite being a history researcher by (current) trade, I would be hesitant about overselling the value of a high school or even undergraduate history education. Not because it’s not valuable, but because the key element — political awareness — seems to be lacking, and not by accident. Some of the key lessons could equally well be taught in the context of economics or even math (the myth about tax cuts causing revenue increases, and tax raises causing instant depressions, being chief among them), in science class (the imminent threat posed by climate change, about which our government is basically unconcerned), etc.
All that said, history is one of several fields that can offer a counterweight to the present obsession with management and process rather than substance, in all kinds of fields that really should know better. Into that morasse I would include a lot of the NGOs currently involved in social, political, and environmental advocacy, which are in too many cases becoming professionalized networks of salaried advocates coordinating volunteers, rather than being genuine, ground-up citizen’s movements.
Sam Gunsch
re: “Into that morasse I would include a lot of the NGOs currently involved in social, political, and environmental advocacy, which are in too many cases becoming professionalized networks of salaried advocates coordinating volunteers, rather than being genuine, ground-up citizen’s movements.”
How to work on the issues in ways that build a citizen’s movement? The holy grail of democracy?
Most of us in the lead roles here in AB’s 1990′s openly acknowledged our efforts were failing to engage Albertans as citizens. I considered it a core part of my job as a salaried advocate, but I never figured out what to do.
The ‘how’ of being part of generating and maintaining ground-up citizen’s movements continues to elude staff and board member environmentalists in AB. My take since I re-engaged fall 2010: a majority of the present leadership know it is essential, but have concluded that they don’t know the reasons. If they have been around for more than a few years, they are leaning to the theory that maybe it isn’t possible to build more than a member/donor/volunteer base. I am not sure what to think on this.
The leadership have not entirely given up the search, but even the more energetic younger leaders in the most activist organizations are aware that whatever they are doing, it isn’t generating citizen engagement. But they are as flummoxed as we were in the 1990′s as to what to do differently.
At present, what greatly troubles me is that many groups by their mode of advocacy seem to me to have concluded some time ago that the primary advocacy mode that they have to work within, is participating in collaborative processes with industry/government. And some groups openly continue call for more processes when the outputs of the last fail to deliver, and even when the outputs fail to address fundamental issues in enormously blatant fashion. I have learned that other old-timers have noticed this and share my concern.
I think I am now correctly identifying these processes to be textbook elements of corporatist democracy, which the Klein Revolution installed here in the early 1990′s. Over two decades they have been normalized. I personally threw myself into these sorts of processes with every ounce of energy I could muster in the 1990′s. But based on my recent study of democracy and political history I am certain as I can be, that it is the corporatist method of government in AB which is the root problem that citizens must address. But where to begin dealing with that in the land of petroleum?
I’m with you…it’s ground-up citizen’s movements if anything is to be done.
After 8 or so years of private citizen life, I am joining you all again to see what might be done.
Sam Gunsch
John Vogt
re: “Some of the key lessons could equally well be taught in the context of … science class (the imminent threat posed by climate change, about which our government is basically unconcerned).”
Yesterday, here in BC, the ministry of education released a rationale for eliminating climate change from the only mandatory secondary science course to discuss this. The rationale? “Those students who choose SS 11 will also get instruction in climate change. The content of at least one-half of the deleted Sc 10 items would be covered.” … presumably the other half are not important.
Sixth Estate
Why don’t they eliminate it from the mandatory SS11 course instead? That would make more sense…
Edited: SS11 isn’t mandatory anymore? That’s interesting, too…
Sixth Estate
Sam — I wish I had an answer. My experience from listening to people who vote lecturing at length about how to get people who don’t vote to show up is that it’s not easy for people who are already actively engaged to understand why someone isn’t engaged… which, of course, is something that has to be answered before you can try to reverse the problem.
There’s definitely something attractive about being invited to take a seat at the table — and something frightening about the prospect of losing that chair, even if you haven’t actually been able to accomplish much else. The problem is, this only increases the problem, as you say. It reinforces the impression that discussion and decision-making is something that happens behind closed doors — and when those discussions don’t work, you don’t have any other options anyways. Ideas about exactly what a large group of people outside of the room can do don’t seem to have changed much from “go outside and have a demo” — an event which those in power now readily ignore when small, and send out police to disperse when large. Meanwhile a disturbingly large number of people seem to believe that Facebook, Twitter, and Internet petition protests are the future, which is even sillier and even easier to ignore.
I wish I had an answer. All I can do is blog.
J Thacker
Library and Archives Canada catalogues all federal Royal Commissions and provides access to their reports through its online AMICUS catalogue. Those catalogue records also form the basis for a LAC web site called “Index to Federal Royal Commissions” where you can search for the reports of any federal Royal Commission in LAC’s collection.
The “Index to Federal Royal Commissions” is available at:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/indexcommissions/index-e.html
Sixth Estate
J — Yes, that’s correct. The problem is that the original sites for the recent commissions were removed and the text of the material moved onto the LAC servers does not appear to be searchable via Google. I am gradually attempting to rectify that by putting links here. In the meantime, some of the websites people reach through Google, or have bookmarked, are now selling sex products. This is an unfortunate state of affairs for government.
Interestingly, the only separate site still up is the Gomery Commission site, and unlike the others, it doesn’t have an expiration notice. Sometimes my mind grows overly suspicious, but I have to wonder whether that’s purely a coincidence.
Jo
It’s not that hard to find
Sixth Estate
They were easier to find when they had their own websites and those websites were searchable by Google.
Type “Iacobucci Inquiry” into your fancy tool there and see how far down in the rankings the official government publication of that commission’s website, or even just its final report, is now, outside of the copy which can be found on my website.
I’m well aware that you can get to the reports of most published commissions if you first search for the PCO’s list of historical commissions, and then follow their links behind the Library and Archives Canada search-proof wall. Given the piffling cost of domain names and the intentional effort needed to make the LAC archive sites not searchable by Google, I think it was reasonable asking why this was the approach the government chose to take, and in the meantime posting copies of the documents where they WOULD get indexed by Google. People shouldn’t have to meander through multiple layers of websites, or know that this path is necessary, in order to get at commission reports which used to be easily found via Google.
The problem becomes even more acute now that people have purchased the commission websites, obviously judging them high-traffic locations, and have used them for various other purposes.
The Sixth Estate » Rights & Democracy Down the Memory Hole?
[...] suspect technical difficulties are a possibility. But the Harper regime has a bad habit of sending old websites down the memory hole, and I’m worried that’s a possibility [...]