The Sixth Estate

This week, the Supreme Court of Canada agreed with the Harper regime that several Canadian citizens detained and tortured in developing countries based on advice passed to the Americans from the Canadian secret police services have very limited rights to seek restitution from the government for the abuse they suffered. Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, and Ahmed El-Maati suffered in circumstances roughly similar to those of the better-known Maher Arar, and were subsequently cleared of any links to terrorism by an official inquiry.

Reference to this inquiry, by retired judge Frank Iacobucci, is made in the news coverage. What is not mentioned is that it is now virtually impossible to find this report anymore. If you go to its former domain name, IacobucciInquiry.ca, you are instead bombarded by advertisements for a male sex toy product called the Fleshlight. Presumably this reflects the work of an opportunistic vulture with no ties to the Conservative Party, though of course one can never be sure about these things.

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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.

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