(Ottawa) A report on Canada’s treatment of Nazi war criminals suggests that political considerations played a key role in the decision in 1967 not to strip a man convicted of crimes of his Canadian citizenship of war in the Soviet Union.
Recently released unredacted documents show that when he was justice minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau advised against attempts to revoke the man’s citizenship.
Minister Trudeau warned that this revocation could cause widespread fear among all naturalized Canadians. He also believed that nothing in the Citizenship Act required someone to disclose all past actions that might call into question their nature.
Alti Rodal, who wrote the report for the work of the Commission of Inquiry into War Criminals in 1985, described this argument as “abstract and artificial”. He then emphasized that this man had been attributed with the massacre of more than 5,000 Jews.
The unexpurgated pages of the report show that Mr. Rodal and External Affairs officials believed at the time that Minister Trudeau’s opinions were motivated by political rather than legal arguments.
B’nai Brith Canada and several other Canadian Jewish organizations welcomed Thursday the publication of new, unexpurgated pages from the Rodal report.
The report was first published, in heavily redacted form, in 1987, thanks to the Access to Information Act. More details were released last summer following a new access request from B’nai Brith Canada.
This new, almost complete version of the Rodal report makes public 15 pages which were previously “classified”, explained Thursday the director of communications for the federal Minister of Immigration, Aïssatou Diop.