The Department of Justice has been ordered to release thousands of memos detailing the continued concealment of postwar files on Nazi fugitives who entered Canada.
Blacklock's Reporter says Information Commissioner Caroline Maynard issued the directive, setting a deadline of June 30, but the department has indicated compliance will come only after the election campaign.
“I order the Minister of Justice to provide a complete response to the access request as soon as possible and no later than June 30,” Maynard wrote in a March 28 Final Report.
The department identified 20,933 pages of previously undisclosed records related to cabinet’s refusal to release Nazi blacklists.
Despite a year’s delay, less than half of the records have been examined.
“The Department confirmed the file has been transferred to a senior analyst and that 6,600 pages have been reviewed to date,” Maynard wrote. “The remaining 14,300 pages need to be reviewed.”
The records were sought following the government’s failure to fulfill a pledge to declassify and release the files.
“I don’t think there’s any excuse,” then-Immigration Minister Marc Miller told reporters in 2023. “There’s no excuse for delay other than the fact that we do have to have a process where the declassification of these documents is done in a thoughtful way.”
A 1985 blacklist of Nazi collaborators and suspected war criminals remains sealed, despite all suspects being presumed dead.
The request sought “all documents, records, files and correspondence including electronic communication and data regarding the release of confidential portions of the 1985 Deschenes Commission of Inquiry on War Crimes reports, excluding press clippings, cabinet confidences, material already made public, or the confidential portions themselves.”
The Deschenes Commission, led by Justice Jules Deschenes of the Québec Court of Appeal, compiled the secret blacklist nearly 40 years ago, recommending prosecution of Nazi suspects.
The list has never been made public, despite repeated calls from advocacy groups like B’nai Brith Canada.
“Only through public access to Holocaust archives can we learn lessons from those archives,” B’nai Brith wrote in a 2024 petition to the Commons finance committee.
“Learning lessons from the Holocaust is a legacy we can create for the victims, giving meaning to the senseless death of innocents. To learn those lessons, we need access to the archives.”
Memos obtained on January 14 revealed that federal archivists were withholding over one million pages of records on Nazi collaborators in Canada.
“There is upwards of 1,000,000 pages of material likely including some material classified top secret,” stated a 2023 Library and Archives Canada briefing note.
The note confirmed archivists were identifying reasons to keep the Nazi files hidden, citing “solicitor-client privilege,” “personal information,” “information injurious to international relations,” and “information obtained in confidence from foreign governments.”
The document, titled Public Release Of Records About The Presence Of Nazi War Criminals In Canada, noted, “However, this could only be confirmed after a fulsome review of the records.”