Air India inquiry head ponders role of racism

The head of the the Air India bombing inquiry has pondered openly whether racism played a factor in the public and Ottawa's response to the tragedy.

During an exchange Wednesday with former Ontario premier Bob Rae, former Supreme Court judge John Major said it's "hard not to share" an impression held by some of the families of the victims that race played a factor in how the investigation was handled.

"That is the fact that, if it had been an Air Canada plane and Anglo-Saxons, things would have been different," Major said.

Rae said he learned from his lengthy discussions with the families that they felt their loss had not been adequately understood as a Canadian tragedy.

"Many of them said to me that if the colour of their skin had been different, the level of sharing would have been different."

"Whole families were wiped out," Rae said. "This is a Canadian tragedy. It happened to us."

Rae said he found no evidence of racism among government officials, police and intelligence officers during his preliminary investigation. But he noticed "culturally driven" issues, such as delays of several weeks in translating wiretap surveillance tapes of the bombing suspects from Punjabi into English.

He added the delays were caused by the lack of qualified translators, which U.S. authorities also experienced in their surveillance efforts prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"That's not racism … but it certainly leads to ineffective surveillance," Rae said. "It means that you can't really understand what's going on on a snap basis."

Bombing 'should never have happened'

Rae also said Canada still has a lot to learn about security in the age of terrorism from the Air India tragedy, which "should never have happened."  

"It's one of those tragic situations where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong and the consequences were simply disastrous for the people who were on board that flight," said Rae, who conducted his own federal investigation in 2005 to identify questions and issues surrounding the disaster.

"The first point was that the bag should never have been allowed on the plane without a passenger …. And secondly, the bag should never have gone through a screening system without being detected in Toronto."

Rae, a current federal Liberal party leadership candidate, said Wednesday that while most people consider the 9/11 attacks as the moment the world woke up to the realities of terrorism, Canadians had a much earlier event that should have drawn their attention to the dangers of extremism.

"We should have come of age on June 23, 1985," Rae said in reference to the date of the bombings, which killed 331 people.

"I got a continuing sense that we still hadn't come to grips with what happened."

The 1985 bombing killed 329 passengers aboard Air India Flight 182, which crashed off the west coast of Ireland. Of the passengers, 280 were Canadian citizens and 82 were children. A separate luggage bomb destined for a second Air India flight killed two Japanese baggage handlers at Tokyo's Narita airport.

'Weak links' in world air security

While baggage and passenger screening levels have "improved significantly" in Canadian airports, Rae said the lack of consistency in security at airports around the world is still a grave concern.

"There are a lot of weak links in the world today," he said. "We have to understand that a plane can take off at any place in the world and become a threat to any other place in the world."

He also said communication barriers between agencies such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP were a subject for the inquiry to address.  

"Information was not shared about the conduct of individuals that should have been shared," he said.

Rae cited the "firewall" problem among U.S. intelligence agencies before the 9/11 attacks — in which agencies were not always legally permitted to share information with each other — as an example of how communication failures could lead to catastrophe.  

'Canadian tragedy'

Rae carried out the fact-finding investigation for the federal government that led to the inquiry.

His appointment in April 2005 as special adviser into the bombing followed the acquittals of two B.C. men — Vancouver businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik and Kamloops sawmill worker Ajaib Singh Bagri — on eight charges connected with the bombing.

The verdicts led to widespread frustration among the families of the victims.

They accused police and the Crown of bungling the investigation, citing their inability to infiltrate Vancouver's close-knit Sikh community and the fact that key documents in the case were destroyed before it came to trial.

Major has noted that the inquiry is not a court of law and won't find fault.