The national officers of B’nai B’rith Canada (BBC), meeting here, have passed three resolutions calling on the Canadian government to take immediate action in response to the revelations of Nazi war criminals living in Canada as contained in the Rodal report released August 6.
The 600-page report documented among other things that in 1983 two alleged Nazi war criminals, one with a background in the Waffen SS, were admitted to Canada with the complicity of a senior member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), who destroyed vital immigration documents.
BBC has urged the government to commence proceedings to remove the two former Nazis, and to take disciplinary action against those responsible for their admission and the disappearance of the files.
A resolution by the BBC League for Human Rights appealed the deletions of the heavily censored Rodal report to the Canadian Information Commissioner, questioning if in fact all the deletions were justified. The government initially claimed that the Rodal appendix to the Deschenes Commission report on Nazi criminals was too sensitive to release because it could lead to the identification of suspected war criminals.
Ottawa historian Alti Rodal acknowledged that due to the time limits imposed on her research and the sheer quantity of the classified records, her report has significant gaps, according to BBC. The report contains little or no treatment of the post-1960’s history of admitting and protecting Nazi war criminals.
The third resolution called on the government to present a report completing the work that the Deschenes Commission was unable to do because of time constraints.
Commenting on the resolutions, David Matas, senior legal counsel and vice president of BBC, stated, “It was imperative that all the data pertaining to the entry and destruction of files be made known to the Canadian populace.”
Frank Dimant, BBC executive vice president, stated, “We are concerned that cover-ups in previous governments are an unhealthy episode in the history of this country. The Canadian community is entitled to know what the positions were of previous Premiers and the directives given from these men to the Cabinet Ministers.”
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