Thank you very much.
I'm senior legal counsel to B'nai Brith Canada. I have with me Michael Wenig, who's here to help answer questions. Mr. Wenig has been working with another lawyer at B'nai Brith, David Rosenfeld, on the requested records that we discuss in our brief. He has also helped to draft our proposed amendment to the Access to Information Act.
Today is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I welcome the opportunity to address the committee on the subject of remembering the Holocaust.
Canada, as a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, is committed to Holocaust remembrance. To remember the Holocaust, we must remember the victims, but we must also not forget their murderers. While the murderers are alive, that means bringing them to justice. Once they are gone, it means providing public access to the record of their atrocities.
During the Holocaust, the murderers were in Europe. After the Holocaust, the murderers scattered around the world to escape justice. Thousands came to Canada. Howard Margolian, a historian with the war crimes unit with the Department of Justice, in his book Unauthorized Entry, estimated that 2,000 Nazi war criminals and collaborators entered Canada after World War II. Canada's program on crimes against humanity and war crimes stated in one of its reports that, since beginning its work, the Department of Justice had opened and examined over 1,800 files.
The effort of understanding and learning the lessons from the Holocaust must never stop. For that history to be written, the files of those who have been identified to the war crimes commission or the Government of Canada, or investigated by them, must be made public. We have a duty to the victims not just to remember that they died but why they died and how they died. The picture of the memory we paint must be real and complete. That picture must include the murderers.
Right now, we are woefully short of meeting that goal. The efforts of B'nai Brith Canada to obtain access to relevant files and documents have been constantly frustrated and have gone nowhere.
One element is part II of the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals. That part II recommended urgent attention to 20 files and further investigation of 218 others. We don't have that part II. We don't have the names of those who were recommended, and we've asked for this without success.
There is the follow-up to part II. What happened to those 20 cases of urgent attention and the 218 for further investigation? We've asked for that. We don't know.
There was a report commissioned by the Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals on the history of Nazi war criminals in Canada from the 1940s to the present. Mr. Justice Jules Deschênes recommended that the historical report be made public in its entirety, but it was not. There were substantial deletions through our access to information request. We've had some of them removed, but there are still significant deletions that remain.
Then, of course, there are the 1,800 files that the Department of Justice and the RCMP were dealing with. What happened to them? Who are they? Again, we don't have that information.
We're recommending two proposals.
First is to amend the Access to Information Act so it would mandate disclosure of records relating specifically to alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada and to any other Canadian residents who have been complicit in carrying out the Holocaust.
Second, we're recommending the establishment of a publicly accessible digital archive of Holocaust materials by requiring all government agencies to compile and submit to Library and Archives Canada all of the agencies' Holocaust-related records, and then require Library and Archives Canada to organize and place the records in a digital archive that is readily accessible to the public.
Now there is something very specific about the Holocaust archives in the European Union general data protection regulation, which provides for specific public access to those sorts of archives. There are also some statements, policies and recommendations in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance about access to archives about the Holocaust: that they be made available to independent researchers. Canada, of course, is a member of that alliance.
Philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We cannot remember a past that remains hidden from us. Only through public access to Holocaust archives can we learn lessons from those archives.
Learning lessons from the Holocaust is a legacy we can create for the victims, creating meaning from the senseless death of so many millions of innocents. To learn those lessons, we need access to the archives that can convey them.
Thank you very much.