Trudeau 'looking carefully' at releasing names of ex-Nazis in Canada
CBC
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday senior bureaucrats are reviewing the Deschenes Commission report — a 1980s-era independent inquiry that looked at alleged Nazi war criminals in Canada — with an eye to making more of it public.
Struck by former prime minister Brian Mulroney, the Deschenes Commission's final report was released in 1986 and is composed of two parts.
The first, which included recommendations to make it easier to extradite war criminals, was released publicly. The second was marked secret and the names of alleged Nazis in Canada were never released.
Jewish groups, including B'nai Brith and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, have said the second part should be unredacted and disclosed publicly so that Canadians can learn more about the country's shameful history of admitting an untold number of Nazi collaborators after the Second World War.
They've said that in the wake of the Yaroslav Hunka affair — when a 98-year-old veteran of a Nazi unit was honoured in Parliament — Canada needs to reckon with questionable post-war immigration decisions that allowed Hunka and others like him to settle here and live in relative peace.
"There are top public servants looking very carefully into the issue, including digging into the archives," Trudeau told reporters. "We're going to make recommendations."
Quebec Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said it's a delicate issue because the government doesn't want to "bring pain to a lot of Eastern European communities."
Hunka, for example, has framed his war service as a fight for Ukrainian independence.
The unit he fought for, the 1st Galician division, is also memorialized by Ukrainian expatriate groups at different sites across the country.
They claim the Waffen-SS troops were fighting not to advance Hitler's racist and genocidal agenda but to push back against the totalitarian Soviet Union.
The Deschenes report has also concluded that allegations of war crimes committed by this division have "never been substantiated."
That finding conflicts with what the post-war, Allies-led Nuremberg trials concluded about SS units like that one.
For that reason, Jewish groups say they want to see all that the Deschenes commission compiled to better understand its conclusions.
"We have to recognize we have a horrible past with Nazi war criminals. We opened our country to people after the war in a way that made it easier to come if you were a Nazi than if you were a Jew," Housefather said.
The Alberta government has suspended a loan program at Picture Butte Feeder Cooperative, the province's largest cattle financing cooperative, after an inspection alleged a number of financial mismanagement and regulatory issues.
If you look up at the sky late, late Thursday in the Toronto area, there's a chance you'll be able to see a total lunar eclipse and what's called a blood moon.
When wintertime calls, go where it's warm.
Colby Leamon had lost a close family member, and was looking for a dog to provide emotional support.
The cost of a 24-pack of beer could increase $3 to $5 because of 25 per cent tariffs on aluminum exported to the United States, according to a craft brewery in northern Ontario.
Fire tore through a seafood processing plant in Cape John, N.S., on Wednesday night.
Another of New Brunswick's new municipal councils has become embroiled in drama and bitter conflict.
Tardiness is nothing new at Via Rail, but late arrivals are reaching historic levels in a key corridor since passenger trains have been forced to slow down at hundreds of rail crossings operated by CN Rail.
Walmart Canada will stop selling machetes — a type of weapon frequently used in violent crimes — in stores across the country, after Manitoba's government pressured the retailer to restrict online sales.
The parents of two 15-year-old girls at Evan Hardy Collegiate in Saskatoon say they went to police and the school multiple times between June and August 2024 with concerns about escalating online threats from the student now accused of setting one of the girls on fire in a school hallway.
After more than two years of developing an official plan, the City of Charlottetown is getting close to voting on adopting it. Some residents have concerns with higher density housing the plan could make way for, but others are welcoming it.
Premier Danielle Smith is once again headed to the U.S. later this month to continue her diplomatic approach to tariff talks amid a trade war with the United States.
Point Roberts, a U.S. community in Washington state, is so Canadian that it advertises its gas prices in litres as well as gallons.