"Your pain is our pain. As you grieve, so we grieve. And, as the years have deepened your grief, so has the understanding of our country grown ... we are sorry."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, June 23, 2010, speaking to families of Air India Flight 182, which exploded 25 years earlier.

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Far be it from me to doubt the sincerity of anyone's apology, especially over an issue as serious as the Air India bombing that killed 329 innocent people a quarter of a century ago. Prime Minister Harper's expression of sorrow -- unforthcoming from his three predecessors -- was particularly important considering Canada's mishandling of this disaster before and after it occurred.

That being said, words are not enough. That Harper's government has come forth with such a pitiful response to Mr. Justice John Major's comprehensive investigation into the aerial massacre touches on the unforgivable.

Part of the shame lies in the government's failure to come up with an appropriate compensation package for family and relatives. These people have had to endure a panoply of bungling and what Justice Major referred to as "callousness" on the part of the Canadian government over the years.

It has been six long months since Justice Major brought down his detailed and damning report on this terrorist incident -- an attack that was the precursor of 9-11 and should be etched in every Canadian's memory. Unfortunately, Flight 182 has never quite sunk in as a Canadian tragedy.

Why hasn't it? Is it because its root cause was far from our shores, and we don't like foreign issues messing with our peace and order? Is it because most of those on board didn't quite measure up as real Canadians? Those are questions we should all be asking ourselves if this incident, as the prime minister said, is really going to lead us to "a greater understanding of our country."

Justice Major suggested that this understanding is still incomplete. "I stress that this is a Canadian atrocity," he said when he released his report. "For too long the greatest loss of Canadian lives at the hands of terrorists has been somehow relegated outside the Canadian consciousness."

The government should have moved quickly months ago to bring in a thoughtful response to Justice Major's report, with the offer of a compensation package that should be debated by parliamentarians. That kind of debate could help right a wrong. It could also address continuing weaknesses in Canada's security infrastructure itemized in the Major Report.

What kind of weaknesses? Many of them have been outlined by reports of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence over the past five or six years.

There are still huge holes in airport security related to uninspected mail and cargo as well as lack of scrutiny of service personnel with access to aircraft. While the government makes large noises about defending the Canadian North, Canada's eastern, southern and western coasts remain largely undefended. Some of our ports are riddled with crime.

Notably, two of Canada's most important security agencies (both of which failed to get their act together to prevent the explosion of Flight 182) are still at odds about who should take the lead in improving national security. The Canada Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP should be working hand in glove to ensure that effective intelligence leads to effective prosecution, but despite protestations of better co-operation, a long-standing turf war never seems to end.

Justice Major noted that there remains a lack of institutional co-ordination over national security matters, which could be mitigated by strengthening the role of Canada's national security adviser to co-ordinate the exchange of information between CSIS and the RCMP. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews seems to think that is his job, but if it is, he isn't doing it.

All this needs to be discussed, in an effort toward coming up with solutions. In the meantime, the families and relatives of the Flight 182 victims need to know that all of us understand that 280 people who died on that flight were Canadians, and that it is time to make amends as to the shameful way this monstrous moment in Canadian history has been swept under the carpet.

It has been said that the government has mooted the idea of providing survivors with a "symbolic" payment of around $20,000. It has been over 25 years since that plane went down after our national security agencies made a cascade of errors in failing to prevent a bomb plot that Air India had told them was coming.

Those symbolic payments would amount to handing out about $2 a day for all those days that Canadian authorities did everything in their power to make us forget that Flight 182 ever disappeared.

A cup of coffee a day. Is everyone satisfied? I don't think so.

Are survivors insulted? They certainly should be.

 

Colin Kenny is former chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence.

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