Memoirs, 1939-1993 | 2007 | Brian Mulroney

Brian Mulroney Memoirs, 1939 - 1993

Published in 2007

[Page 348]

In early 1985 I turned to another distinguished judge, Mr. Justice Jules Deschenes, on a different legal matter. I asked him to examine the whole issue of Nazi war criminals who had escaped from Europe after the Second World War to slip into Canada and who could still be living here. I received a huge amount of abuse for this decision, much of it coming from traditional Tory constituencies of ethnic Canadians who originated in eastern Europe. Fiercely anti-communist, these communities were concerned about the Deschenes Commission accepting evidence from Soviet sources. While I was sympathetic, I allowed the commission to continue for one important reason: to me the idea of people who had participated in the extermination of Jews living in my country was odious and unacceptable. They had to be exposed, and then they had to be expelled from Canada.

[W.Z. Mr. Mulroney is parroting the catechism of the Holocaust Industry with respect to the Deschenes Commission and Nazi war criminals. He does not explain that the main protagonists in the Deschenes Commission hearings were the Ukrainian and Baltic communities versus the Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith.

Officially, the Deschenes Commission was established because of the misinformation campaign spearheaded by Sol Littman in Canada and Ralph Blumenthal in the United States claiming that thousands of Nazi war criminals were living in Canada. (See pages 245-249 of Deschenes Commission Report, which lists 31 such allegations by Simon Wiesenthal, Sol Littman, Edward Greenspan, Simon Adler, Sabina Citron, Irwin Cotler, Robert Kaplan, David Matas and many other lesser known personalities.) The real reason is more likely associated with the politics of the 1984 federal election, which the Conservatives under Mr. Mulroney won.

The last sentence contains two fallacies. "They had to be exposed" implies that there were indeed "thousands of Nazi war criminals" in Canada. Is Mr. Mulroney unaware that not one such "Nazi war criminal" has been exposed, tried and convicted of perpetrating war crimes?

The statement "then they had to be expelled from Canada" contradicts his own government's decision not to allow "denaturalization and deportation" (d&d) as was being done in the United States by the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) with John Demjanjuk and others. Justice Minister Ramon Hnatyshyn trumpeted that there would be no denaturalizations and deportations. Instead, the government had opted for a "made in Canada solution", wherein retroactive legislation would be passed to allow prosecution of war criminals in Canadian criminal courts of law. Indeed, such legislation -- written in bad faith, in my opinion, by Department of Justice bureaucrats -- was passed as Bill C-71 in August 1987.

Unfortunately, criminal prosecutions were abandoned by Justice Minister Allan Rock in January 1995, when he announced that the Liberal government would institute the civil d&d process based on a "balance of probabilities" to prove that the accused victim "must have lied" when he came to Canada. The d&d process fraudulently equates immigration infractions with war criminality.

If Mr. Mulroney wishes to remain true to his own legacy, he would denounce the d&d process, demand its abandonment and call on the government to issue an apology and financial compensation to its victims. The d&d process should never have been initiated. It is a blot on Canada and particularly on Canada's legal profession.]

PERSONAL JOURNAL: JANUARY 1, 1988

The decision by Pierre Trudeau to leave, untroubled, Nazi war criminals living in Canada surely must rank with the greatest sins of omission in the history of this nation. After serving as justice minister and 16 years as PM, Pierre Trudeau was -- or should have been -- aware of the fact that people guilty of the most heinous crimes involving the slaughter of Jews were living in Canada. They lived here under false pretenses and were never charged because it appears that Mr. Trudeau did not want "to trouble" the social fabric of Canada. I appointed the Deschenes Commission specifically because I believed that Mr. Trudeau had opted for "social tranquility" rather than simple justice. It is repugnant to me in the extreme to think that criminals and murderers were allowed to enter Canada and prosper here, thereby sullying our citizenship, without challenge or accountability. For all those years criminals of the worst sort found sanctuary in Canada, when evidence of their guilt or their complicity was available for the minister of justice or PM if he was interested in finding out.

[W.Z. If Mr. Mulroney truly believed and wrote this rubbish in his diary on 01Jan1988, it proves that he was brainwashed beyond belief. On this issue, history has proven him wrong and the approach of Pierre Trudeau has proven to have been correct.

All the criminal trials since 1988 and the d&d trials since 1995 have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that there are no "Nazi war criminals" in Canada.

Mr. Mulroney should be asked to respond to some of the criticisms of the Deschenes Commission posed by Dr. Lubomyr Prytulak in his 27Apr2004 letter to Paul Martin archived under Cotler Files in my Geocities website
http://www.willzuzak.ca/tp/Geocities/cotler/cotler.html
or specifically at
http://www.willzuzak.ca/tp/Geocities/cotler/prytulak20040427martin07.html

He could also be asked to respond to my own "Critique of Deschenes Report" of May 1987 at
/tp/wllzzk/deschene005.html ]