OTTAWA - The Air India inquiry hasn't finished its work yet, but it's ready to start publishing some of what it has heard about the 1985 bombing that took 329 lives.
The first volume of commissioner John Major's report will be released Tuesday, but it won't draw any final conclusions about the worst mass murder in Canadian history.
Instead it will concentrate on the emotional and human impact on those most directly affected - the families who lost loved ones when Flight 182 was blown from the sky by a terrorist bomb.
"The judge wants to place the story of the families, the victims, on the record," said inquiry spokesman Michael Tansey.
"This report lives up to that commitment."
The interim volume won't include any assessment of the turf wars between the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that hampered the investigation of the bombing, nor will it recommend any concrete reforms to avert future attacks.
That will be left for a final report to be presented sometime next year - although exactly when is unclear.
"The judge and the legal team are more interested in getting it right than in cruising toward some artificial timetable," said Tansey. "It will take the time it will take."
Oral hearings, which began 15 months ago, are expected to wrap up by the end of this week, and lawyers for all parties will make their last written submissions in January.
Only after that will Major, a retired Supreme Court of Canada justice, start drafting his final report.
It's not unheard of for Canadian commissions of inquiry to put out interim reports before their work is completed. But the nature of this one - essentially a narrative of the human consequences of the tragedy - is unusual in its approach.
"It's important to realize that this commission perhaps is different from others," said Jacques Shore, a lawyer for the victims' families.
"It is so emotionally intertwined with the past 22 years where the families did not really have a chance to be able to share their views, their positions, their tears."
Shore expressed hope that the strategy adopted by Major will help heal old wounds, although he was reluctant to use the word closure, a term often employed by others involved in the affair.
"I don't know that we can ever have closure with something as tragic as this," he said.
The inquiry opened in the fall of 2006 with wrenching testimony from dozens of family members who recounted their experiences to Major.
Some told of recurring nightmares, others of how they couldn't stop crying, still others of how they could no longer cry at all as they hardened their hearts in emotional self-defence. Few got any grief counselling, and when they did it was typically at their own expense.
Many felt they'd been treated like second-class citizens by their own government and complained of a lack of help from Canadian diplomats when they travelled to Ireland to identify and repatriate the bodies of relatives recovered from the North Atlantic.
It took days for federal bureaucrats - under pressure from senior aides to then-prime minister Brian Mulroney and then-foreign minister Joe Clark - to take the elementary step of setting up a 24-hour emergency phone line.
The Foreign Affairs Department initially put only three extra staff on duty at Ottawa headquarters and dispatched only seven diplomats and three support staff to Ireland.
By contrast, 80 employees were pressed into emergency service to help about 500 Canadians in the region affected by the 2004 Asian tsunami, and hundreds were deployed to aid in the evacuation of 15,000 Canadian citizens from war-torn Lebanon in 2006.
Scott Heatherington, one of the diplomats sent to Ireland in June 1985, confessed to feeling as frustrated as the people he was trying to help.
In some cases, he said, when officials finally met with family members "all we could do is say we're here."
Robert Desjardins, another Foreign Affairs official, testified that although things had improved over the last two decades, the department still didn't have full-time rapid deployment teams to aid Canadians abroad.
"That is something that we have as a plan, which we haven't yet implemented because we don't have the resources," he said.
