OTTAWA - The on-again, off-again Air India inquiry is on again with plans to delve into a question at the heart of its mandate - whether Canadian police and security officers did enough to try to head off the worst mass murder in the country's history.
Former Supreme Court justice John Major has faced one delay after another since he was appointed by the Conservative government in March 2006 to revisit the 1985 attack that took 329 lives.
But inquiry spokesman Michael Tansey says commission staff are confident they will finally "hit our stride" with a series of public hearings that begin this week and will likely run for the next two months.
The sitttings are expected to start Monday with testimony from two former Vancouver municipal police officers, Rick Crook and Don McLean, who will talk about intelligence their force compiled on the activities Sikh militants and the potential threat they posed to Air India in the weeks immediately preceding the bombing.
After that, Jacques Jodoin, a former official of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, will outline the challenges the spy agency faced in obtaining warrants needed to keep suspects under surveillance.
Finally, Lynne Jarrett, a former CSIS officer who has since moved to the RCMP, will recount an infamous episode, shortly before the attack, when she and a CSIS partner followed two men into the woods on Vancouver Island.
The men were Inderjit Singh Reyat, later convicted of manslaughter for his role in the bomb plot, and Talwinder Singh Parmar, leader of the Sikh fundamentalist sect Babar Khalsa and alleged mastermind of the bombing.
Jarrett, then known as Lynne McAdams, and her surveillance partner heard a loud bang in the forest but didn't realize what it signified. They thought Reyat and Parmar might be taking firearms training. It wasn't until after Air India Flight 182 went down on June 23, 1985, that investigators returned to the wooded site and found evidence of an explosives test.
The incident has since stood as a symbolic example - although not the only one - of a missed chance to head off the bomb plot. Additional questions arose after the attack, when turf wars between the RCMP and CSIS hampered efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Reyat is the only person ever convicted in a court of law. Parmar was shot dead by police in India in 1992, and two other men were acquitted at a trial in Vancouver in 2005 that left relatives of the victims outraged and led to Major's appointment to conduct a further study.
The retired judge has no power to hold anyone criminally responsible but hopes to draw lessons from the affair that may still be relevant to anti-terrorist policy in the post-9/11 world.
Aside from the parts played by the RCMP and CSIS, Major will probe Transport Canada's role in airport security and offer recommendations on better protection of witnesses and more efficient ways of handling high-profile terrorist prosecutions in future.
The inquiry heard three weeks of emotional testimony last fall from the victims' families recounting their personal ordeals and frustrations over the last two decades. But there have been hardly any hearings since then on the details of what happened.
Most of the delay can be attributed to haggling between commission counsel and lawyers for the federal government over how much of the documentary trail and oral testimony from here on will be public and how much will remain behind closed doors for reasons of national security.
Major threatened in February to shut down the inquiry and go home unless the government relented in what he considered excessive secrecy claims. Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded with a promise to loosen the rules, and lawyers for both sides say they have made "good progress" since then in resolving the issue.
Major had hoped to finish gathering evidence by this spring and deliver a report to the government this September, a timetable that all concerned now admit won't be met.
The revised plan is to hold public hearings through May and June, take a two-month summer break and return for a final month of public testimony in September. Major now hopes to deliver a report by the end of the year.
