The head of the Air India inquiry says he will shut down the probe into the 1985 disaster unless a dispute about how much evidence will be made public is resolved.

Former Supreme Court justice John Major said he can't fulfil his mandate unless the veil of secrecy is lifted.
(CBC)

Former Supreme Court justice John Major halted proceedings on Monday until March 5, and said he would not resume them if portions of documents from the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service remain secret.

"I have reached the conclusion that if the documents remain in a manner of speaking blacked out, there is no way I can carry out my mandate," a visibly frustrated Major said Monday.

He said he would inform Prime Minister Stephen Harper that he could not go forward with the inquiry unless government lawyers loosen their stance on keeping the documents under wraps.

"If the proceedings started today, under the circumstances, the redaction of the documents — that's the censoring or black-lining of the documents — would make them meaningless," Major said.

PM calls for quick resolution

During question period Monday, Harper said he was sending his national security adviser to resolve the dispute quickly, and has told the RCMP and CSIS to impose a "non-restrictive interpretation of the law" when it comes to releasing documents to the inquiry.

CBC reporter Terry Milewski holds a document with areas blacked out before it was released to the Air India Inquiry.
(CBC)

Government lawyers have argued that certain documents should be kept from the public for continuing security concerns — despite the fact many of the matters under investigation are more than two decades old.

Federal lawyer Barney Brucker insisted Monday that some material must be kept secret to avoid giving terrorists a blueprint on how to circumvent security measures.

Major has said repeatedly he wants most of the proceedings to be accessible to the families who lost loved ones and to the media.

He said Monday it would take years of court proceedings to get the thousands of documents declassified, which would make his inquiry "disappear into the quicksand of bureaucracy."

The impasse over what evidence can be made public has a mild resemblance to the Maher Arar inquiry, the CBC's Terry Milewski reported. 

Canada's worst mass murder

Relatives of the victims said Monday that after spending so many years campaigning for years for a public inquiry, they would rather see the process shut down than prevented from bringing evidence to light. 

"We're seeing the same type of games played by those involved with the government to delay things and not let the truth come out," said Sushil Gupta, whose mother was killed in the bombing.

NDP Leader Jack Layton applauded Major's move and called for the prime minister to instruct officials to make a "full and open disclosure" at the inquiry.

"If the reports are all blacked out, then how is he [Major] ever going to get to the bottom of it?" Layton said Monday.

Harper appointed Major to look into the bombings, determine what went wrong with the subsequent investigation and draw lessons for current counter-terrorist policy.

The long-delayed probe into the worst mass murder in Canada's history has been in recess for more than three months.

The 1985 bombing killed 329 passengers aboard Air India Flight 182, which exploded over the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Ireland. Of the passengers, 280 were Canadian citizens and 82 were children.

A separate luggage bomb destined for a second Air India flight killed two Japanese baggage handlers at Tokyo's Narita airport.

Only 1 man convicted

The attack has been widely blamed on militant Sikh separatists based in British Columbia, but only one man has ever been convicted, on a reduced charge of manslaughter, for his role in the plot.

The verdicts led to widespread frustration among the families of the victims, who accused police and the Crown of bungling the investigation and Canadian security officials of failing to prevent the tragedy.

At the request of the Indian government in 1985, CSIS began monitoring suspected members of a separatist Sikh cell for several weeks before the bombings.

Canada's spy agency also wilfully erased hundreds of phone intercepts of suspected mastermind of the bombing, Talwinder Singh Parmar.

Parmar was long considered a key suspect in the bombings, but was killed in 1992 in an alleged gunbattle with police in India before any charges could be laid.

With files from the Canadian Press