PS752 Families Deserve the Missing Criminal-Probe Ledger

Who closed the file? On a national-security tragedy involving Canadian victims, “no contemporaneous record” is not good enough.

Flight PS752 is not an old news story for the families who lost loved ones. It is an open accountability file.

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 was shot down shortly after leaving Tehran by Iranian surface-to-air missiles. Global Affairs Canada says 176 people were killed, including 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents. Ottawa’s public position is that Canada continues to seek transparency, accountability and justice, including through international legal and aviation-safety channels.

That is why the latest reporting from Blacklock’s Reporter should alarm Parliament. Blacklock’s July archive says the RCMP has no records showing who told police to abruptly cancel a planned criminal investigation into the killings of Canadians in Iran. The same summary says records show the investigation was dropped after then-prime minister Justin Trudeau met Iran’s foreign minister, while also noting there was no evidence RCMP members were motivated by political considerations.

That last caveat matters. This is not a licence to invent a conspiracy. It is, however, a flashing red light about record-keeping, ministerial accountability and institutional memory. A proposed Canadian criminal probe into a mass-casualty attack involving Canadian citizens and permanent residents should not disappear into an undocumented fog.

Global Affairs’ own PS752 page says that in early 2020 the RCMP Federal Policing National Security Program engaged with Ukrainian counterparts to support Ukraine’s criminal-law investigation. It also tells families they may contact the RCMP with information that could assist criminal investigations. If Canadian police channels remained relevant enough to receive tips, Canadians deserve clarity on why a domestic criminal path was not pursued or was abandoned.

The conservative accountability answer is straightforward: publish a PS752 criminal-probe decision ledger. It should include the date the Canadian probe was proposed, the unit responsible, the decision-maker, the legal test applied, Justice Department advice, RCMP-GAC communications, any ministerial or PMO briefings, victim-family notifications, and the reason no formal decision note exists. Sensitive operational details can be protected. The existence of the decision chain should not be.

For years, Liberal governments promised families justice while asking Canadians to trust closed processes. Trust is earned with records. If the decision was sound and free of political interference, a ledger will help prove it. If the record was never properly created, Parliament should find out why and fix the rule before the next national-security tragedy.

Families should not have to accept a memory hole where a criminal-justice file should be. Publish the PS752 decision ledger.