OTTAWA - A parliamentary committee is poised to recommend that the government compensate and apologize to three Canadians who were jailed and tortured in Syria, says a key source.
The Commons public safety committee report Thursday will also reportedly urge the government to push ahead with longstanding plans to beef up oversight and review of federal security agencies.
However, insiders say Conservative members of the committee will issue a minority report disagreeing with the recommendations.
The respective reports are said to closely mirror the party positions that emerged during hearings on the findings of two commissions of inquiry into the cases of Arab-Canadians who were abused in Syrian prisons.
One commission probed the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was detained in New York in September 2002 and shipped abroad by U.S. authorities. He wound up in a Damascus cell where he was beaten into giving false confessions about terrorist links.
Three years ago, Justice Dennis O'Connor found the RCMP passed misleading, inaccurate and unfair information to the Americans that very likely led to Arar's arrest and deportation to face torture at the hands of Syrian military intelligence.
In 2007, the government apologized to Arar and gave him $10.5 million in compensation.
The other commission looked into the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.
Last fall, former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci found Canadian officials contributed to the brutalization of the men in Syria through the sharing of information with foreign intelligence and police agencies.
Human rights and civil liberties advocates have since called on the government to do for the three men what it did for Arar -- issue an apology and compensate them financially.
The Conservatives have consistently said that since the three are suing the federal government it would be inappropriate to address the question of an apology.
Word that the committee was expected to recommend the government make amends to the men was welcomed by Kerry Pither, a human rights advocate who wrote a book about them and appeared before the committee.
Pither said she hopes the MPs will indeed urge the government to "issue a formal and public apology for its complicity in their torture and move swiftly into mediation for compensation so they can rebuild their lives."
O'Connor's inquiry made 23 recommendations urging the RCMP, Canadian Security Intelligence Service and others to usher in policy changes on information sharing, training and monitoring of security probes.
It also called for a new family of watchdogs to monitor intelligence agencies.
Public Safety Minister Van Loan says the government is waiting for a report on the 1985 Air India bombing that killed scores of Canadians before revamping national intelligence oversight.
Opposition MPs have accused the government of stalling.
The RCMP watchdog told the public safety committee during hearings that he is powerless to tell whether the Mounties have made the needed changes to prevent another debacle.
Paul Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, said he could provide no assurances the government had enacted O'Connor's recommendations -- despite a government claim that it had moved forward on them.
Liberal public safety critic Mark Holland said at the time it was "staggering" the recommendations made in September 2006 remained up in the air.
