Federal Court orders Ottawa to release 21 redacted passages of a 1986 report on US-aided resettlement of Nazi suspects

Justice Simon Fothergill ruled on 1 September that a “bald statement of ongoing ‘tensions’” with the United States could not justify keeping seventy-year-old passages of the Rodal Report secret. Canada’s funded newsrooms carried the holding within two days and left out the judgment’s own arithmetic; the writers outside that funding went at the document, and left out how much of it Ottawa had already published on its own.

The numbers5 figures, each sourced

excerpts of the Rodal Report withheld under s. 15(1) of the Access to Information Act that the Federal Court ordered disclosed

B’nai Brith Canada v Minister of Canadian Heritage, 2026 FC 1119, at para 36

redaction upheld — a US official’s views on the American “100 Persons Act”, withheld under s. 13(1)(a) because the United States had not consented to release

2026 FC 1119, at para 21

7 of 15

redacted RCMP file numbers in the report’s endnotes that the government had already disclosed inadvertently

2026 FC 1119, at paras 46 and 50

6 March 2023

date B’nai Brith Canada filed the access request; judgment came on 1 September 2026, three and a half years later

2026 FC 1119, at para 5

February 2024

when Library and Archives Canada had already published the vast majority of the same report voluntarily, before this case was decided

New release of Rodal Report in commitment to transparency, Government of Canada

What funded newsrooms reported

The ruling reached Canadians through the newsrooms that draw on public or regulated money — from the CBC’s parliamentary appropriation to the Google payments made under the Online News Act — and it reached them quickly. The Canadian Press moved a dispatch by Jim Bronskill on 3 September, two days after the judgment; it ran on CBC News under the headline “Government must release some secret material from 1986 Nazi war crimes study, court says”, and across the chains that take the wire. The Globe and Mail ran its own piece the same week, “Court orders Ottawa to release details about resettlement of Nazi war criminals in Canada”. Ground News, which aggregates by outlet, counted 45 publishers carrying the story, among them Radio-Canada, the Toronto Star, Le Devoir, CTV News, the Hamilton Spectator and Postmedia’s National Post and Ottawa Citizen.

What that coverage carried was the judge’s sharpest line — that “a bald statement of ongoing ‘tensions’ between Canada and the United States is not a sufficient basis to refuse disclosure” — together with the categories of what had been held back: the names of foreign intelligence officials, their roles and duties, statistical information and descriptions of historical events. The wire also went back to Alti Rodal’s 1986 finding that postwar security screening was aimed at Communists rather than Nazi collaborators, leaving “ample opportunity” for war criminals to enter Canada through the 1950s.

None of it went to the judgment’s numbers, and none of it could go to the sealed text itself, which no one outside the Court has yet seen.

What was already public

1.
The passages at issue are Part 5 of Chapter XII of Alti Rodal’s 1986 study for the Deschênes Commission, titled “Irregularities in resettlement of defectors and former agents by American intelligence agencies”.
2026 FC 1119, at para 4
2.
The Court allowed the application in part and awarded no costs.
2026 FC 1119, judgment
3.
Library and Archives Canada published the vast majority of the Rodal Report on 1 February 2024, in a release announced by then-immigration minister Marc Miller, with some information still withheld under the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act.
New release of Rodal Report in commitment to transparency, Government of Canada
4.
B’nai Brith Canada, the applicant, said through chief executive Simon Wolle that “it is a scandal that, during a time when Canada maintained severe restrictions on Jewish immigration to this country, it facilitated the entry of perpetrators of Nazi crimes”, and asked Ottawa to build a public digital archive of its Holocaust-related records.
B’nai Brith Canada statement, 3 September 2026
5.
About $22.2 million of the money Google pays under the Online News Act had reached 108 Canadian news outlets as of 23 April, with Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, Metroland, The Canadian Press and the CBC each above $1 million and the CBC at roughly $6.8 million — according to The Globe and Mail’s report of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s disbursement figures.
More than 100 media outlets have received $22.2-million in Google payments, journalism group says
6.
The Federal Court decision was posted in full, as a PDF, by The Canadian Jewish News.
Federal court orders Carney government to release more Nazi war criminal documents

What the independents said

Outside that funding — no appropriation, no Canadian Heritage program, no labour tax credit, no Online News Act payment — two writers on online platforms worked the document rather than the announcement.

TheJ.ca, a Canadian Jewish site that tells readers it “receives no government money”, published the operative passage on 5 September: “Having regard to all of the relevant policy considerations, including the importance of the historical record, the passage of time, and the inadequacy of the Minister’s rationale for continuing to withhold the information from the public, I am satisfied the Court should order that the information be disclosed.” It set the ruling against B’nai Brith’s years of pressure and the Deschênes Commission’s roughly 800 investigated cases.

Wesley Wark, the national security scholar, wrote on his Substack on 6 September that the Rodal Report “has no more secrets to give”. His point cuts the other way from the headline: the records that would answer the question — those of the Interdepartmental Committee on Defectors, which from 1953 weighed the settlement in Canada of defectors and former agents — are still classified at Library and Archives Canada and Global Affairs Canada, and no one has litigated for them. Wark also noted Rodal’s own account of being “specifically discouraged by Commission Counsel from researching these allegations further on the grounds that the task was an impossible one”.

The gap

Funded newsrooms left out

The funded newsrooms did not include the judgment’s own arithmetic — 21 passages ordered out, one kept back over a US official’s view of the American “100 Persons Act”, and seven of the fifteen RCMP file numbers in the endnotes that Ottawa had already disclosed by its own error.

The independents left out

The independent writers who treated the ruling as the door to a revelation did not include how much of the Rodal Report Library and Archives Canada had already published in February 2024, nor Wark’s point that what remains sealed is names, roles and statistics rather than the secret at the centre of the story.

The caveat — against our own framing

The case against this issue’s framing is a strong one. A wire dispatch filed within 48 hours of a judgment is not a case comment, and no newsroom — funded or not — could quote text the Court had only just ordered released. The funded desks got the holding, the reasoning and the operative quotation right, and got them to a national audience in two days; the fuller readings came four and five days later, with the leisure a daily file does not have. Nothing here shows a story being avoided. It shows the difference between a deadline and an essay, and a reader who wants both is well served by having both.