Canadians must not forget Flight PS752

Across Canada, solemn memorial services were held last week to mark the first anniversary of the downing of Flight PS752 and remember the 176 innocent lives that were lost when it crashed in Iran.

Outdoor rallies were held in cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, an entirely appropriate response because most of the people who were slaughtered on that passenger jet by the Iranian military on Jan. 8, 2020, were either Canadian or travelling to this country.

Meanwhile, after meeting remotely with the families and loved ones of those who had perished, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week reaffirmed his commitment to declare Jan. 8 a national day of remembrance for those who die in airline disasters.

All these acts of recognition were as necessary as they were timely. So much has happened in the year since Iranian missiles blasted Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 out of the sky shortly after takeoff from the airport in Iran’s capital city of Tehran.

COVID-19, above all else, has so transfixed the public’s imagination that the heinous crime committed against so many Canadians and people with ties to Canada is being overlooked or even forgotten. The federal government needed to challenge the collective amnesia that has set in.

But as essential as the act of remembering is, there is something even more necessary. It is justice. There must be justice for the 55 Canadian citizens, the 30 permanent residents of Canada and the 53 foreign nationals coming to Canada, who died on the flight. There must be justice for the citizens of the United Kingdom, Afghanistan, Sweden and Ukraine who were also lost that day, too.

Iran will have to be pushed, prodded and badgered by Canada and the international community to do what is right, declare itself fully responsible and show that it will be accountable for this atrocity. Justice demands no less.

Nothing Iran has done so far comes close to this. Its unilateral offer to pay $150,000 to the survivors of those killed in the tragedy was taken as an insult by the victims’ families and rejected by Ralph Goodale, Canada’s special adviser on the issue. Those were both reasonable responses.

The Canadian government has yet to receive a final copy of Iran’s official investigation into the air disaster. It doesn’t know what Iran will or will not admit to. Nor have there been any negotiations that involve the victims’ families to determine what sort or level of compensation would be appropriate. In other words, because of Iran’s secretive behaviour, we don’t even know what justice truly demands.

Remember that when Iranian missiles downed Flight PS752, the entire region was on high alert. Iran had hours earlier fired missiles at American military positions in Iraq in retaliation for the Jan. 4, 2020, U.S. airstrike that killed an Iranian general.

Iranian authorities should have closed the nation’s air space to civilian air travel — and kept Flight PS752 grounded. They did not, a decision that suggests the Iranians were trying to conceal their aerial attacks from the Americans and were willing to sacrifice the passengers aboard Flight PS752 to deceive their enemy. On top of this, Iranian officials lied about why Flight PS752 crashed, claiming there had been a mechanical failure until overwhelming evidence pinned the blame on their own missiles.

And so it was right for the Canadian government and the families in Canada of all those PS752 victims to remind us last week what happened one year ago. Even more importantly, they showed why Canada must apply relentless pressure on Tehran. As long as justice continues to be delayed, justice will be denied.