John C. Major

John C. Major became the public face of Canada’s long effort to understand why Air India Flight 182 was not stopped. By the time he chaired the federal Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182, he was already a retired Supreme Court of Canada justice, a jurist shaped by the habit of demanding evidence before conclusion. That temperament mattered. The bombing had produced outrage, grief, speculation, and decades of argument; what it needed from an inquiry chair was not rhetoric but discipline.

Major’s role was not to relive the blast for its own sake. It was to force the state to account for itself: what was known, when it was known, why it was not acted upon, and how the same failure might be prevented again. The commission he led became a national reckoning in documentary form. It reviewed intelligence handling, police coordination, airport security, and the institutional habits that allowed pieces of danger to remain separated until the plane was already gone.

His importance lies partly in tone. Major’s inquiry did not treat the bombing as an inexplicable act of evil floating outside systems. It treated it as a case in which systems had responsibilities, and in which those responsibilities had been broken. That framing was painful for officials and essential for families. It acknowledged that prevention is not an abstract virtue; it is a chain of decisions made in offices, terminals, and briefing rooms.

There is something telling in the fact that the commission came so late. The delay itself became part of the story, because it reflected how difficult democracies find it to return to old wounds when those wounds implicate institutions. Major’s work helped convert private suspicion into public record. He gave the country a formal language for failure.

In the legacy of Air India 182, Major stands for the discipline of retrospective truth. He could not restore the dead, and he could not undo the bombing, but he helped establish the record that now defines how the disaster is understood: as a terrorist attack enabled by avoidable blind spots, not merely as an unavoidable act of fate.