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T A K I N G Th e morning of June 23, 1985 was a typical Sunday for John Major. At the time a highly touted litigator at Bennett Jones LLP, he enjoyed a pleasant Sunday morning round at the historic Calgary Golf & Country Club, one of the few hobbies the self-confessed workaholic partakes in away from the law. But as he left the course, a startling news report chimed in on the car radio. An Air India plane was reported missing over the North Sea. Major was well aware of India's internal strife at the time: the country's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, had been assassinated in October 1984 by two of her bodyguards as radical Sikhs rallied to create their own country in the Punjab. In an effort to quell the campaign, Gandhi had earlier ordered a raid of the revered Sikh Golden Temple. These factors led Major, as he wound his way through the golf course grounds, to assume the plane's fate was attached to "internal" Indian turmoil. It was later revealed that 329 passengers had been killed in the terrorist bombing of that plane, Air India Flight 182; 280 of the passengers were Canadian, many of them second- and third- generation immigrants. The shocking attack remains Canada's worst mass murder. One would expect a terrorist act of this magnitude to spark a firm and calculated response from the www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com SEPTEMBER 2010 27 ROTH & RAMBERG