Solicitor-General Wayne Easter has ruled out a public inquiry to determine how Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was deported from the United States and jailed for 374 days in a Damascus prison without charges.

As Arar arrived in Montreal yesterday following his surprise release from prison, MPs from all political parties, including the government benches, called for an inquiry into the possible role the RCMP played in the U.S. detention and deportation.

"No, I will not agree to an inquiry. There is nothing for an inquiry," Easter said outside the Commons yesterday.

But Gar Pardy, a recently retired senior foreign affairs official who handled the diplomatic aspects of the Arar case, said senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, have privately said they acted on intelligence supplied by the RCMP.

"Every time we talked to the Americans, the Americans would turn around and say, 'Your problem is back in Ottawa. We only acted on information that came from there,' " he said.

The disclosure is likely to dominate a hearing of the Commons foreign affairs committee today when Easter appears to discuss Arar, who was carrying a Canadian passport when he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport last year on suspicions of belonging to Al-Qa'ida.

Easter repeated yesterday what has become the government's standard response, that the RCMP were not involved in the U.S. decision to arrest and deport Arar. However, Easter refused to say if the Mounties passed on intelligence about Arar, who was the subject of an RCMP investigation, to U.S. authorities that resulted in him being sent to Jordan for 12 days of interrogation and then to Syria.

Pardy said Foreign Affairs was never shown evidence that he belonged to Al-Qa'ida. But he said senior Syrian intelligence officials told Canadian officials that Arar, 33, had once been at training camp in Afghanistan in 1993.

Joe Clark, the former Conservative prime minister, accused Easter of a coverup to hide RCMP involvement in sending a Canadian citizen to a foreign prison without due process.