Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America by Reg Whitaker, Gregory S. Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby (review)

A comprehensive history of Canada’s intelligence service is long overdue. For years scholars in this relatively new field have made do with myriad studies that focused on particular aspects of Canada’s security state. While a number of studies created by scholars such as Larry Hannant, Steve Hewitt, Gary Kinsman, Mercedes Steedman, and Patricia Gentile remain informative and influential, the field has lacked one comprehensive history of Canada’s security state. With Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America, authors Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby have come together to address this need. The study, which builds on decades of research and the scholarship of others, is a valuable one for those researching Canada’s security state and for those interested in its connection to Canadian history, broadly speaking.

The span of the book is large, beginning with the early Fenian threat to British North America and ending in the contemporary post-9/11 world. The book centres on the concept of “political policing,” which the authors explain is “the notion that there are limits to ideas acceptable in the public sphere,” and that while democracies like Canada pride themselves on their openness and freedoms, political policing has nevertheless taken place and usually in order to defend the “political/economic status quo.” The book is thus an attempt to explain and shed light on how this policing was carried out within the shadows that typically surround the intelligence world. As the authors rightly point out, a study of the world of surveillance also entails discussing its targets, a veritable laundry list of Canadian radicalism and radicals throughout Canada’s history.

As the authors show, Canada’s forays into state security did not begin with the formation of its security service, the rcmp. The first perceived threats came from the Fenians and from radicals from India, both considered dangers to British imperialism. The early security service, then, was very much in the service of empire. A large portion of the book deals with the seemingly constant obsession Canada had with communists, both real and suspected. Given the Cold War conflict, some of that obsession is understandable, while much of it was not. The authors use troves of primary sources to reveal in shocking detail just how invasive the security state was, with security files at one point existing for about 7 to 8 per cent of Canada’s adult population. Meticulous records were kept about largely mundane groups such as the Ladies Auxiliary of the Mine Mill Union and included such incriminating details as the number of “cookies sold” during bake sales. The authors also contribute to a revision of the rcmp’s involvement in the October Crisis of 1970, in many ways absolving the force of the charge that it failed to provide reliable intelligence on the flq to the government, which contributed to Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act. According to the authors, this was not the case, and thus the government’s use of the act appears to have been more politically motivated than previously believed. The remainder of the book deals with topics that have called out for more research such as the Mackenzie and Macdonald Commissions into the rcmp’s “dirty tricks” and the formation of csis, a move the authors characterize as “pouring old wine into new bottles,” at least in the early years of the new intelligence organization. Discussions of the security service’s failure on Air India and of the new “war on terror” round out this expansive and detailed book.

Yet the exhaustiveness of the volume also reveals some of its drawbacks. Topics are sometimes dealt with more briefly than a reader would like – perhaps a necessary evil, given the study’s scope. The book also avoids an...