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

The authors of this impressively-researched and detailed work wrestle with fundamental questions at the heart of liberal democracies: to what degree should police or security agencies monitor their citizens and organizations? When does surveillance of political dissent violate the fundamental principles of democracy? To what degree should political policing be accountable to elected authority or civilian oversight? Secret Service examines more than 150 years of how federal police agencies and, starting in the 1980s, the civilian Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), spied on Canadians. The authors have years of experience in researching and writing on political policing and state responses to labour and the left; one of them has been the subject of his own RCMP dossier. As they document, most of this surveillance was hidden from the public and not reported to or debated in parliament. Although the RCMP shared information with the United States, Canada’s political policing was largely self-contained until the 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks on New York. With “9/11,” the situation changed, and Canada’s spy agencies became more integrated with those of the United States and operated for the first time beyond Canadian soil. This new reality was revealed by the O’Connor inquiry and a Military Police Complaints Commission which investigated the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria and the role of CSIS and military intelligence in the transfer of Afghan prisoners captured by the Canadian army to the custody Afghanistan’s notorious security service.

Historically, security and intelligence was not a burning issue politically and focused almost entirely on Canadian citizens in Canada. Yet, external links were often the catalyst for action; the first secret police effort responded to Fenian threats within Canada and from the United States in the 1860s. Gilbert McMicken’s secret police, with agents and informants in border cities, by 1870 had all but neutralized the Irish nationalist security threat to Canada. The Dominion Police, formed in 1868 following the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee, was the nucleus of Canada’s political policing effort. By the 1910s, its focus had shifted to the South Asian community in British Columbia where “agitators” were challenging British rule in Indian and Canada’s immigration policies.

By the early twentieth century, the Royal Northwest Mounted Police (RNWMP) became involved in monitoring dissent, notably from the radical left and organized labour. During World War I, political policing included registering, monitoring and in some cases interning enemy aliens and combating subversion. Political policing, which the authors argue is inherently conservative and defends the economic and political status quo, was preoccupied with the left. In the wake of the 1919 Winnipeg general strike, the RNWMP and the Dominion Police were merged to form the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), a national constabulary charged with enforcing federal laws. During the 1920s, it struggled for resources and new roles; one of the latter was conducting immigration clearance investigations. During the Great Depression, RCMP political policing was directed against the Community Party and other leftist movements, with mixed success. During World War II, the national security bureaucracy expanded as the RCMP screened defence industry workers.

Although Canada was not a major power and enjoyed a relatively peaceful and democratic political life, it was not insulated from the Cold War (c. 1946-1990). Again the focus was on internal threats, most of them with real or imagined left-wing associations. During the 1950s and 1960s, homosexuals, who were thought to be vulnerable to Soviet blackmail, were a special category of security vetting. Canada’s inability to gather foreign intelligence on its own during this era made it “vulnerable to manipulation and disinformation” (p. 205) and to American demands for intelligence on Canadian citizens, which could lead to Canadians being denied entry into the United States. The most dramatic example of the pitfalls of this relationship was the 1957...