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

This comprehensive history of Canada’s ‘political policing’ is a major contribution to the growing field of Canadian security studies and to Canadian history more broadly. Whitaker, Kealey and Parnaby are to be commended for assembling a wealth of research – a full 120 pages of notes – extracted painstakingly, no doubt, from reluctant government agencies, which builds on the scholarship of other experts who have explored only aspects of these internal security practices. This scholarship, and Secret Service in particular, should give Canadians pause when contending that their country is a land of openness and freedom in contrast to the United States. The targets of this policing included a panoply of radicals, as well as innocent Canadians caught up in the maelstrom.

The story starts in the mid-nineteenth century, prior to the creation of the country’s first security service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Fearful of attacks from the Fenian Brotherhood – Irish Americans intent on freeing their homeland – as well as radicals from India, the nascent Canadian state worked to protect itself and Britain’s Empire. Here, the authors seem on somewhat shaky ground regarding their notion of political policing: the Fenian threat was external and so a legitimate concern in a military sense as armed attacks were launched against Canada. As for the surveillance of a smattering of South Asians interested in India’s independence, this was largely the effort of one man, a William Charles Hopkinson, and expired along with him. In any event, police concern quickly shifted to communism. And with good reason: communists lurked in Canada, threatening the political and economic status quo. Predictably, though, this fear became obsessive for Canada’s security officials, who went overboard. As the authors note, at one point a security file was maintained for seven to eight per cent of adult Canadians. Soon, new threats emerged, including Quebec separatism, Sikh terrorism and radical Islam. The authors ably review these topics, shedding new light, for instance, on the RCMP’s involvement in the October Crisis of 1970, and the RCMP’s ‘dirty tricks’ and the resulting Mackenzie and Macdonald Commissions, which led to the creation of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS).

These topics are covered thoroughly and the book will justly stand as the authoritative study of political policing in Canada. However, the authors avoid much in the way of a discussion of the broader issues regarding such activities in a liberal democratic society. They denounce this policing for its ‘chilling and debilitating impact on political activity’ (p. 253), but there certainly are internal threats, most recently from a number of al Qaeda-inspired radicals caught – and convicted of – plotting attacks. As for the Cold War files on Canadians, with the impossibility of knowing in advance which threats might be real, files were doubtless created on innocents. What is more disturbing about this episode is that thousands of Canadians apparently informed on their neighbours, an indication, perhaps, of the support that exists for political policing and the protection of the status quo. In the event, more attention to debate over balancing security and liberty might have been useful.