R.C.M.P. Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part 3: 1936 ed. by Gregory S. Kealey, Reg Whitaker (review)

172 The Canadian Historical Review R.C.M.P. Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part 3: 1936. Edited by GREGORY s. KEALEY and REG WHITAKER. St John's: Canadian Committee on Labour History 1996. Pp. 619, $29.95 Although they may be reluctant to acknowledge the fact, historians of the Canadian communist movement should be grateful to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Created in the wake of widespread labour unrest in 1919, Canada's new federal police force regarded workingclass radicalism in general and the Communist Party of Canada in particular as primary threats to national security over the next four or five decades. Consequently, officers and agents kept an intense and scrupulous record of communist activities, a record unparalleled in its detail and unrivalled as a source of information for labour historiaqs. Over the past decade, historian Greg Kealey and political scientist Reg Whitaker have fought to have these files declassified and their contents published, and so far have produced five volumes of R.C.M.P. Security Bulletins that range intermittently from 1919 to 1945· As a result, our picture of relations between the state, labour, radicals, and the unemployed has been brought into much sharper focus than before. This latest volume, devoted to the single year of 1936, is no exception . The fact that its fifty weekly bulletins occupy more than 500 pages of text gives some idea of the detail in each of those bulletins. For the most part, they provide a summary of reports on 'revolutionary organizations and agitation in Canada,' giving province-by-province and cityby -city accounts of any unrest, demonstrations, mass meetings, and elections for that particular week. More specifically, however, the bulletins throw a .spotlight on the decision reached at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935 to abandon the Communist Party's former sectarian policy of undermining labour parties and trade unions, and instead to join them in a United or Popular Front against the widening threat of fascism. Much of this book is devoted to documen!ing the manner in which communists across Canada responded to this directive, and the picture that emerges is far less clearcut than the RCMP's own predictable verdict that 'the leaders of Comintern at Moscow are keeping close touch with the situation in Canada, and ... are controlling and supervising Communist activity in this country' (85). The idea of the Popular Front - an anti-Hitler alliance of communist , socialist, and liberal forces - found support in many European countries in the 1930s, producing new governments in France and Spain. Perhaps it is surprising, therefore, that the Popular Front in its Canadian manifestation has evoked little interest among historians in Book Reviews 173 this country. Even labour historians have paid it scant regard: Desmond Morton, Bryan Palmer, and Craig Heron do not deem it worthy of an index entry in their respective survey texts. Yet as this volume of · R.C.M.P. Security Bulletins demonstrates, it is difficult to appreciate the twists and nuances of Canadian politics in the late 1930s - especially at the local level - without at least some appreciation of the Popular Front's influence. For example, the ccF's resolute opposition to enter any sort of pact that involved the Communist Party led to its outright rejection of either the Popular Front or its pro-socialist forerunner, the United Front. This decision led to some bitter splits within the party in some cities, and in one case, observed the RCMP's agent, was said 'to have caused a split in the c.c.F. which may have far-reaching consequences ' (264). While the cCF-Communist conflict is described and documented in several existing works, such as Walter Young's 1969 study of the ccF, many of these bulletins provide valuable ground-level detail otherwise not easily available. There is much more to this collection of police reports, however, than an account of the Communist Party's switch to the politics of the Popular Front. The very focus of these reports - the lives and actions of radicals, alleged radicals, the unemployed, and ethnic minorities makes them an important document of Canadian social history. For example, we are told of a demonstration by and subsequent...