Gregory S. Kealey - Spying on Canadians: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War

This collection of essays has been many years in the making. The social and political issues that it addresses, however, have grown ever more grave. The many individuals who provided me with research and archival help and intellectual stimulation over the past decades are legion, far too many to name individually without slighting someone omitted in error. The individual essays do include specific acknowledgments and I renew my gratitude to those folks and to many others. At the University of Toronto Press, Len Husband has displayed the patience of the most stoic of editors. I am also grateful to managing editor Lisa Jemison, copy editor Kimberly Booker, and indexer Catherine Plear. At the University of New Brunswick I received excellent support in pulling the final copy together from Rebecca Stieva and the folks at the Harriet Irving Librarys Centre for Digital Scholarship, especially James Kerr. I am also most appreciative of my co-authors Kirk Niergarth, Andy Parnaby, and Reg Whitaker for their support and collaboration on some of this material. And thanks to Kerry A. Taylor of Massey University in New Zealand, my most recent collaborator on our new research on the postWorld War II renewal of the domestic security and intelligence apparatus of the junior Commonwealth partners in the emerging Five-Eyes Alliance. Finally, thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its support of this research.

Some twenty years ago I published a collection of essays from my research on Canadian labour and working-class history.; second, I thought that some day these papers might constitute a separate essay collection. This volume transforms aspiration into reality.

The essays in this collection first appeared as articles or book chapters in the years between 1988 and 2003. From the pages of national and international journals and edited collections of essays and documents, these individual studies are brought together here to provide readers one convenient and accessible anthology. While covering some of the same terrain as Secret Service, they provide considerably more detail on themes covering the years from the 1860s to World War II than the Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby study that carries the story forward to 2012.

My interest in the origins and early history of the Canadian states domestic security apparatus emerged from my studies of Canadian labour and the Left. In my earliest work on Toronto workers, In other words I began to appreciate far more fully how unique the Macdonald Papers were as a source on spies and spying.

As I was pursuing my labour revolt research at the then National Archives of Canada, I was becoming ever more conscious of the tortured history of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) fonds that I was reviewing (for details see

This volume is organized in three parts. Part I, Nineteenth-Century Roots, commences with my Canadian Historical Association Presidential Address of 1999, which explains some of my personal interest in In the second essay, co-authored by Andrew Parnaby with the help of Kirk Niergarth, we extend the theme of the first essay beyond Fenianism to demonstrate the Canadian states service to, and defence of, the empire in the case of its pursuit of Indian nationalists in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In both cases the Canadian state wholly identified its self-interest with that of its imperial master and pursued ethnic others with a vengeance all too recognizable to readers today. The familiar whiff of anti-Asian racism reinforced this service to the empire.

Part II moves the story of Canadian political policing into the twentieth century and argues that the Cold War domestic security state was simply a natural extension of the postBolshevik Revolution Red Scare arising from the labour revolt of 191725.

, Reg Whitaker and I analyse the RCMPs role in internment during World War II.

As readers will have recognized, the interplay of the internal and secret state security archives with the emerging, but never complete, publicly available archival record lies at the heart of writing the history of spies and spying. This theme is central to Part III, which contains one essay on the organization of the inter-war RCMP Registry, Canadas internal secret security archives, and another on the complex, problematic, and ongoing fight to gain public access to these records.

Perhaps ironically given the great promise of Canadas ATIP regime when first introduced in the 1980s, the access situation actually worsened considerably in subsequent years under both Liberal and Conservative federal governments. While politicians, most often while in opposition, have reflected eloquently on the importance of such legislation, the reality in practice has been very different. Hence the sadly unfulfilled potential of Ontario Liberal Cabinet Minister Ian Scotts eminently quotable phrase, We do not now and never will accept the proposition that the business of the public is none of the publics business.