Spying on Canadians: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service and the Origins of the Long Cold War

Award-winning author Gregory S. Kealey's study of Canada's security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States. Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through its use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defense of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction: spying on Canadians. Part 1 Nineteenth-century roots : The empire strikes back: the nineteenth-century origins of the Canadian Secret Service -- "High-handed, impolite, and empire-breaking actions": radicalism, anti-imperialism, and political policing in Canada, 1860-1914. Part 2 The origins of the long Cold War : State repression of labour and the left in Canada, 1914-20: the impact of the First World War -- The surveillance state: the origins of domestic intelligence and counter-subversion in Canada, 1914-21 -- The early years of state surveillance of labour and the left in Canada: the institutional framework of the RCMP security and intelligence apparatus, 1918-26 -- Spymasters, spies, and their subjects: the RCMP and Canadian state repression, 1914-39 -- A war on ethnicity? The RCMP and Second World War internment. Part 3 The archival trail : Filing and defiling: the organization of the state security archives in the inter-war years -- The RCMP, CSIS, the Public Archives of Canada, and access to information: a curious tale. Permissions -- Index

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