/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: Spying 101: Campus ‘Dissent’ Under Scrutiny in Canada

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 5 2002 (IPS) - Canadian police and intelligence officials have demonstrated the same myopia in trying to distinguish between legitimate dissent and real security threats to the state as have their counterparts in other western countries, such as the United States and Great Britain.

One major difference is that Canadians historically have felt uncomfortable about police spying on campus activity. University officials in many instances have refused to cooperate with the security service arm of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (which split from the RCMP to form the Canadian Security Intelligence Service – CSIS – in 1984) when requested to assist in some form of surveillance on their students and professors.

Perhaps mindful of the impact of a U.S. senate committee witch hunt that led to the suicide of Herbert Norman, Canada’s ambassador to Egypt, a decade earlier, then prime minister Lester Pearson negotiated an agreement in 1963 with the Canadian Association of University Teachers to restrict the ability of the RCMP to mount covert surveillance operations within universities.

Successive Canadian governments have altered the wording of this directive under pressure from the RCMP or CSIS. But the changes were insufficient to please either agency, which managed to bend the rules anyway.

A loophole in a 1997 federal directive, for instance, allowed CSIS to use informants on university campuses in ”urgent situations” without first informing the solicitor general (who oversees police).

CSIS interpreted the authorisation more broadly than what Ottawa ”had originally envisioned possible under the new policy”, writes Canadian historian Steve Hewitt, the author of Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997.

It is normally assumed that ruling Canadian political leaders will turn a blind eye to the excesses of their domestic spies except in the rare occasions when reporters or opposition members of Parliament bring them to light.

Aggressive reporting by a television journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) helped to spark a public inquiry into RCMP efforts to restrict lawful peaceful political protest during the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operative (APEC) conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Ten months before the leaders of the participating APEC nations convened, the RCMP’s national security investigations directorate (a rival of CSIS) investigated anti-APEC protestors on and off-campus under the mantle of protecting visiting dignitaries (including Suharto the corrupt former dictator of Indonesia, a major trading partner for Canada) from the ”threat of harm and embarrassment”.

Hewitt describes how the RCMP read personal email and performed criminal checks on the protestors, all of which yielded nothing.

The author draws comparisons with earlier questionable RCMP tactics involving campus political activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were also the subject of a government inquiry. ”Indeed, one of the senior Mounties involved at APEC, Superintendent T.W. Thompsett had spied on Trotskyites (followers of Soviet Russia communist official Leon Trotsky) when he was a member of the old (RCMP) Security Service,” writes Hewitt.

Like its U.S. counterpart the FBI, the RCMP 30 years ago resorted to disruptive tactics to undermine left-wing political groups. These included filing a false income return in the name of a targeted individual, manipulating the media to spread negative information about groups and individuals and anonymous telephone calls designed to spread discontent within groups.

The full story of RCMP spying in that era upon groups representing youth, peace activists, aboriginals, blacks, urban reformers, Quebec nationalists and campus activists has yet to be fully told. Hewitt’s considerable use of RCMP documentation was somewhat hindered by tough security provisions in Canada’s access to information law.

Later, a stolen list of the names of left-wing activists and groups got into the hands of the RCMP. The Mounties then circulated within the Canadian government a list of 21 civil servants, several of whom were former campus activists. They were either dismissed from their jobs or did not have their contracts renewed. Their names were also forwarded to various foreign intelligence agencies.

A 1981 royal commission found that the RCMP had concocted a totally groundless theory about how these individuals were set to destroy Canada’s political and social structure through an extra-parliamentary opposition (a vague left-wing concept that had morphed into a concrete conspiracy).

With the exception of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Canadian universities have not generally been great centres of intense left-wing political activity. Nowadays, students are more concerned about their job prospects and personal debts stemming from having to borrow large student loans to pay for tuition and living expenses.

Nonetheless, ”the inherent and interconnected duality of both challenging the status quo while at the same time upholding and perpetuating it”, in higher education, says Hewitt, ensures that the RCMP and CSIS will not be far away.

Well-funded police and intelligence agencies need to justify their existence, even if today they are more likely to monitor Muslim students. ”It is never in the interest of these agencies to minimize threats,” the author adds.

/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOKS: Spying 101: Campus ‘Dissent’ Under Scrutiny in Canada

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Nov 5 2002 (IPS) - Canadian police and intelligence officials have demonstrated the same myopia in trying to distinguish between legitimate dissent and real security threats to the state as have their counterparts in other western countries, such as the United States and Great Britain.
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