Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada 9780773553651

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Figures
Introduction
1 The Red-Tinged Prism
2 A Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight
3 On to Ottawa Redux
4 The Limits of Global Sisterhood
5 Evolution and Decline
6 The Paradox of the Mountie Bounty
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y

Citation preview

JUST WATCH US

JUST WATCH US RCMP Surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada

christabelle sethna and steve hewitt

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 isbn 978-0-7735-5282-1 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5365-1 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5366-8 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sethna, Christabelle Laura, 1961–, author Just watch us : rcmp surveillance of the women’s liberation movement in Cold War Canada / Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5282-1 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-5365-1 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-5366-8 (epub) 1. Royal Canadian Mounted Police – History – 20th century. 2. Intelligence service – Canada – History – 20th century. 3. Internal security – Canada – History – 20th century. 4. Feminism – Canada – History – 20th century. 5. Women – Political activity – Canada – History – 20th century. 6. Cold War. I. Hewitt, Steve, author II. Title. hv8158.7.r69s48 2018

323.44'820971

c2017-907064-9 c2017-907065-7

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Figures follow pages viii, 104 Introduction 3 1 The Red-Tinged Prism 18 2 A Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight 48 3 On to Ottawa Redux 76 4 The Limits of Global Sisterhood 105 5 Evolution and Decline 137 6 The Paradox of the Mountie Bounty 170 Conclusion 200 Notes 209 Bibliography 257 Index 289

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Acknowledgments

Researching and writing a book usually takes longer than expected. Researching and writing a book collaboratively takes longer still, but the rewards are compensation enough. Thanks to some of our earlier research on state surveillance, we discovered independently that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) had spied on the women’s liberation movement. Having already known each other for several years, we decided to collaborate. On the strength of two articles we co-authored and published, Jonathan Crago of McGill-Queen’s University Press invited us to submit a manuscript that enlarged upon our research. The shape of the book, and our relationship to it and to each other, evolved over time as we brought different but complementary ideas and values to the process of working together and apart with large numbers of rcmp declassified documents. In the end, this book is a product of our combined strengths and weaknesses, and its completion is made possible not only through co-operation and compromise, but a host of behind-the-scenes support systems. We acknowledge the British Academy and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the financial assistance that allowed us to hire wonderful research assistants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. We thank Catherine Chambers, Vickie Cieplak, Erin Jex, Simone Parniak, and Keturah Prendergast for their efforts. Sarah Mackenzie deserves special mention for her early dedication to this project. Isaac Hewitt-Harris did considerable work on assembling the bibliography for us, and Flora Hewitt-Harris proofread the manuscript and helped assemble the index. Archivists Frances Fournier and Paul Hébard at the Simon Fraser University Archives were helpful in so many ways, as were the University of Ottawa librarians, Lucie Desjardins, Emily Kingsland, Katrina Petryk, and Catelynne Sahadath, who dealt with our many, many queries with good cheer. It was a special pleasure to work with archivists

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Julie Roy and Deidre O’Connell at the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives, University of Ottawa. Lora Ramunno explained the ins and outs of prisms to us. The incisive critiques of three anonymous readers helped refine the structure of this book and contributed greatly to the clarification of its argument. We are grateful for the time and energy each expended, and acknowledge Reader A3 for a sentence that we reconfigured as the title of Chapter 2. We would also like to thank McGill-Queen’s University Press, in particular Jonathan Crago, for the faith expressed in this project, and Patricia Kennedy for her copy-editing of this manuscript. Christabelle would like to thank the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society in Graz, Austria, and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, for much needed time and space to reflect and write. She is grateful to a sabbatical leave from the University of Ottawa, and to Paolo Di Martino, the late Francesca Carnevali, and Danielle Fuller, in whose homes she stayed so that she and Steve could work together in Birmingham. She considers herself lucky to be surrounded by a network of women who are strong, smart, beautiful, resilient, funny, and feisty family members, friends, colleagues, staff, and students. Inspired by their love, support, encouragement, and example, it is inevitable that she would write about the women’s liberation movement. And last but not least, Steve Hewitt deserves special appreciation. He challenged, questioned, and improved upon the book from beginning to end with generosity and respect. A book is as much a labour of endurance as a labour of love. Making such a task bearable are those who share journeys in life with us. For Steve, Ceri Morgan made this book possible, and he is eternally grateful for her love and support. This applies as well to his children, Isaac, Flora, and Gwilym. Then there is Steve’s wider family, many excellent colleagues, and, of course, friends in Birmingham, where he has a home, but also in Canada. In no particular order, the latter category includes Roberta, Corey, Deborah, Karen, Jarrett, Debra, Isabelle, Michele, Lucie, Shirley, Jo, Jim, Margaret, Dominique, Jules, Snoot, Danielle, Scott, and Jeff. Finally, Steve would like to thank Christabelle Sethna for her patience, persistence, and passion, without which this book would not exist. Some of us do not get the time we need. During the writing of this book, we lost a friend and colleague, Marie Hammond-Callaghan, whose own work on the Voice of Women will be missed. We dedicate this book to her.

rcmp surveillance of women’s organizations like the Voice of Women anti-nuclear protest predated the targeting of the women’s liberation movement. Duncan Cameron, Library and Archives of Canada, PA-209888.

Voice of Women march against Canadian complicity in the Vietnam War. The makeshift clothesline on the left is adorned with handmade clothing for Vietnamese children and a sign that reads “Dark Colours for Camouflage Purposes.” Library and Archives Canada R10202-0-4-E, Accession 1995-082, Box C 0539, Album no. 1, Page 10, Lil Greene fonds, by permission from Karen Greene.

rcmp security service memorandum from 1977, commenting on the relationship of the women’s liberation movement to the political left that was replicated in a number of surveillance files. Library and Archives Canada, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, Women’s Liberation Movement–Manitoba, rcmp memorandum, 2 August 1977, 2.

The lead vehicle of the 1970 Abortion Caravan bore a coffin on its roof to symbolize the deaths of women from illegal abortions. Archives of Ontario Item Ref Code: C 193-2 strip 2296 #39.

Members of the New Feminists support the 1970 Abortion Caravan in Toronto, 7 May 1970. Jac Holland for the Toronto Telegram, York University Libraries, Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections, Toronto Telegram fonds, ASC04612.

Members of the Abortion Caravan protest outside the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, 11 May 1970. Courtesy of the photographer, Errol Young, for the Toronto Star.

An early rcmp security service surveillance report on the Vancouver Women’s Caucus that is mostly censored. Library and Archives Canada, rg 146, access request A2007-00198, volume 2914, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus, 6.

JUST WATCH US

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Introduction

Allan Fotheringham once commented aptly: “Ottawa does not represent Canada because nothing in Canada is so dull.”1 There was little that was dull, however, about Canada’s capital in the wake of the defection of Igor Gouzenko. In early September 1945, Gouzenko, a cipher clerk working at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, walked out with over one hundred stolen documents proving that the Soviets were engaged in espionage activities in Western countries, including Canada. Although the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp), the national police force, did not believe the Soviet initially, they interrogated him after the federal government gave his family safe haven. Once American newspapers got hold of the story in early 1946, through a strategic leak, the Canadian state was forced to act. The rcmp, known colloquially as the Mounties or Mounted Police, arrested a number of suspects, and the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King struck the Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and the Circumstances Surrounding the Communication, by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust, of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power. Mercifully known by its shorter title, the Kellock-Taschereau Commission, after the two leading commissioners, Supreme Court Justices Roy Kellock and Robert Taschereau, this body questioned suspects without permitting them counsel. Its findings confirmed that Soviet spies were after Western atomic secrets and that a small number of Canadians had assisted them by spying against their own country. The Gouzenko Affair kicked the Cold War, which had been brewing since the Russian Revolution of 1917, into high gear on the international and domestic fronts. It led to arrests, trials, imprisonment, and blacklisting of Communists and suspected Communists in Canada, the United States, and Britain. The subsequent defection to the Soviet Union of prominent members of the British establishment, Donald McLean and Guy Burgess, and later Harold “Kim” Philby, as

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well as the anti-Communist witch hunt of American Senator Joseph McCarthy, heightened even further Cold War paranoia about Communist subversion at the heart of Western liberal-democratic institutions.2 This book deals with a little-known manifestation of state surveillance during the late Cold War years in Canada, but one that fits a wider pattern in relation to counter-subversion and its impact on civil liberties in liberal-democratic societies, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Just Watch Us: RCMP Surveillance of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Cold War Canada investigates the surveillance of women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities by the intelligence branch of the rcmp, popularly known as the rcmp security service, and then formally known as the rcmp Security Service from 1970 onward.3 This surveillance began in the late 1960s and stretched into the mid-1980s, a period that is often referred to in the history of the women’s movement as the feminist second wave. We rely upon a close reading of thousands of pages of rcmp intelligence files pertaining to the women’s liberation movement in Canada. We had the files declassified under Canada’s 1985 Access to Information Act and the corresponding 1983 Privacy Act (atip), albeit recognizing that they constitute neither a complete archive of the women’s liberation movement nor a comprehensive account of rcmp security service surveillance of that movement. 4 The book features examples of the state surveillance of feminist activism, primarily in English Canada, but at various points as it also played out in Quebec, particularly with the volatile element of growing Québécois nationalism in the mix. Using these declassified files, we catalogue, examine, and analyze the interaction between the rcmp security service and the women’s liberation movement in the waning years of the Cold War to make three significant claims. First, the women’s liberation movement was not the only or the main target of state surveillance during the time span in question. Cold War politics meant that the gaze of the rcmp was trained on this movement because of its real and/or imagined connections to left-wing activism. In that sense, spying on women’s liberation is yet one more illustration of state surveillance in which a variety of domestic targets, such as labour unions, political parties, gays, hippies, lesbians, and university and highschool students were targeted, and information about their activities collected and interpreted through what we call a “red-tinged prism,”

Introduction

5

which dominated the security environment. We use this term figuratively to refer to the increasingly expansive surveillance frame used by the rcmp security service to assess the potential for left-wing threats and the possibility of violence. This surveillance frame was affected by the nature of the rcmp during much of this time. It was an all-male (until 1974), predominantly white police force, used to targeting Old Left, specifically Communist, male-led protest movements. Into the 1960s, the focus of the rcmp security service centred on communism and Communists, viewed collectively as a foreign, deviant, and subversive menace to the security of Western liberal-democratic governments. However, as will be pointed out, the security service’s anti-Communist focus came under pressure because of the rise of the New Left and the concomitant growth of a wide range of social protest movements supporting a variety of causes. This development led to the broadening of the surveillance frame to cover not only the doctrinaire Old Left but also the amorphous New Left, and this served as the justification for the targeting of the women’s liberation movement. Second, state surveillance of the women’s liberation movement is connected to, but differs from, other cases of rcmp security-service spying, even when earlier women’s organizations, such as the Voice of Women (vow), were involved. Spying on these women’s organizations was carried out in a similar fashion to surveillance of the women’s liberation movement, but was motivated primarily by their membership in the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) or by their participation in a union, an immigrant association, or the peace movement, all of which were suspected of an allegiance to communism. The women’s liberation movement advocated in the main for a radical restructuring of gender relations in Canada. In fact, women’s liberation demanded not the violent overthrow of liberal-democratic governments but an end to the oppression of women. While this desire was often couched in the dramatic rhetoric of revolution common to parallel civil rights, decolonization, and anti-war movements, and was sometimes inspired by various Old and New Left analyses of capitalist society, women’s liberation insisted on achieving gender equality. In many ways, this goal, along with the styles, strategies, and structures of women’s liberation groups required a departure from the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. Third, intelligence is not an exact science; it can be skewed by the outlooks, biases, and backgrounds of those individuals who collect and

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interpret information about targets of state surveillance. The rcmp security service did not spy on the women’s liberation movement because it had a vendetta against women or against feminist ideologies, but rather as a result of Cold War politics in relation to the movement’s connections to the radical left, especially to Trotskyists, who skirted between the New and Old Left in support of a number of radical causes. Additionally, the gender gap between a police force staffed only by men until 1974 and a movement of women intent on sparking a revolutionary reboot of gender relations tested the Mounties’ understanding of what women’s liberation represented, coloured their responses to the women protesters’ appearance and behaviour, and affected some of the methods they used to spy on women. The police discounted the truly radical nature of women’s liberation because that radicalism existed in a social realm beyond the traditional male protest areas that the male-dominated police worried about in terms of provocations to the state. Of course, gender was not the sole variable at work. The performance of masculinity by the security service, and the youth of many of the women protestors, acting in combination with other factors, such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class, had an impact on the workings of espionage during an era that was roiled by unrest on the domestic and international scene. This book adds to the growing field of surveillance studies, not only because it is the first book to deal with state surveillance of the women’s liberation movement, thereby positioning second-wave feminism both chronologically and politically within the context of the Cold War, but also because the topic acts as a bridge between a late-twentieth-century period when domestic security surveillance concentrated on communism and subversion, and a twenty-first-century focus on terrorism and extremism that has devolved into the policing of local protest on a broad scale.5 The impact of surveillance on civil liberties is, of course, a major subject of discussion in the post-9/11 world.6 Alarms have been rung in a range of countries, including Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom regarding the targeting of racialized immigrants, citizens, and travellers, the globalization of surveillance networks, and the growth of everyday technologies of surveillance, which have contributed to what social justice activist and journalist Harsha Walia calls “border imperialism.”7 That growth has increasingly raised concern, not just from the “usual suspects,” such as civil libertarians, but also from within the

Introduction

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media, among politicians, and even across the general public. Much of the outcry has been triggered by revelations detailing widespread spying by the National Security Agency (nsa) in the United States and its allied agencies, including the Communications Security Establishment Canada (csec) and the Government Communications Headquarters (gchq) in Britain, after a cache of documents were leaked by former nsa and Central Intelligence Agency (cia) employee Edward Snowden. The Snowden material revealed the existence of widespread data mining of electronic residue of the general public, including phone records, online postings, and Internet searches.8 Even the American journalist who broke the story, Glenn Greenwald, found himself caught up in the state surveillance web when his partner was detained and questioned for several hours at Heathrow Airport under British terrorism legislation.9 Despite these contemporary revelations, as the example of the Cold War illustrates, the massive pursuit of information on an unprecedented scale by the security state is not a new development. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the efforts of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, valuable scholarly work has been done on the vast archive of files generated by the Stasi, the secret police in the former East Germany, on citizens suspected of subversion against the Communist government.10 In Canada, the rcmp’s intelligence branch, in parallel with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) in the United States and the Security Service (mi5) in the United Kingdom, spied upon millions of individuals and organizations believed to be subversive, primarily because of their real or suspected ties to communism and other radical left-wing interests.11 Thanks to documents opened to researchers through the Freedom of Information Act in the United States, atip in Canada, and the Freedom of Information Act in the United Kingdom, there is ample proof of this claim.12 Nevertheless, it is also true that after the fall of the Berlin Wall there is greater openness in relation to the operations of domestic intelligence agencies in the former Communist bloc than in relation to the work within western democracies by domestic intelligence agencies. In the triumphalism of the post–Cold War era in the West, there was considerable media and academic attention paid to what Communist intelligence agencies had done to citizens of Communist nations and in the West, but far less discussion about the surveillance Western intelligence agencies conducted within their own countries.13

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It is equally correct to state that not all individuals are equally targeted by or, more importantly, affected by government-controlled and government-initiated spying. Certain “suspect communities,” a concept that sociologist Paddy Hillyard employs to describe the earlier experience of Irish people living in Great Britain,14 have long experienced intrusive surveillance that can consist not just of data collection as a potential end in itself, but as a means to disturb the lives of the targeted. Because those who have been or who are besieged in this way are in some way already marginalized by the wider society, whether because of ideology or ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, religion, or social class, or some combination thereof, due to a process that surveillance-studies scholar David Lyon refers to as “social sorting,” their treatment largely escapes attention in majority discourses.15 Only when the wider public is a potential target of surveillance or perceives itself as such do the mainstream media and politicians – and, indeed, the public itself – pay attention to the issue of state snooping. It is the spying equivalent of the old axiom about the economy: it is a recession when my neighbour loses her job, but a depression when I lose mine. While widespread state surveillance generates the headlines, targeted surveillance of suspect communities still does not receive the attention it deserves, in part because of continuing restrictions on access to relevant documents. Thus, recent accounts of British protest movements infiltrated by undercover police officers, who had sexual relations with the women they spied upon and even fathered children with them, or the selection of Muslim communities by the New York Police Department for intrusive surveillance hold far greater relevance to the study that follows than does surveillance through the mining of metadata.16 The selection of targets via the red-tinged prism also embodies, in the words of the late civil-liberties lawyer Frank Donner, “a judgment of deviance from the dominant political culture.”17 In turn, that dominant political culture, through official sources and positions of power such as the rcmp, generates “frames” that encourage the viewing of deviance on the receiving end of state power as subversion. Throughout the Cold War, subversion was a crucial aspect of the red-tinged prism deployed by the state to frame domestic political deviants as representing a threat. These “official frames” are used to ensure “the political status quo,” because, according to David Cunningham and Barb Browning in their relevant work about the fbi, “[they] contain implicit or explicit narra-

Introduction

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tives of deviances that serve to demonize actors and organizations engaged in counter-hegemonic activities.”18 They argue that the lead agency has control of these frames which, even when explicitly articulated by visible authorities, are not static, nor do they necessarily translate directly into predictable forms of action, repressive or otherwise. The key is that the frames are constructed and negotiated within the repressing agency and shaped by the specific interests and motivations of organizational actors, which in turn are tied to the structures of the organization itself.19 Frames can be highly gendered, an argument that is supported increasingly by recent ground-breaking feminist intersectional scholarship in surveillance studies. There is already ample evidence of the “male gaze,” whereby heterosexual men are constructed as watchers of women and women are constructed as the watched.20 But new scholarship calls for a widening of the panoptic gaze such that “surveillance practices” are seen not only as tied to relations of power and inequality between states and targets, but also as connected to former histories of surveillance and as reflective of embodied social identities. Such work even makes a case for the development of a “feminist surveillance studies” that engenders surveillance as “white, supremacist, capitalist [and] heteropatriarchal.”21 In that vein, scholars Robin Jarvis Brownlie, Sherene H. Razack, and Suvendrini Perera highlight the long-standing state surveillance of Indigenous women and women of colour, just as Simone Browne reminds us that black bodies have been policed from slavery onward, making surveillance the norm. As such, surveillance studies as a field does not concentrate per se on unearthing evidence of state persecution of surveillance targets, but on what a state-sanctioned surveillance apparatus says about the treatment of individuals who are “othered,” because of their gender, race, class, or sexuality, in a particular society.22 Like international relations, nuclear warfare, national security, and private security, surveillance paradigms are grounded in dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity.23 Spying itself is mocked as “the second-oldest profession,” and as dishonourable as the first. This syllogism works to cast suspicion upon the profession of espionage only because women who sell sex for money are coded as shameful and treacherous.24 Although female spies can be characterized as patriotic heroines, they

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have been stereotyped as disreputable old maids or, as in the archetypal case of Mata Hari, sexualized and racialized as exotic sirens threatening both manhood and nationhood.25 By contrast, male spies, such as the notorious Cold War creation of author Ian Fleming, British secret agent James Bond, taken to task for exhibiting blatant sexism, racism, and class snobbery, have often been stylized as white, cool, and controlled males, whose promiscuous heterosexuality is weaponized against communism.26 White, heterosexual, hegemonic masculinity and homosocial bonding, as Steve Hewitt points out, are essential to maintaining gendered structures of the type seen in the police, defence, military, and spy agencies.27 The discovery of sexual activity, particularly if considered deviant, has been a favourite spur to blackmail surveillance targets into providing sought-after evidence; regardless of biological sex, informants, moles, double agents, and civil servants suspected of sexual misconduct were gendered as queer and identified simultaneously as a menace to national security and to heteronormativity.28 Still, attention to gender is lacking in some of the best-known work on rcmp history, including the most impressive in terms of its scope and depth, Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America by Reg Whitaker, Gregory Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby. Because of the macro nature of its approach, it is missing detailed examinations of either particular security operations or specific surveillance targets. Similar points apply to other studies related to Canadian domestic intelligence, ranging from the groundbreaking research by journalist John Sawatsky to a study of the rcmp and security screening by Larry Hannant to a history of rcmp surveillance at Canadian universities by Steve Hewitt.29 Memoirs by ex-security-service members have largely been non-existent, with a recent notable exception being a work by a former civilian director in the early 1970s, John Starnes. Regrettably, his book provides little insight into the operations of the rcmp intelligence branch.30 On the other hand, the literature does show that, at various points, individual women or organizations of women in Canada did become Mountie surveillance targets, not necessarily because they were women, but because their activities aroused suspicions of subversion. Joan Sangster provides evidence of the surveillance of women and their husbands who were involved in the cpc, sometimes leading to the harassment, arrest, and imprisonment of both parties.31 Deborah van Seters shows that

Introduction

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Gerda Munsinger, an East German immigrant to Canada suspected of prostitution and espionage, was considered a security risk by the Mounties because she fit “an ideal profile of a female foreign agent successfully infiltrating Canadian government circles by trading on her ‘feminine wiles.’”32 In the work of historian Franca Iacovetta, the rcmp is portrayed as one of the most powerful “gatekeepers” of postwar immigration from Europe, surveilling female immigrants suspected of compromising national-security and immigration policies. Academics Julie Guard and Mercedes Steedman highlight the ways in which women involved in the Housewives Consumers Association and the Mine Mill women’s auxiliaries, respectively, caught the attention of the Mounted Police, because of their presumed support for Communist ideology. Similarly, historian Marie Hammond-Callaghan indicates that the rcmp security service set its sights on vow, fearing that its involvement in the peace movement would lead members to become Communist dupes.33 More recent research on the rcmp pays attention to the intersectionality of gender, race, and sexuality. Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile’s The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation contends that the surveillance of lesbians and gays in the civil service and the military occurred because Canada’s secret police believed that their putative deviant sexuality made them vulnerable to blackmail by Communists. Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal by David Austin tracks in part rcmp surveillance of Black Power, triggering paranoia over the possibility of an alliance between black activists, Indigenous peoples, and Quebec separatists. Bonnie Reilly Schmidt’s Silenced: The Untold Story of the Fight for Equality in the RCMP follows the first batch of women recruits to join the Mounties and reveals the deep-seated sexism many of them experienced on the job. Schmidt maintains that women officers who considered themselves the equal of male colleagues were branded as manly “women’s libbers,” while those who considered themselves different were said to be weak and ineffectual.34 In the 1960s, the binary Communist–anti-Communist framing that the rcmp intelligence branch had relied upon to assess national security threats since the Russian Revolution began to fray. An explosive mix of Cold War and New Left politics moved the rcmp security service to expand the red-tinged prism to include a wide range of so-called subversives, including women’s liberationists. Christabelle Sethna and Steve Hewitt have shown variously that the Mounties spied on the Toronto

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Women’s Caucus (twc) and the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc) because of connections to Trotskyist organizations and anti–Vietnam War mobilization.35 Spying on feminist protest was not unique to Canada. The pursuit by the Australian Secret Intelligence Service of Carole Ferrier, a feminist activist involved in women’s liberation movement activities, resulted in a voluminous personal file.36 The American literature is the most developed. Active in women’s liberation, Americans Robin Morgan, Karla Jay, and Brenda Feigen detail the influence of state surveillance on their lives.37 Betty Friedan, a leading figure in the American second-wave feminist canon, cogently pointed out that the fbi had infiltrated the National Organization for Women (now). That infiltration was intended to destabilize now, especially when it came to debates around sexual politics.38 The fact of fbi and cia financial support for and/or infiltration of progressive and other organizations, including those connected to women’s issues and to feminism internationally, is common knowledge, thanks to the efforts of scholars like Hugh Wilford and Helen Laville.39 Very useful to this book is Ruth Rosen’s The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. A historian and journalist, Rosen argues in one chapter that the fbi, which spied on and infiltrated the women’s liberation movement in the United States, was stuck in a Cold War mentality that privileged male-focused political change while downplaying more woman-centric protest. Consequently, the fbi fundamentally did not understand what it was up against in its surveillance of feminist activists, nor did it comprehend how far-reaching and revolutionary the feminist agenda for gender equality truly was.40 Although there is scholarship on the women’s movement in Canada and Quebec in general, and on particular aspects of that movement, it does not deal specifically with the rcmp’s involvement, with the exception of Hewitt and Sethna’s previous work.41 In any case, definitive academic histories (and herstories) of the women’s liberation movement have yet to be written, although there is now a much-needed online archive of second-wave feminist activism.42 The main basis for Rosen’s fbi-related chapter and Just Watch Us is declassified national security documents. Researchers who work with such documents are well aware of the difficulties involved, ranging from delays in access to the significant amount of censorship they undergo and the consequent limitations on dealing with the information that remains.

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Despite the fact that much remains classified, these documents are meaningful for several reasons, not the least of which is the glimpse they provide of the secret machinations of the security state.43The rcmp security service used three main methods to gather the information that would then be turned into the intelligence necessary to justify and sustain a file: Open Source Intelligence (osint); covert police operations, including technological surveillance; and undercover surveillance by Mounties and informants. Such files are a standard primary source for scholars doing research on rcmp surveillance. Those files not destroyed or retained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), a security agency created in 1984, which inherited them, eventually ended up in Library and Archives Canada (lac) as part of Record Group 146. Some of the relevant files have already been declassified. Others remain closed and, therefore, require requests using atip. Once declassified under atip, a censored version of the requested file is open to the public. The declassified files, available in hard copy and/or in an electronic version, appear in two sets: surveillance reports and appended material. They vary greatly in length; some can appear voluminous, because the number of pages released can run into the hundreds or even thousands. However, surveillance reports can be censored heavily for reasons related putatively to national security and/or to personal privacy issues. In addition, the surveillance reports are sometimes cross-referenced, resulting in multiple versions that create inconsistencies, especially when some sections are redacted in one version but are intact in another.44 Such aspects are extremely irksome to researchers, the censorship especially so. The format for surveillance reports typically includes a subject and a date followed by a section of information. Because the police were never entirely sure what they were looking for, or what ultimately might prove to be significant, no detail was too small to be ignored. A list of “sources” is often included in the report to explain where the information came from. Finally, and most tellingly, there is typically a section near the conclusion of the surveillance report under the title of “Investigator’s Comments.” Usually the author of the report or a more senior Mountie supplied an interpretation of the “facts” contained therein. Ultimately, surveillance reports consisted mainly of verbatim facts with small amounts of analysis, ratios that, as we shall see, symbolized one of the main problems of the Mounted Police intelligence branch. To surveillance reports, the rcmp security service often appended a great

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deal of osint material, such as newspaper and magazine clippings related to the surveillance target, as part of their persistent information gathering. Unlike the surveillance reports, the appended material is rarely censored and is a rich mine of information about women’s second-wave activism that was marked affectively by outrage, irreverence, and hopefulness. Over decades, thousands upon thousands of files accumulated, consisting of millions of pages. Each file was organized into broader categories of files connected to a wide array of individuals and organizations. Much of the information in itself did not represent “intelligence.” Rather, through the “intelligence cycle,”45 some of the information accumulated by the rcmp was turned into intelligence for consumption by senior Mounted Police officers, national and international allied security agencies, and government officials. We used both surveillance reports and appended material, contextualizing the information gleaned from them to produce a critical discourse analysis of the rcmp security-service surveillance of the women’s liberation movement. Most of the declassified files we used involve various women’s liberation groups, including the vwc, the twc, the New Feminists, Montreal Women’s Liberation and similar groups from across the country; files on earlier women’s organizations like vow, the Ligue des femmes du Québec, and Women Against Soaring Prices, which were useful in providing the context for spying on women’s organizations in general; and files about women’s activities related to the cpc and those connected to women’s liberation in some fashion, such as International Women’s Day celebrations and the 1971 Indochinese Women’s Delegation. The files are predominantly in English, even when they pertain to Quebec. On the rare occasions when French was employed in the surveillance reports or the appended material, an English translation was usually included for unilingual Anglophone officers reading the files. The appended osint material in these files consisted of countless pamphlets, minutes of meetings, speeches, schedules of activities, opinion pieces, flyers, and newspaper and magazine articles, providing a rich supplement to the surveillance reports. These provide a more intimate look at the intellectual and emotional aspects of the women’s activism. As expected, the surveillance reports were heavily censored. Major deletions occur under section 13(1) of atip, referring to information supplied by another government in confidence. A fundamental rule of any government is not to reveal the secrets of other governments and their agencies,

Introduction

15

particularly allied ones, lest their own secrets are revealed in response. This atip clause has relevance to this project in that the rcmp security service enjoyed a close association with both the fbi and mi5 in the United Kingdom, with the sharing of secret information taking place among all three agencies during this period; it also enjoyed a good relationship with provincial and city police forces across Canada. Another important justification for deletions is section 15(1). This broad category allows csis to remove anything it deems to be harmful to the national security of Canada. It pertains as well to the fact that the identities of informants are censored in perpetuity. To be clear, the real names of informants never actually appear in the documents being released under atip. The rcmp used code names for informants, and they appear in the third person, often referred to as a “source” or a “reliable source” throughout the files. The problem from the perspective of the authorities is that the context of reports might provide clues to the real identity of an informant. Other deletions occur because of section 19(1), which for reasons governed by the Privacy Act restricts the release of personal information about individuals either living or deceased for fewer than twenty years. The difficulty here is that, in order to get the file released, it can be up to the researcher, particularly in the case of more obscure individuals, to prove that the individual named in the document has been deceased for more than twenty years. Given our previous work on the rcmp, both of us were accustomed to working with declassified rcmp files, Hewitt far more than Sethna. But over the long haul of co-authoring this book, we struggled unexpectedly at times over some of the uncensored portions in the surveillance reports when the names of surveillance targets – many of whom are likely still alive – appeared alongside information about them that was highly personal, derogatory, or potentially embarrassing. Our scuffles, which boiled down to the need for transparency versus the regard for the privacy of surveillance targets, led us to exclude the names of some surveillance targets, or to protect their identity in some way when we agreed on a case-by-case basis that the information was too sensitive. On occasion, we included the names of surveillance targets, if they were public figures, when they appear in general surveillance chatter or were in positions of prominence in the groups and organizations we studied. As a matter of course, when we quoted directly from surveillance reports in which portions have already been redacted, we use the designation “[deleted under

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atip].” Understandably, the community of scholars researching state surveillance is extremely troubled by any lack of transparency, precisely because so many of the declassified documents released are censored, and because blocks to accessing information can have a serious negative impact on the rights of citizens. This preoccupation means, however, that very few academics have reflected upon the range of ethical challenges faced when working with declassified national security documents, including surveillance reports and appended material. Our sensitivity to these challenges is yet another salient reason why this book is a valuable addition to the growing field of surveillance studies. The title of this book evokes Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s infamous retort “just watch me,” during a testy exchange with journalists about the federal government’s controversial 1970 decision to impose the War Measures Act in response to two high-profile kidnappings in Quebec. But it also captures, simultaneously, both the notion of widespread state surveillance and the defiant challenge the women’s liberation movement posed to the gender status quo. Chapter 1 of our monograph will offer an overview of the history of the rcmp, including the development of its security service and the heavily masculine nature of the institution. Chapter 2 moves directly toward a synopsis of the women’s liberation movement, establishing its place within the second-wave feminist “sisterhood” and in the context of broader social protest movements that emerged out of the 1960s. It will also document the beginning of the rcmp’s interest in women’s liberation. This launching point leads directly into Chapter 3 with a detailed case study of the 1970 Abortion Caravan, the first major national action the women’s liberation movement undertook. Demanding the reform of the newly minted abortion law of 1969, activists from the vwc travelled from Vancouver to Ottawa, gathering supporters along the way, to make their protest. The caravan captured the attention of Canadians, but, unbeknownst to most, rcmp surveillance accompanied the caravaners at every step of their journey. A second significant national event is profiled in Chapter 4. It occurred the following year and involved an international gathering of women on Canadian soil. The Indochinese conference, with meetings held first in Vancouver and then in Toronto, drew together Canadian, American, and Asian women peace activists who sought an end to the Vietnam War. Also present were women who

Introduction

17

supported lesbian rights, women’s liberation, and racial equality. Relying on informants, the rcmp monitored the conference, inadvertently revealing the fracturing of feminist sisterhood. Chapter 5 then takes up the remainder of the 1970s and the 1980s, looking at the evolution of the women’s liberation movement and the decline of the rcmp’s surveillance. In Chapter 6 we take a step back to reflect on the ethical challenges when using surveillance reports and appended material in research, highlighting their promising and problematic outcomes and exploring, in particular, the appended material. Finally, the conclusion will summarize the key issues raised by this book, including the historical legacy of state surveillance and its continuing relevance to Canada and the wider world of the twenty-first century.

1 The Red-Tinged Prism

Beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution, the history of the intelligence branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) is impossible to separate out from the Cold War. Countering communism, and perceived Communist subversion in particular, became the raison d’être of what would eventually become known as the rcmp security service. The Mounties, like other state security agencies in the western world, viewed security threats through a red-tinged prism. From that perspective, the state was perpetually endangered by communism through espionage and, most significantly of all, by the spectre of subversion, an important-but-vague concept that grew in magnitude over time. This chapter lays bare the origins of this particular angle of vision and how it was used by the rcmp to interpret new challenges to the status quo that emerged in the 1960s. The rcmp was in a powerful position to act. It is, after all, arguably, the most distinctive police force in the world. Although similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) in serving as a national police force, it is more powerful within the Canadian system than its American counterpart is in the United States. The rcmp serves additionally as the main police force in eight of ten Canadian provinces, and even as the municipal force in a number of urban centres across the country. Nor have the tasks assigned to it by the Canadian government always resembled duties normally associated with policing. Throughout its history, the rcmp has been a bulwark against security threats to the liberal-democratic federal government of Canada, but it also stands in opposition to wider challenges to the traditional societal norms and power base of a dominant Anglo-Canadian, white and male, middle-class elite. This position as a status-quo gatekeeper would cause it to view the women’s liberation movement through the confines of its red-tinged prism from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The Red-Tinged Prism

19

The roots of the Mounties’ modern surveillance role lie deep in the latenineteenth-century North West Mounted Police (nwmp). It adopted the British-inspired red serge uniform that remains distinctive even today. Deployed to Canada’s newly acquired western territory in 1874, on its nearly disastrous “Great March,” it soon played a crucial role in preparing the region for European settlement.1 It did so by helping to displace to reserves Indigenous inhabitants of the region. Indigenous peoples were perceived as an outright impediment to the popular racialized vision of a White Canada. Hence, their removal was necessary, not simply by a police force but by a paramilitary institution capable of ordinary day-to-day policing duties and, more importantly, with the flexibility to carry out the work of an army – and, if necessary, even a spy agency.2 Despite this history, the notion of the Mounties as protectors of Indigenous peoples quickly developed in the literature of the time, and has been promoted in some histories since then, serving as a useful nation-building trope that allowed for a peaceful Canadian contrast to the far-more-brutal violence of the colonization of the American West.3 However, the displacement of Indigenous peoples fits the modern United Nations’ definition of “ethnic cleansing.”4 The ultimate loyalty of the nwmp remained with the far-off capital of Ottawa and the federal government. Nowhere was this tie more evident than in the role the police played in dealing with those Indigenous peoples who resisted giving up their land or in doing what Ottawa desired. Andrea Smith, an anti-violence activist and scholar, argues that, because research on surveillance focuses so often on the modern bureaucratic state, it renders invisible how surveillance strategies underpinned the founding of the white settler states that preceded the modern bureaucratic state. In fact, in a foreshadowing of espionage tactics that the Mounties would deploy in the twentieth century, the nwmp spied on Indigenous peoples, and even participated in a campaign that involved withholding food rations from those who were starving. because the buffalo herds upon which they relied as a food source had been decimated by the pressures of European settlement. This was intended to force them into moving onto assigned land. The fundamentally coercive relationship continued, as the Mounties have at various times surveilled Indigenous activists and organizations, especially after a Red Power movement pushed for Indigenous rights, and helped topple Indigenous band leaderships that Ottawa opposed.5

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If the rcmp’s surveillance role effectively began with efforts to control Indigenous peoples, the key event giving rise to the red-tinged prism was the First World War. In 1914, the government passed a War Measures Act, which ended up having long-standing repercussions in peacetime. The First World War would present the Mounted Police with a new version of its traditional role as status-quo gatekeeper. Mass immigration, industrialization, and urbanization occurring just before the start of the war brought rapid change to Canada. The combination of non-preferred immigrants and the growth of an industrial and urban proletariat in cities across the country presented new challenges for the governing elite. Many newcomers had different cultural practices, religious beliefs, and racial and ethnic identities from the dominant Anglo-Canadian norm. Some also subscribed to radical left-wing political parties and ideologies.6 Conflict and difference prompted concern, particularly in the West, toward communities of “enemy aliens,” namely those citizens from countries Canada now warred against. Those in power turned to the Royal North West Mounted Police (rnwmp), a new iteration of the nwmp, to monitor and contain the security threat. The government required enemy aliens to register with local police depots; thousands of others were rounded up and interned in different parts of the country for the duration of the war. Still other communities found themselves being spied upon.7 This surveillance represented what historian Gerda Ray characterizes as a “profound expression of state power … The power to spy – to watch, listen and question – has been … a characteristic of class-based male-on-male power.”8 In the Canadian milieu, there existed what criminologist Robert Reiner calls “a (manifest and/or latent) conflict of interests between social groups differentially placed in a hierarchy of advantage,” hence “the creation of systems of surveillance.” He adds that the surveillance is tied to the punishment of “discovered deviance – either immediately or by initiating penal processes.”9 Yet, this assessment is not a neat fit for what the Mounted Police did, because in the vast majority of cases it spied for decades on individuals on the left because of their perceived deviance, but without pressing any legal charges. The composition of the rnwmp meant that its officers lacked the language skills, the racial and/or ethnic background, and, at least until the mid-1970s, the gender to fit in with the communities they sought to spy on. Consequently, the rnwmp did what countless other police forces and intelligence services have done in analogous circumstances: they recruited

The Red-Tinged Prism

21

informants across western Canada from within targeted communities.10 The concentration at the start was on enemy aliens. Midway through the conflict, however, the police focus shifted to an emphasis on the radical left, since it reflected not just concerns related to ethnicity but also to class and ideology. There were substantial transnational reasons for this change. Labour strikes within Canada increased in response to the high cost of living, but the government preferred to blame foreign agitators as the cause. The Russian Revolution and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 heightened fears among western governments of the potential for comparable uprisings in their own countries. In 1919, the rnwmp commissioner, Aylesworth Bowen (A.B.) Perry, remarked on a presumed connection between Bolshevism and “foreigners” who had “shown themselves ready to follow and support the extremists who play upon their ignorance and appeal to their national prejudices and sympathy for the central powers. Bolshevism finds a fertile field among them and is assiduously cultivated by the ardent agitator.”11 With growing labour unrest at home and abroad, the rnwmp occupied a strong position from which to offer reassurance to a beleaguered federal government. Perry, the most important and longest-serving commissioner in the history of the rcmp (1900–1923) and the father of the modern force, was quick to recognize this reality. He promoted a merger between the rnwmp and the other main Canadian security agency, the Dominion Police.12 This amalgamation would be the model adopted by the federal government during a period of fear and disorder that followed in the aftermath of the war. Crucially speeding the process was the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, an episode that caused members of the political elite to tremble with apprehension and which the Mounted Police put down with force, resulting in numerous arrests and the death of two protesters. The real and imagined radical left-wing overtones of the strike, echoed by events south of the border in Seattle and further afield in Europe, reinforced in the minds of the political elite the need for a national political police force. On 1 February 1920, the actual, but officially ignored, birthdate of the modern Mounted Police, the rnwmp absorbed the Dominion Police to create the rcmp.13 Canada’s new national police force lacked a regular crime-fighting role for much of the decade, as provincial police forces held sway. Instead, the force enforced a wide variety of federal statutes across Canada

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that dealt with activities ranging from the narcotics trade to poaching.14 And, of course, it spied. Before the Second World War, the fledgling intelligence branch did not have a clear identity. In the postwar era, matters changed. As the Cold War intensified after 1945, the numbers of Mounties within the intelligence branch, which went by a variety of names but is popularly known as the rcmp security service, increased (see Table 1.1).15 Many were based in Ottawa and in larger divisions across Canada, but into the 1970s, in smaller rcmp outposts, Mounties carried out both intelligence and regular policing duties.16 Who were the members of the Mounted Police’s security service doing the spying after the Second World War? First and foremost, all Mounties until 1974 were male. This gender gap was the main characteristic of the rcmp for the first hundred years of its existence. Constructions of gender often involve complexities and contradictions.17 The force could be said to represent a “hegemonic masculinity,”18 although the concept is problematic, failing as it does to recognize the diversity of the masculinities that existed within the Mounted Police and in policing in general. For instance, in the officer class, there was an emphasis on manliness derived from British influences, including support for the British Empire, while the rank-and-file members engaged in an occupation that historically had been the preserve of working-class men.19 Race and ethnicity also factor greatly into the construction of rcmp masculinities. Although numbers remain imprecise, available evidence from the interwar period shows a clear British and Irish background to those who were Mounties.20 Assumptions about “whiteness” intersect with masculinities, so that certain groups of men were excluded from careers in the Mounted Police.21 Applications on the part of men of colour to join the rcmp were met with rejection. In one instance of note, two black men who applied to the Sydney, Nova Scotia, Subdivision in the early 1940s were rebuffed only because of their race, although an rcmp officer had earlier encouraged one of the men to train to meet the force’s physical requirements. The rcmp superintendent faced with the situation wrote: “the Commissioner directs that these men should be afforded the opportunity of writing the educational test with the hope that we shall find that they have not successfully passed, as to refuse them the opportunity of applying on account of their colour would raise the question of policy, which the Commissioner does not wish to do.” The two men gave up after repeated delays in processing their applications.22

Table 1.1 Number of rcmp intelligence personnel, 1919–1966 Year

1919 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966

hq

Field

Visa control

“I” directorate [security service] in total* 65 20 81 59 67 67 67

8

12

54

46

100 82

106

100

206

240 278 292 299 323 338 366 345 392 389 407

207 256 447 483 547 603 638 639 690 700 753

39 39 39 39 34 34 34 29 29 37 39

486 573 778 821 904 975 1038 1013 1111 1126 1199

*Includes regular and civilian members, employed civilians, civil servants, and special constables, but not officers. Source: lac, rg 146, Records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request a-2010-000294, rcmp, “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada – Countermeasures,” 1 February 1967, 90.

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Also unwelcome were women, not just as regular members but even as wives of male Mounties. Policing has traditionally been based “on the labour of men,” permeated with and displaying “distinctly masculine attributes and values.”23 Prior to 1974, almost all women connected to the rcmp served in clerical positions within the force, and at times found themselves sexualized and ornamentalized through, for example, a Miss Teen rcmp pageant.24 Until that same year, the rcmp would not recruit married male Mounties and those who did join had to serve for a time before they would be allowed to marry – but only after getting official approval.25 There were occasional exceptions to the rule around female employment prior to 1974, as the force was aware of the value of using women as undercover or surveillance agents. Unlike burly male officers, they did not raise as much suspicion on the part of targets. Beginning in 1966, the rcmp hired civilian women to work in plainclothes surveillance with some hired by the security service, tracking Russian spies and conducting surveillance on Canadians suspected of subversion.26 A specific mention of a female employed as an intelligence analyst appears in a 1969 report. The security service office in the rcmp’s “E” Division based in British Columbia hired a woman with a university degree as a civilian member in December 1968. Her employment clearly represented a novelty, as evidenced by the subsequent report on her work and its tokenistic treatment of her gender: “E” div. is delighted with her performance to date. She is being groomed for work in the youth and labour unrest fields, as well as the Communist professional setup and activities at the University of B.C. [British Columbia]. This C/M [civilian member] appears to be well satisfied and is eager and extremely bright. We are watching with interest to determine how this C/M progresses after one year and, if the results are favourable, and we expect that they will be, we will consider recruiting more female C/Ms with university background.27 Recruitment of women as regular members would occur only in the aftermath of a recommendation in the Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970), when the decision was made to admit women into the force. Nearly three hundred women applied to be among the initial contingent, who joined in May 1974. Thirty-two were accepted into the first intake and, in March 1975, thirty of them graduated

The Red-Tinged Prism

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into a not-always-welcoming institution.28 The arrival of female Mounties, as historian Bonnie Reilly Schmidt argues, did little to dismantle gendered notions of biological difference and its connection to ideal citizenship and the nation. Indeed, male and female bodies continued to be perceived in binary opposition, operating in an unequal power relationship despite the rcmp’s official employment equity policies.29 Evidence of the continuance of such attitudes toward women can be found in the published accounts of Robert Gordon Teather’s threedecade-long career in the rcmp, from 1967 to 1997. He writes that male Mounties referred to female colleagues using a derogatory term for disabled people: “crips.” Teather recalls that only those women who took on hyper-masculine qualities, such as a female constable who kept a piece of an ear that she had bitten off a suspect while trying to subdue him, earned the respect of male colleagues.30 In an environment marked by male physicality, military-style discipline, and occasional bullying, higher education was not a requirement for employment. Into the 1960s, a man could join Canada’s national police force with a Grade Eight education; not until the 1970s would a high-school education be required of all new recruits. Due to the nature of the work and the secrecy surrounding its operations, the security service was perceived as an elite unit within the rcmp; yet in 1969, only 5.5 per cent of its members had university degrees – ten years later that number had risen to 21.4 per cent.31 For the rcmp as a whole, the span of a man’s chest was more important than any educational achievement when it came to recruits: the chest measurements of male applicants at full expiration were required to be a minimum of seventy inches, with a minimum expansion on inhalation of two inches. Recruits additionally needed to have “good muscular development.”32 Undoubtedly there was a perceived practicality to such bodily requirements in an era when physicality was equated with policing and size could be used to intimidate suspects, but there were likewise elements of nationalism and imperialism implicated in constructing these body ideals. Large policemen were needed to police a growing nation.33 The undemanding educational requirements were not simply reflective of a particular era, as at the same time the fbi required its members

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to have law degrees.34 The rcmp sought a type of policeman who was unlikely to ask questions or challenge authority and who could be taught military-style discipline while imbibing the Mountie mystique. White, physical masculinity, generous in proportion, not educational attainment, ruled, and the end result was a decidedly conservative world view that did not welcome change, either inside or outside the force. An official rcmp publication from 1969 described the force as a “semi-military organization … charged with the administration of law enforcement throughout Canada” and requiring, accordingly, “certain rules and regulations to govern its members.”35 It emphasized the hierarchical nature of the institution: From time to time certain members of the Force are commissioned as officers by the reigning sovereign, on the same basis as is effected in the Armed Forces. That is why, in so far as this Force is concerned, it is wrong to call all members officers … The salute rendered is an outward and visible sign indicating the spirit of discipline of the corps to which the man belongs.36 One Mountie recalled what the “spirit of discipline” meant in practical terms: I accepted a life circumscribed by rules. I couldn’t swear or smoke or take a drink in public in uniform, couldn’t even stop at the liquor store on my way home. I couldn’t lend money to a friend in the force without the permission of my Officer Commanding, couldn’t talk of my work to friends outside of the force. I couldn’t sign a petition, discuss politics, [or] attend a political rally.37 The system in place as late as the mid-1970s allowed the commissioner to put into prison a regular Mounted Police member for up to a year without the prisoner having access to regular courts. It also denied the accused legal representation, the right to remain silent, even if to do otherwise would lead to self-incrimination, the opportunity to confront the accuser, and the chance to hear the charges against him or her.38 Militarism was instilled in Mounties from the beginning. Since 1885, all who joined experienced military-style training at “boot camp,” where they were organized into “troops.”39 This location for training, Depot

The Red-Tinged Prism

27

in Regina, modelled after the Royal Irish Constabulary’s Depot of Instruction, also served as a place where recruits, according to a whistle-blowing piece published in Maclean’s magazine in the early 1970s, experienced brutal hazing rituals. Allegations of brutality subsequently led to a reform of the internal complaints system within the force through a royal commission.40 After graduation, new Mounties initially carried out general policing duties, before a small number transferred to the security service to carry out intelligence work. Despite low educational standards and a narrow socio-political world view, these recruits into the Mounted Police’s intelligence branch would have received almost no specialized training for their new job, beyond the occasional lecture and encouragement to read books that reinforced the dominance of the red-tinged prism when it came to domestic security.41 Its main target was the Communist Party of Canada (cpc).42 Materializing out of the radical Canadian left in 1921, the party was inspired by the Russian Revolution and encouraged by the new Soviet state. It later received secret financial support from Moscow, support that was repaid by some cpc members through unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union and by an even smaller number through involvement in espionage.43 The cpc’s popularity waned dramatically over the subsequent years, but the Mounties obsessively viewed it as the top domestic security peril because of the cpc’s political ideology, its connection to the Soviet Union, and its extensive work among the unemployed, ethnic minorities, and organized labour.44 By the 1930s, as Steve Hewitt has written elsewhere, the cpc was associated with sexual immorality and perversion, such that “reading communistic literature took on the status of masturbation or homosexuality, acts also deemed reprehensible in Depression-era Canada.”45 For decades, the intelligence branch of the rcmp viewed through its red-tinged prism anyone with a potential connection to communism as worthy of investigation. Individuals openly proclaiming their Communist leanings, although still likely to be subjected to surveillance, concerned the rcmp less than those believed to be hiding their Red allegiances. Extensive inquiries were carried out into the background of suspected Communists to unearth evidence of their radical left leanings. If enough suspicious affiliations could be uncovered – six “adverse references” were required by the 1960s for the opening of a file46 – then a definitive designation as to the surveillance target’s political persuasion could be made

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through a process known in the security service as “link analysis.”47 Under such a system it was important that individuals received a designation, to indicate whether or not they constituted a subversive entity. Originally, the files were assembled by the police. Why? The rcmp security service was first and foremost a police force. That reality, combined with a focus on the ill-defined concept of subversion, led to the accumulation of enormous amounts of information in the pursuit of significance. The practice of surveillance is commonly associated with technological wizardry, such as cameras in cigarette cases or audio recorders in wristwatches. In popular media representations of the Cold War, such gadgets figured prominently. They are mainstays of boys-with-their-toys James Bond films featuring British secret agent 007, and were even spoofed in the 1960s American television comedy series Get Smart, about bumbling spooks. This popular show was part of a vast Anglo-American entertainment bonanza that Wesley Allan Britton calls “spy television.”48 In actual fact, a collection of surveillance technologies disguised as watering cans, birdhouses, and wooden logs, which belonged to the Stasi, the domestic security agency for the now non-existent German Democratic Republic, has been relegated to a museum exhibit in the reunified city of Berlin. The rcmp opted for Open Source Intelligence (osint), covert police operations, including technological surveillance and undercover surveillance by Mounties and informants. Much of the information on targets came from osint. Security-service members were voracious consumers of a large number of publications, ranging from mainstream newspapers to Communist and other radical left-wing journals and periodicals. Anything remotely relevant to a target would be clipped out and placed into an ever-burgeoning file. In similar fashion, plainclothes Mounties would attend public occasions where their presence would not be conspicuous, something that became more difficult as hairstyles and clothing choices changed dramatically through the 1960s and into the 1970s. At gatherings, the undercover policemen would collect any available pamphlets, flyers, and other free handouts, which would be placed in various files once they returned to the office. They could also attend open meetings involving both male and female participants and report on their observations. Here they would carefully watch for those who appeared to be in leadership roles, the content of speeches given, and the enthusiasm of

The Red-Tinged Prism

29

the crowd, down to keeping track of the amount of donations if a collection were taken up. A crucial aspect of this monitoring involved identifying by first and last name individuals connected to the main target(s) of surveillance, and sometimes providing physical descriptions of them. The police also have advantages in accessing confidential information about surveillance targets. Telephone records were readily available through liaisons at phone companies, relationships which also could be exploited when it came time to arrange the tapping of telephones. Mail could be accessed through requests to the post office. Other records, including educational and governmental records, and those relating to employment, were readily available to the police through a telephone call or a visit and the flash of a badge. As well, in the early 1950s, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Louis St Laurent approved an rcmp wiretap program code-named picnic, which continued to operate under subsequent prime ministers.49 Thanks to the variety of such sources, over time the security service built up detailed profiles of targeted individuals. There appears to have been a geographical angle to the level of detail accumulated. More exhaustive records, certainly in relation to the women’s liberation movement, appear to have been accumulated in centres of smaller population, perhaps reflecting better access to records in these places and/or a smaller number of available targets, which could be afforded more attention, and thus yield greater results. The chief difficulty involved collecting details on what occurred in private beyond the public gaze of Mounties. Technological surveillance in the form of telephone taps and hidden microphones represented a way to surmount this hurdle. These were used infrequently, however, because of the amount of resources involved, the existence of higher-profile targets elsewhere, the difficulty in some cases of gaining physical access to a property to install the equipment, and questions around the legality of such methods.50 Instead of impersonal and expensive technology, human informants supplied key information the police sought. Informants revealed the limitations of the police, particularly demographically. During the First World War, the police lacked the language skills necessary to carry out surveillance against targeted ethnic communities in Western Canada, hence the recruitment of people within these communities to supply

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information. The same pattern would apply to surveillance against womenonly organizations, including those connected to the women’s liberation movement. The practical reality of an all-male police force spying on a largely female protest movement meant that a crucial component of police surveillance consisted of women spying on women. The rcmp security service had no choice but to rely on women, either already positioned within the organizations being spied on or inserted from the outside, to supply information. This was evident in the case of Carole de Vault. Although not used directly by the Mounted Police or against women’s liberation, she gained widespread notoriety, in part thanks to memoirs she published detailing her experience of spying on the Front de libération du Québec (flq) on behalf of the Montreal City Police.51 In her account of fbi spying on the American women’s liberation movement, Ruth Rosen points to the extensive use of women informants. She reveals that the bureau recruited, some for pay and others on a volunteer basis, dozens and possibly hundreds of women to carry out espionage against feminists. Although American feminist Betty Friedan blamed fractures in the American women’s liberation movement on the dirty tricks of the fbi, Rosen reduces the ultimate impact of this secretive organization to its ability to damage trust among women. Part of this downplaying emanates from her contention that relationships among movement women were so personally and politically querulous from the start that even noted feminist Gloria Steinem was drawn in, because in her youth she had done work on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency (cia). Furthermore, Rosen suggests that, despite ample evidence of fbi spying on the women’s liberation movement – informants reported on meetings and conversations and agents infiltrated women’s communes in search of revolutionaries and fugitives – the fbi never really understood its surveillance target.52 Understandably, trust was a major issue when it came to informants. At the end of the First World War, the architect of the Mounted Police’s security role, Commissioner Perry, had issued guidelines around informants, warning that Mounted Policemen should “be constantly on their guard against being purposely misled by the informants”; one key piece of advice was that, whenever possible, meetings should be covered by two informants operating unbeknownst to each other, so that their accounts could be cross-checked against each other for accuracy.53 Across

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the Mounted Police intelligence branch’s history, elaborate internal rules would be developed pertaining to the use of informants in intelligence operations. For instance, police policy ranged from addressing specifically how to prevent informants from breaking the law in pursuit of information to outlining the nature of the relationship between an informant and his Mountie handler, cast in the common gendered language of the day: A paid informant may think he has a license to commit any offence in order to gain the desired result. To combat this: 1. Do not leave him to his own devices. 2. Make him operate on strict instructions. 3. At every stage of the operation, set out his limits. 4. Tell him that any consideration he may get depends on whether he follows instructions. 5. Tell him he has no license to violate the law, but let him use all the stealth and inventiveness he can, provided he stays within the limits you set out for him.54 Not all rcmp informants received the same treatment. A key divide existed between informants used in regular policing, often recruited from the ranks of criminals, and those deployed in a security and intelligence context. The latter could have come from any background, including from a social status superior to that of the police. Another major difference related to the outcome of their informing. On the criminal side, such activity could lead to an arrest, charge, and conviction; but on the part of security and intelligence related to counter-subversion, such a process was non-existent and no arrests ever occurred. Hence, those secretly helping the police would continue until they were no longer needed, grew tired of the work, or had their involvement with the police discovered. The rcmp security service recognized several formal categories of informants (see Table 1.2). The value of the human source increased the further the category lay down the chart. The informant’s position on the chart reflected factors such as the source’s length of service, which in turn fed into the level of remuneration the informant received. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the cpc remained the top priority for the security service, fuelled by the revelations of espionage

Table 1.2 Types of human sources Type

Description

Payment

Nature of handling

Volunteer

Person who volunteers – could be anyone supplying information, often on a one-time basis

Usually none

Infrequent Meetings

Undeveloped casual source

Source who occasionally supplies information

Usually none

Recruited – periodic contact

Developed casual source

More permanent source

Occasional, especially expenses

Recruited after considerable planning – source has specific handler who makes frequent contact

Long-term “penetration” source

Most important Paid source – described in Canadian government report as the “bread and butter” of security work; source either already in a targeted organization, or injected into one by police force or intelligence agency

Recruited after development of relationship between Mounted Police member and target for recruitment; extensive handling ensues – strong relationship often formed between source and handler; recruited after lengthy profiling and concerted effort to form relationship

Source: McDonald Commission, Second Report: Freedom and Security, 1:296–7.

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carried out by a small number of Canadian Communists and exposed through the defection of Igor Gouzenko. Leading the effort were undercover Mounties and informants who infiltrated the cpc and its associated organizations in order to supply information from the inside. Identifying Communists and infiltrating their clandestine gatherings in Canada’s main cities in the early 1950s became a leading focus of what would become known within the security service as counter-subversion. The official history of the rcmp’s intelligence branch emphasizes the secret nature of these gatherings, suggesting that illicit activities, almost on par with prurient sexual adventures, were taking place inside. The same source, however, raises an equally plausible explanation: that individuals who frequented these gatherings, namely academics, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation employees, lawyers, civil servants, and immigrants seeking naturalization, maintained a high level of secrecy about their activities to protect their jobs, status, or chance at future citizenship in an era of anti-Communist witch hunts, epitomized in the early 1950s by the actions of American Senator Joseph McCarthy.55 Even more than the celebrated post–Cold War justification for domestic surveillance – counter-espionage – the concept of subversion drove decades of spying on domestic targets.56 From 1919 to 1977, the rcmp opened nearly 1,300,000 intelligence files on organizations and individuals, including over 800,000 on the latter.57 Between 1982 and 1984 alone, the security service began files on 134,880 individuals and organizations.58 The emphasis on subversion and documenting it through a vast apparatus of files is why ordinary intelligence duties involved considerable paperwork at a desk instead of thrilling Hollywood versions of the lives of spies. A 1961 time study conducted at the rcmp’s Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, office found that a security and intelligence investigator spent 51 per cent of his time on office duties, and of that period, 62 per cent was devoted to writing reports, while the other 38 per cent involved clerical work, including maintenance of the files.59 Once gathered, the input needed to be collated. Accordingly, the rcmp developed an extensive filing system resembling the one used by mi5 in the United Kingdom. The Mounties held thousands of files on individuals in “subversive indices.” These consisted of cards with the person’s name and other pertinent details (computers arrived in the 1970s), such as their home address, along with the crucial evidence to justify the subversive label. This might include information supplied by informants or

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simply about their consistent involvement in organizations or activities already officially considered by the Mounted Police to be subversive.60 Submitted reports slowly proceeded upward through the rcmp security-service establishment. Once they reached headquarters in Ottawa, “reader analysts,” usually known simply as “readers,” pored over page after page to determine what was meaningful and eligible to be parcelled out to various other file categories and branches and to “desks” devoted to specific areas. The official Manual of Filing for the security service described the key role of readers in the circulation of information: “If the Reader digests his reports and correspondence as thoroughly as he should, he must be better equipped than anyone else to decide who and what are of real importance or what may be omitted or destroyed.”61 The higher a report climbed, the more it shrivelled, as material was synthesized for digestion by senior administrators and finally for their political masters. In a system of incessant information accumulation reflecting its effort to gather anything remotely connected to subversion, an ongoing issue for the Mounted Police intelligence branch was the plethora of files collected; as early as 1953, it found itself dealing with information overload. In the words of the authors of the security service’s official history, “processing the sheer quantity involved was proving impossible, negating the point of collecting the material in the first place.”62 At that point, the rcmp’s intelligence branch held active files on 21,000 individuals and 2,300 organizations. The following year, it “temporarily” put aside 17,000 distinct files in order to allow for the continued processing of others considered more significant.63 In 1958, a review process began to close out and destroy thousands of files no longer deemed to be priorities. By 1960, the process of perpetual review of files had become a routine practice for the security service. Later in the decade, the number of subversive references for an individual file to be made permanent was raised to six.64 Even with the trimming and tightening, in 1967, the countersubversion branch of the security service held active files on 48,000 individuals and 6,000 organizations. As further evidence of the continuing growth in material being handled, despite efforts to curtail the trend, the number of staff responsible for security-service files in the central registry increased from 15 in 1947 to 165 in 1963.65 The pursuit of subversion fuelled the file frenzy. Given its association with communism and the resultant violation of socio-political norms, subversion, an ill-defined concept, took on the trappings of deviancy. It

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arose as a major security concern in the early twentieth century, closely allied with the era of anti-radicalism that accompanied the First World War, and this concern continued afterwards across much of the western world.66 A classic 1964 text on the topic, reflecting the institutional view of subversion as a contest between states, defined it as: the undermining or detachment of the loyalties of significant political and social groups within the victimized state, and their transference, under ideal conditions, to the symbols and institutions of the aggressor. The assumption behind the manipulative use of subversion is that public morale and the will to resist intervention are the products of combined political and social or class loyalties which are usually attached to national symbols, such as the flag, constitution, crown, or even the persons of the chief of state or other national leaders. Following penetration, and parallel with the forced disintegration of political and social institutions of the state, these loyalties may be detached and transferred to the political or ideological cause of the aggressor.67 Conversely, academics Elizabeth Grace and Colin Leys view subversion as “legal activities and ideas directed against the existing social, economic and political order (and very seldom against ‘democracy,’ as liberal-democratic states are wont to claim).”68 Clarity of definition was not necessarily a requirement for pursuing subversives – or so the minister of justice and political head of the Mounted Police in the government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Davie Fulton, admitted in 1959 in the Canadian House of Commons: Communists are so infinitely various or devious or skilful. I should think you would have to have a 500-page book before you could define every one of the methods they might have and therefore every type of organization that should be deemed to be suspect on security grounds. I just do not think we can get a single, over-all, standard definition of what is a subversive or security risk.69 Officially, a December 1963 federal cabinet directive (replacing a 1952 version in which disloyalty through subversion included a belief in “marxism-leninism”) defined broadly a subversive as “a person whose

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loyalty to Canada and our system of government is diluted by loyalty to any communist, fascist or other legal or illegal political organizations whose purpose is inimical to the processes of Parliamentary Democracy.”70 Under such a definition, any type of protest, no matter how peacefully and legally conducted, could constitute subversion. Importantly, a lack of a coherent definition of subversion made for more surveillance, not less. The rcmp security service spelled out its version of the security threat posed by Communist subversion in a remarkable internal document from the 1960s: Through the use of the Communist Front technique of subversion, the Communists seek to create seemingly independent organizations with the aim of conditioning non-Communists to co-operate and think along the same lines as the Communists on certain specific issues. It is part of the long range Communist strategy to build a United Front for the eventual seizure of power … Under the guise of an appropriate high-toned name, the particular front supports or raises issues of current significance thus facilitating the recruitment of those with a genuine interest in the matter. Consequently it is possible to either divide or neutralize their opponents when the issue becomes political. Herein lies the potential threat.71 This framing of the security threat of Communist subversion underpinned the rationale for surveillance against a wide range of targets. Ultimately, the emphasis on subversion reflected profound pessimism and insecurity on the part of the Canadian state, including its security service, calling into question not just the loyalty of those targeted for intrusive surveillance but also the wider sustainability of Canadian political institutions and liberal-democratic political values. From the perspective of the rcmp, Canada had all the durability of Russia in the autumn of 1917; a small number of subversives could potentially topple the entire system. Hence the need for Canadians to be on guard perpetually against a formidable enemy. In The Theory and Practice of Communism, a text assigned members of the Mounted Police as part of their security-service training, R.N. Carew Hunt warned that “Communism is essentially aggressive and intolerant, and its adherents are

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taught from the first that they are living in a hostile world which is seeking their destruction, and that they must never relax their ‘revolutionary vigilance’ against its machinations.”72 Adding to this environment after 1945 were the emergence of the United States as the major international military and economic powerhouse, the steady expansion of Soviet influence through the installation of Communist-bloc governments in Central and Eastern Europe, and the growth of a nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States that would involve Western European countries and China. The seismic geopolitical changes brought about by the “decolonization of British and French Africa, the independence of India, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Algeria and Vietnam Wars, and the many other challenges to empire of the post-wars era” added to the complex global picture.73 Canada was implicated in this new world order. Notably, the postwar globe was increasingly understood as being divided into First, Second, and Third worlds. This partition is attributed to French demographer and economic historian Alfred Sauvy, who meant to distinguish between capitalist- and socialist-supporting nations. The First World encompassed the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and their allies, while the Second included the Soviet Union, the Communist bloc, China, and their allies. The Third World referred generally to the “third way” taken by non-aligned countries, many of which had gained independence from their First World colonial masters. It was also associated with poverty and underdevelopment, as well as with “the formation of a Third World consciousness” based on common ideas and a shared history of oppression relative to the west.74 For many white and non-white left-wing activists in Canada and Quebec, anti-colonial movements in the Third World were a source of political inspiration. So too was the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, with links to the Chinese revolution and Marxist movements in the Third World, bringing to fruition analyses of anti-imperialism, race, and class. Canada and Quebec were popular territory for Marxists-Leninists, with the appearance of Maoist parties, newspapers, and involvement in union organizing throughout the sixties.75 As historian Scott Rutherford writes, “[f]rom black radicals who looked to Maoist China for inspiration to Quebecois who read Frantz Fanon in cafés in Montreal, to … young Indigenous

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men and women who argued anti-colonialism was not contained by geopolitical borders, Third World theory and its revolutionary potential profoundly shaped the imaginations of North Americans in the Sixties.”76 Canada’s colonial past, its long history of restrictions on non-white immigration, and its traditional ties to Britain and France influenced its foreign policy. However, in the postwar period its growing closeness with the United States meant that the Canadian government frequently took foreign-policy decisions regarding the Third World that aligned with American interests in the region. The US involvement in the Third World was driven by “the combination of ideological predilections, racial stereotyping, and Cold War political and strategic aims.” It resulted in a series of violent American military interventions that perpetuated gross political and economic inequalities between First and Third World nations.77 Even when various Canadian governments expressed the desire to work through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), the United Nations, or the Commonwealth to resolve international conflicts, Canada looked to the United States to take a lead role, due to related viewpoints on race and empire, as seen later with the tacit acceptance of American aggression in Southeast Asia. In effect, the Third World became a site for proxy wars fought by rival superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, with Canada choosing to side with American anticommunism during a period of Third World decolonization.78 This was the wider international environment that influenced efforts to root out subversives in North America. A point made in the American context about the perceived deviancy of subversives similarly applied to its northern neighbour: counter-subversion is based traditionally on “the persistent conviction of white male elites” that “hostile races and foreign ideas” threaten national security.79 The security agency of the white male elites did not hide its disdain for obstacles to its counter-subversion agenda. In a report, “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada,” dated 1 February 1967, the rcmp warned that its efforts against espionage and subversion were being undermined by a “gradual erosion of Canada’s security defences.” “[H]umanitarian motives,” so explained the report, weakened the Mounted Police’s ability to security-screen immigrants, while government “desire to ensure basic human rights and academic freedom” limited the Mounties’ powers to carry out security investigations at Canadian universities or to block the admission of academics with subversive records into the country.80

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Women, too, were included in the national security mix, not because of their sex or gender specifically, but because of any actual or presumed relationship to communism. The force spied upon women who joined the cpc, participated in labour unions, or supported consumer associations that railed against the high prices of household goods.81 Many were part of the “ethnic Left,” meaning immigrants who carried on with their anti-fascist and anti-capitalist struggles in their new homeland of Canada.82 Youth was no obstacle to becoming a target of state surveillance; Jeanne Corbin, a French immigrant to Alberta, was kept under surveillance when she was a high-school student in Edmonton and a member of the Young Communist League in the 1930s.83 After 1945, the rcmp trained their sights on lesbians and gays in the civil service, fearing they were potential national security risks.84 Other women also gained Cold War attention. In a well-known instance, one Gerda Heseler, from postwar West Germany, tried to immigrate to Canada and failed because of her involvement with minor criminal activity in Europe. After trying a second time under her married name, Munsinger, she succeeded. Thereafter, Mounties tailed her, purportedly for fraternizing with Montreal mobsters, prostituting herself, and spying for the Soviets. Her blonde good looks, her seductive manner, and her affair with at least one high-level Tory politician in Ottawa fed into the media-constructed Cold War image of “the iconic female foreign agent” whose sexual wiles posed a security risk to the state.85 The Munsinger sex-and-spies scandal exploded in the mid-1960s. By then, the rcmp was already keeping tabs on women in organizations such as Voice of Women, apprehensive about a possible overlap between the organization’s peace and anti-nuclear stances and support for communism, or possible cpc infiltration.86 Celebrations for International Women’s Day (iwd) came under suspicion because they involved the Congress of Canadian Women, which was suspected for its ties to the Soviet Union.87 Surveillance by the rcmp of iwd celebrations combined its interest in both women’s and immigrant organizations. Of particular importance to the force was the tracking of any co-operation between women’s organizations and Russian, Ukrainian, or Jewish groups. Activities held by the Federation of Russian Canadians, the Women’s Federation of Russian Canadians, the Finnish Organization of Canada, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, the United Jewish People’s Order, the Women’s International Democratic Federation, and the cpc were monitored.88 Because the travel of individuals to and from

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Communist regimes was carefully tracked, details of women’s voyages to the Soviet Union, Communist-bloc countries, Cuba, and Vietnam were recorded, just as were the journeys of individuals from these nations to Canada.89 Were Canadians active in organizations that appeared on security service radar aware that they were under state surveillance? Given the paranoia peculiar to the Cold War, some expected that they would be spied upon.90 It was relatively well known that individuals suspected of Communist sympathies could face blacklisting, harassment, and job loss.91 Yet even without such drastic consequences, surveillance had a pernicious effect. In one instance, informants spying on Margaret Rouble, Toronto chairperson of Women Against Soaring Prices, a Communist consumer-watchdog organization, provided information about her invitations to speak to labour unions, her frustrations with federal and provincial governments, and her attempts to set up committees to monitor food prices. Rouble, whose last name was unfortunately identical to the term for Soviet currency, was also a member of the cpc. One informant learned through a colleague of Rouble’s that she feared she had become a surveillance target when a man claiming to be a Carleton University professor approached her about researching consumer organizations. The concerned colleague was reportedly “happy” to learn that the professor was not an “R.C.M.P. agent” in disguise, but a “real person and that his questioning of Mrs. rouble was in line with the type of article he was writing.” The colleague was, of course, unknowingly conversing with an informant who duly reported this very exchange to his or her rcmp handler. 92 The shadowy work of informants speaks to the risk of fraying in a fundamental way the social fabric by encouraging distrust in communications within organizations and between colleagues. It is apparent that, through its red-tinged prism, the rcmp security service privileged the role of the subversive individual. American writer Frank Donner labelled this security philosophy as “the agitator-subversion thesis, which,” he wrote, “denies the relevance of social and economic factors as the cause of unrest.”93 Ignoring these causal factors resulted in a Mounted Police emphasis on large numbers of individuals, as well as associated organizations, and the need to monitor both through information collection. In 1967 the “Key Sectors” program attempted to tackle the file frenzy.94 The program focused on reforming the counter-

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subversion wing of the rcmp security service, known as “D” Branch or “D” Ops, from within.95 It prioritized key areas of Canadian society for attention, in order to provide direction and reduce information overload. This branch arose because of a combination of three factors: more Mounties attending universities had more skills to offer in terms of surveillance; there were too many files and too little analysis; and still, they lacked a clear concept of subversion, let alone how to counter it. The program ultimately failed because it was unable to overcome this last fundamental problem. Nevertheless, the program did generate one meaningful conference in 1971, when security-service personnel gathered in Ottawa to reflect on what it was that they did. What, for instance, constituted a security threat? For one member present, that query led to even more fundamental questions about the role of the security service: A threat against what or, paraphrased, what or whom are we protecting – the public at large? the constitution? the Government? the present Administration? the Liberal Party while it is in power? or are we defending our capitalist or neo-capitalist socio/economic/ political order? Are we to be ultra-reactionary, arch defenders of the status quo standing in the path of any and all change? If change is to be permitted in society then how much change, what are the limits of change? At what point is change no longer evolutionary but revolutionary?96 Another agreed with sentiments that he felt addressed more existential security questions: I also feel that it would be extremely difficult to define the term “threat” precisely so that it would be applicable universally and for all time … [T]hey are questions shared by many others, possibly most… But if they are being asked by a wide number of our members … then they must very soon be dealt with at a top level … with answers hastily dispatched to all. The credibility of not only Key Sectors, but all of “D” Branch … is predicated upon identifying, within this rapidly changing society of ours, which of those many elements crossing our paths are we to regard as a threat and to what. They must be answered with clarity, confidence and with

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certainty; everything that we do follows from those basic premises and, without answers, we will appear to be floundering, uncertain, and forced to be apologetic about all that we do and why we do it.97 It was no coincidence that the Key Sectors program appeared alongside the political ferment of the late 1960s. The problem of too many files had only worsened across that decade, because the concept of subversion and the threat it posed had expanded. Suddenly, a glut of new movements allied loosely under the umbrella of the “New Left,” which appealed particularly to young people to discard authoritarianism in favour of democracy and self-expression, made their appearance against the backdrop of the Vietnam War: Quebec nationalism, student protest, Black and Red Power, Third World anti-colonial movements, and women’s liberation, to name a few. All of them would be surveilled by the rcmp, using the methods honed in over forty years of work against communist subversion. There were different international influences on the New Left that emerged in Canada. One strand had appeared in the United Kingdom in the 1950s as a reaction against the Suez Crisis, but also in relation to the Hungarian Revolution, which the Soviets crushed later that decade, resulting in splits within a number of western Communist parties. The New Left’s ranks included former Communists, disillusioned supporters of the Labour Party, and younger student adherents to the cause of socialism. They coalesced around the peace movement through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which began in 1957 as a rejection of both the orthodoxy of British society and of the Communist Old Left, which many associated with Stalinism and then Soviet aggression in Hungary in 1956.98 A parallel organization, tied to the development of the New Left in Canada, arose in 1959 across the Atlantic in the form of the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cucnd), which organized regular peace protests. Its Montreal chapter later published a journal, Our Generation against Nuclear War, later shortened to Our Generation, which became a leading Canadian New Left publication under the editorship of Dimitrios Roussopoulos.99 Another influence on the Canadian milieu was the American New Left, defined by historian Van Gosse as “a series of social movements” that “radically chang[ed] the relationship between white people and people of color, how the U.S. government conducts foreign policy, and the

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popular consensus regarding gender and sexuality.”100 The roots of the American New Left lay in the 1950s Red Scare, which weakened the institutional radical left as represented by the Communist Party of the United States of America, but also in the beginnings of the civil rights movement, the opposition to nuclear armaments, and the Cuban Revolution. Historian Maurice Isserman suggests that in the United States there was more continuity between the Old and New Left than believed, and that the latter’s radicalism stemmed not from its violence but from its attempt to “understand the interconnection of such diverse issues as the danger of nuclear annihilation, the war in Southeast Asia, and racial injustice.”101 Eventually, as a phenomenon in the United States, the New Left would become associated closely with youth protest at universities, and specifically with an organization called Students for a Democratic Society (sds), although it was much broader and existed across a number of diverse movements from the 1950s through to the 1970s.102 In 1962, the sds issued the “Port Huron Statement,” a political manifesto that specifically articulated goals in regard to the construction of a New Left.103 The Canadian equivalent of the sds was the Student Union for Peace Action, which held interests beyond disarmament; it replaced the cucnd in 1964 at a meeting in Regina.104 Focused on the issue of peace, this organization carried out a variety of activities until it dissolved in 1967, but its spirit lived on in campus protests across Canada and in other social-protest movements that challenged the status quo in Canada.105 The rcmp security service responded to student protest and many other New Left movements by gathering intelligence that was analyzed within the context of the red-tinged prism. Thus, the unfamiliar New Left was framed within the familiar, as somehow being Communist inspired or controlled. The events of the first half of the 1960s, combined with increasing sophistication in the rcmp as more of its members went to university, caused it to accept that the world had become much more complicated. By 1967, the intelligence branch of the rcmp defined a subversive as being represented by a wide range of characters, several of whom would fit under a New Left banner, but with Communists and Trotskyists still part of the assortment: “cp of c [Communist Party of Canada] member, suspected Trotskyist, self-admitted Marxist, black nationalist, student agitator, anarchist, red power advocate, or an associate of communists.”106

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The justification for pursuing the cpc for decades had included the belief that the party leadership was beholden to Moscow. This distinction did not apply to the New Left, nor to the Trotskyists, nor to the various other new movements, organizations, and factions that took concrete form between the 1950s and the 1970s. The Trotskyists actually predated the New Left and made up for their limited numbers with outsize enthusiasm for their goals. Their lack of members, concentration in only a few locations, and focus on the anti-war movement and educational institutions meant that, for part of the 1960s, the rcmp could monitor them simply through “one key human source.”107 Research on Canadian Trotskyism has been neglected. The first Trotskyists in Canada were disaffected members of the cpc. The intellectual father of Trotskyism, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, had a chequered relationship to Canada. When he was sailing from New York to revolutionary Russia, British and Canadian authorities detained him in Halifax on 3 April 1917. They imprisoned him in a detention camp in Amherst, Nova Scotia, for one month on suspicion that he was acting under orders from Germany.108 The 2001 release of declassified documents in the United Kingdom revealed that his detention was approved by mi5 after a shipboard spy who was following Trotsky reported on his denunciations of Great Britain.109 After Vladimir Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin outmanoeuvred Trotsky for control of the Soviet Union, forcing him into exile in 1927. Upon Stalin’s bidding, a Soviet agent from Spain, carrying a forged Canadian passport, assassinated Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940.110 Meanwhile, Trotsky’s followers had established the Fourth International, a network intended to bring about workers’ revolutions in countries throughout the world. Trotskyists had a tendency to engage in what has been contentiously labelled “entryism” (a term also adopted by the rcmp), meaning the tactic of infiltrating wider social movements in order to further their own agendas. In this way, they could exert a disproportionately larger influence than if they operated openly on their own.111 Throughout their history, Trotskyists and their organizations were beset by factionalism, expulsions, and quarrels, but made some bold moves; one of Canada’s most famous poets, Earle Birney, corresponded regularly with Trotsky during the 1930s, infusing his own poems, novels, and reviews with a Trotskyist-inflected anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist point of view; Ross Dowson, National Secretary of

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the Revolutionary Workers Party, who wanted a higher profile for Trotskyism, ran for Toronto mayor as a Trotskyist candidate between 1948 and 1950 with the support of union labour.112 Trotskyists attempted entryism in regard to the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, a socialist political party that garnered the support of farmers, workers, and trade unionists after the Great Depression of the 1930s, and to its successor, the New Democratic Party.113 Communists disliked Trotskyists, considering them aberrant.114 Yet the rcmp made little distinction between the two, averring that both supported “Marxist-Leninist ideology”115 and were security risks, thereby requiring few adjustments to its red-tinged prism. In fact, an rcmp evaluation held that a Trotskyist was even more committed than a Communist, because he or she was a “joiner” who “will assist in, or promote, any activity which he considers to be ‘antiestablishment,’ no matter who sponsors the activity” [emphasis in original]. Moreover, Canada’s premier Trotskyist organization in the postwar period, the League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso) was said to have “effectively promoted the same issues as the more orthodox Communists, for example, ‘Hands off Cuba’ and ‘End the War in Vietnam.’”116 These developments kept the rcmp security service busy. The Mounties spied on Trotskyist as well as Maoist organizations, which sprouted on university campuses, assessing both varieties for signs of politically motivated violence.117 The notion of what constituted a security threat in relation to violence was complicated, as the rcmp itself admitted in a 1980 reflection about Trotskyism in Canada, generated in part because of an Ontario Provincial Police investigation into rcmp disruption tactics against the lsa/lso and its leader, Dowson.118 The Trotskyists were “non-violent” wrote Sergeant D.J.O. Johnson, and, specifically, lsa/lso members “were neither advocates nor practitioners of violence.”119 But, in an effort to rationalize police tactics against the organization, he added a caveat: This is not to say that Trotskyists are opposed to violence in principle; rather, the Trotskyist approach to violence is double edged. Violence is always placed in the context of the conditions of the day. Consequently, while Trotskyists in Canada were attempting to increase their credibility and legitimacy through a peaceful, but

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activist posture, they openly applauded the leadership role played by their counterparts in the Paris riots of 1968 … As the Trotskyist attitude to violence is philosophic and many-sided, so must be our explanation.120 Mention of the Paris riots refers to the fact that violence on a number of levels had become a noticeable component of the era. Cold War tensions continued, with growing American military involvement in Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. University students rioted in several countries, including Canada. The United States Democratic Party leadership hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down, just a few years after his brother President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. A series of deadly attacks on African-American activists supporting racial desegregation culminated in the murder of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Chicago Police openly assaulted anti-war protestors during the Democratic National Convention. The Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground Organization, an sds faction, both influenced by Marxism, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism engaged in shootings and bombings, while in Canada the flq, seeking independence for the province, including from the dominance of Anglophone capitalists, detonated explosives in support of labour strike actions. On either side of the forty-ninth parallel, Indigenous resistance to centuries of white settler state oppression sparked a movement for Red Power based on a thriving American Black Power movement that sanctioned the use of violence in self-defence.121 This powder keg did not go unnoticed by the Mounties, who warned the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1970 of the potential for more violence in Canadian society, including as a spillover from a breakdown of law and order in the United States.122 The round of wars, assassinations, and protests that marked the long decade of the sixties further heightened rcmp concern over Trotskyist entryism. But while Trotskyists may have had a penchant for entryism, the rcmp itself was no stranger to infiltration tactics, even going so far as to engage in a covert campaign against Trotskyist organizations.123 The rcmp was extremely suspicious of the activities of the lsa/lso and its youth arm, the Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs); the latter was founded to capitalize specifically on the involvement of youths in New Left protest movements.124 In turn, New Left activists

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debated what means were best to achieve radical change in society. Some approved of violence, while others agreed upon the value of peaceful protest. What is noteworthy, although not always explicitly so in declassified rcmp documents, was the potential of subversives to engage in revolutionary violence for political purposes, representing an ongoing open-ended threat. It became another convenient rationale for state surveillance in the 1960s against a variety of the New Left movements that challenged the Canadian status quo. Before the end of the decade, the women’s liberation movement would join the list of rcmp targets.

2 A Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight

Arising out of several currents characteristic of the era, women’s liberation was in the vanguard of second-wave feminism.1 However, even before the first crop of women’s liberation groups appeared, growing numbers of Canadian women were already employed outside the home, with some active in labour unions. Doris Anderson, editor of Chatelaine, upped the feminist content of this popular women’s magazine, books by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan garnered a following, and a national coalition known as the Committee on Equality for Women pressured the federal government to strike a Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1967. Soon, young, white, middle-class women, disillusioned by the male dominance of New Left organizations such as the Student Union for Political Action (supa), began organizing in small groups in the name of women’s liberation, although they maintained their ties to New Left ideals. These fledgling entities, which attracted not only women students, but also working women and housewives, often took on the names of cities in which they were active, giving rise to monikers such as the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement (twlm), Montreal Women’s Liberation (mwl), and the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc).2 Importantly, many women active in women’s liberation groups viewed their attempts to end women’s oppression as global in scope and as similar to the struggle of colonized people for freedom the world over. The civil rights movement in the United States was a notable influence. So too was anti-imperialism, Black Power, the Vietnam War, Indigenous, peace, student, labour, and anti-capitalism activism, the sexual revolution, Canadian nationalism, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, youth radicalism, and the counterculture.3 The great variety and complex hybridity of feminist positions meant that it was impossible to establish any sort of “taxonomic classification.”4 In general, Canadian women’s liberation

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groups tended to be keener on a class-based analysis of women’s oppression than were their American counterparts, reflecting perhaps the influence of the Old and New Left on feminism in Canada, as well as the significant Cold War clampdown on those suspected of harbouring Communist sympathies in the United States.5 In fact, women’s liberationists in Canada, who were often overshadowed by the larger and more internationally dominant women’s movement south of the border, viewed their left-wing perspective patriotically, because it was understood as distinct from the feminism of their American “sisters.”6 Others were influenced by the radical feminist politics of those American women’s liberationists who understood the oppression of women as rooted in biological differences between men and women in the arena of sexuality and reproduction.7 In Quebec, women’s-liberation politics were often integrated with battles for independence from Anglo-Canadian linguistic, economic, and political domination.8 Most activist groups materializing out of the cacophony of the New Left did not participate in revolutionary violence; however, they did adopt its aggressive rhetoric. In fact, the militant language of the era popped up in the most unexpected instances. When housewife and mother Laura Sabia, founder of the Committee on Equality for Women, demanded that the federal government strike a Royal Commission on the Status of Women, she warned she would round up two million women to march on Ottawa, and was quoted as saying: “If we have to use violence, damn it, we will.”9 Some feminists in the United States denounced revolutionary violence, condemning it as machismo-laden sexism.10 Nevertheless, a few American radical feminist currents were at times themselves associated with revolutionary violence, because of their stated desire for the overthrow of an unequal gender order that oppressed women in mind and body.11 American Valerie Solanas even authored a radical feminist manifesto in 1967 calling for the destruction of the male sex in response to male supremacy,12 while Canadian-born Shulamith Firestone electrified radical feminist circles in New York with a learned treatise on the need for a feminist revolution against male culture.13 Many women who became involved in women’s liberation first “learned their organizing skills in new left groups,”14 adopting the protest styles that were popular with the civil rights, student, and peace movements. These included marches, sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations, as well

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as countercultural forms of self-expression that showcased cleverness, creativity, satirical humour, and exaggerated displays in the form of guerrilla theatre skits and irreverent songs, chants, and costumes intended to shock and amuse audiences.15 They strategized by writing analytical papers, manifestos, pamphlets, and briefs that circulated in mimeographed versions across domestic and international borders, holding teach-ins and engaging in consciousness-raising discussions. Generally, they did, however, reject male-dominated types of hierarchical leadership, preferring consensus-based decision-making frameworks on a structural level. Unlike other women’s organizations that focused on international peace, national politics, or municipal affairs, women’s liberation groups insisted on working toward the revolutionary goal of gender equality between men and women as a way to overcome the widespread oppression of women. Consequently, they tackled issues such as abortion, men’s violence against women, daycare, and equal pay for work of equal value to make “radical and fundamental change” to society.16 Women’s anger, rather than violence, was one of the key affective aspects of women’s liberation. Indeed, scholars have acknowledged that feminist politics are often “suffused with feelings, passions and emotions” because feminism acknowledges how critically affect is tied to power relations that are gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized.17 The movement provided an organized political forum that tapped into the anger they felt over the oppression of women by men.18 When one Montreal resident, Anuradha Bose, became involved in a consciousnessraising group of seven women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven, she realized that she had lost her ability to relate to men, stating: “the anger I had harboured for years and directed toward certain people and certain institutions and which made me act unreasonably most of the time, was the anger that most women manifest. It was the anger of an enslaved minority in the face of the oppressor.”19 According to feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, “conventionally unacceptable” feelings like anger are “outlaw” emotions for women and other “subordinated individuals who pay a disproportionately high price for maintaining the status quo.”20 Unsurprisingly, the women’s liberation movement had to respond to accusations that it was man-hating, and that its ranks were populated with unattractive, single, and possibly lesbian women. These are charges with which feminists even today must contend, because

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women who display anger in response to social injustice are still ridiculed, despised, and discounted as unhappy “killjoys.”21 Although women’s liberation groups usually sought women’s participation alone, many individual women saw the joyous advantages of women’s liberation to women, men, and children freed from the constraints of rigid gender roles. Women-only organizing of the kind undertaken by the vwc reflected the pattern of some American civil-rights organizations, such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc).22 Founded by a black woman, Ella Josephine Baker, the sncc was initially made up of young whites and blacks working together in the American South to overthrow by peaceful means hateful Jim Crow laws and customs. Collectively, these subjected American blacks to lifelong “white racism, disenfranchisement, violence and exclusion” well after the official abolition of slavery in the United States. The sncc eventually ended up barring whites from top-level positions in the organization and then from membership itself in order to further a collective black nationalism.23 A movement by, for, and about women posed a challenge to the rcmp intelligence branch’s quest for national security. In many ways, women’s liberation represented a spurning of rigid white, middle-class, heteronormative gender roles essential to the Cold War. As Elaine Tyler May argues so cogently in the case of the United States, containing the impact of communism abroad meant containing sexual energies at home, channelling men toward the role of husband, father, and breadwinner and women toward the role of wife, mother, and homemaker, within the context of the patriarchal nuclear family.24 The women’s liberation movement spotlighted how oppressive this version of the family could be to women, and sought comfort instead in the romance of a global “sisterhood.” There is much historical evidence of long-standing close female friendships, some of which were also sexual in nature.25 But for many within the women’s liberation movement, sisterly solidarity was a cherished political ideal and an enriching emotional experience that forever transformed many women’s lives. “I cannot begin to imagine,” notes legal scholar Constance Backhouse, “how much poorer I would have been without the enduring friendships, interconnected communities, inspiring ideas, and life goals that feminism offered to all of us who took up its cause.”26

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However, the notion of sisterhood, which offered women a defiantly utopian model of female kinship,27 would prove problematic, because of the presumption that women constituted a universal and united category. In fact, as one writer noted bluntly in 2016, “[t]he dream of female solidarity is, and always has been, a myth.”28 Fierce disagreements among women resulted in the expulsion of individuals from some women’s liberation groups and the creation of new factions and splinter groups.29 Ironically, these divisions may have been a weak attempt at conflict resolution; women’s liberation groups, according to a trio of academics examining their emergence in Toronto, agreed on general aims but did not have “effective mechanisms to cope with conflict internally.” Consequently, they reasoned, “new groups develop and create their own idiosyncratic format instead of amalgamating with and strengthening existing groups.”30 African-American lesbian feminist Audre Lorde concurred to some extent, suggesting that white women’s liberation groups dealt with anger at men. But, when considering differences amongst women, or women as oppressors, or expressions of anger against each other, “[n]o tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt.”31 The intense interest of the Mounties in women’s liberation grew out of its overall focus on New Left activity in Canada. Surveillance of New Left social movements had become one of the rcmp security service’s key activities in the sixties. Given that women’s liberation groups emerged out of the New Left, it was inevitable that the force would snoop on women’s liberation. On the American scene, sociologist Wini Breines allows that there were “substantial links between sixties movements … that have been insufficiently acknowledged.”32 Hers is an important point, because the declassified surveillance reports and appended material show that, in the hurly-burly exchange of ideas, personnel, and activities among sixties activists inside and outside Canada, Mountie surveillance of any one New Left group provided a panoptical spy hole into several other related organizations. Yet women’s liberation also posed a challenge to New Left politics. Historian Linda Kealey remembers that women involved in the New Left were beginning to “question the male leadership and women’s secondary status in political groups supposedly dedicated to eradicating inequality.”33 Indeed, the work of academics Margaret Benston in Vancouver and Marlene Dixon in Montreal utilized Marxist-influenced analyses of women’s oppression in capitalist societies

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to challenge the sexism many New Left men displayed toward their female colleagues and partners.34 As an illustrative instance, Judy Bernstein, Peggy Morton, Linda Seese, and Myrna Wood, the authors of one of the first and most significant Canadian women’s liberation movement documents on record, “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” referred to Karl Marx in their very first paragraph.35 Still, this 1967 document was far from a Marxist screed; at heart it tackled the sexist treatment men meted out to women in supa and in society by turning to a typical New Left eclectic mash-up of material from Marx, philosopher Herbert Marcuse, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and feminists Emma Goldman and de Beauvoir, among others. They identified supa as the key New Left organization in Canada, dedicated to aiding disadvantaged communities, opposing the Vietnam War, and radicalizing youth.36 Therefore, it was all the more astonishing that Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood intimated that, although supa men might not utter in public the disparaging comment attributed to sncc chairman Stokely Carmichael – “The only position for women in the sncc is prone” – they might concur in private. According to some activists in the sncc, Carmichael’s comment was intended to be facetious.37 But, for the authors of the Canadian document, the sexism of activist men threw into sharp relief the New Left concept of the “liberation of all human beings, a liberation that would enable us to develop the full potential that human kind may have. It is the concept behind our rhetoric on the black people of the U.S., the Vietnamese, the Canadian Indians, the developing Third World and the poor and middle classes [emphasis in original].”38 British author Juliet Mitchell served as a major intellectual inspiration to Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood. In her own article “Women: The Longest Revolution,” published in the prestigious New Left Review a year earlier, Mitchell questioned the silence of the New Left regarding the oppression of women, even though the topic had preoccupied nineteenth-century socialist thinkers like Marx, Friedrich Engels, Auguste Bebel, and Charles Fournier, stalwarts of the Old Left. She proposed going beyond the emphasis these luminaries placed on women’s oppression as the consequence of the unfortunate relationship of their biology to the economy and argued that New Left activists should investigate instead four structures that contributed significantly to women’s oppression: production, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialization of children.

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She claimed that each of these four structures cemented women’s subordinate role within the patriarchal nuclear family.39 Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood concurred. No more were women willing to accept their subordination within this version of the family or within the New Left. Women’s political and personal empowerment lay not in ministering to activist men in a fashion similar to wives and mothers, but in bonding with each other as revolutionary sisters: Some [New Left] movement women are ready for a revolution. We have rejected many of the traditional leaders as irrelevant. We are thinking for ourselves. We are doing the necessary reading, writing and conversing to find the analysis and theory for the task. We have the background of experience to do this. We have the frustration of being excluded to force us to do this. We are realizing that we have brains, that we can be political. It is the liberating feeling that black people have when they discover that being black is beautiful and they are beautiful. It is a feeling of beauty and power.40 Interviewed decades after co-authoring this document, Morton stated that, from today’s vantage point, “it’s a pretty funny paper. But it sparked a lot of discussion and debate.” She claimed that she and her co-authors had assumed that in the New Left “we were going to be treated with freedom and justice and rights. Then we found out that we weren’t, that we were expected to do all the grunt work in the organization.”41 To justify their arguments, Morton and her co-authors turned for inspiration to “Black Power,” the rallying cry of the sncc under Carmichael’s dynamic leadership. The sncc was initially influenced by Satyagraha, a nonviolent form of resistance that Indian nationalist Mohandas K. Gandhi practised in his campaign to rid colonial India of British rule and which later was adopted by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr, who sought to overturn racial segregation in the United States.42 Carmichael convinced the sncc to reject what he believed was an all-too-conciliatory civil rights movement in favour of a more militant push for Black Power. Although Carmichael held American blacks to be a colonized population within the United States that had the right to employ violence defensively against the ravages of white racism, he disputed the commonplace notion that Black Power was intent only on violent revolution. He argued that the real risk of

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violence lay in the American government’s naked aggression against the Vietnamese and emerged in the guilt, fear, and terror white Americans projected onto blacks in the United States. Carmichael insisted that Black Power was ultimately about all blacks claiming with pride their black identity, community, and autonomy.43 The “colour line” was a major factor in global Cold War politics. Black Power activists drew inspiration from newly decolonized nations in Africa and Asia, just as the United States, despite racial segregation against African-Americans at home and warmongering against the Vietnamese abroad, attempted to portray itself as a democratic nation that was politically and morally superior to its Communist superpower rival, the Soviet Union.44 The fbi targeted black radicals, infiltrating the civil rights movement, spying on its leaders, and engaging in dirty tricks.45 Martin Luther King, Jr, was initially targeted because a few of his advisors had links to the Communist Party of the usa. When it came to Black Power, the rationale for espionage was to discredit and destroy black nationalism using disinformation tactics hatched by the fbi’s Counter Intelligence Program, more commonly known as cointelpro, and supplemented by the same ruthless violence that the American secret service also deployed against several New Left organizations.46 The pithy comment of Malcolm X – “Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border”47 – allowed some to embrace the myth that, unlike the United States, Canada was free of white racism. This optimistic assessment is not borne out historically. In fact, Black Power was deemed a menace to the national security of Canadians, with universities in particular peril. The fbi and the rcmp shared information with each other about Black Power activists in both countries.48 In Canada left-wing, anti-imperialist black intellectuals of Caribbean origin were on the forefront of Black Power. Influenced by Carmichael and the Black Panther Party, they founded in Toronto the Afro-American Progressive Association and a bookstore, Third World Books.49 At Montreal’s McGill University, they hosted the successful Congress of Black Writers in the autumn of 1968, at which Carmichael spoke. During his speech, Carmichael referred to the dispossession of the Indigenous in Canada and proclaimed that their lands should now be taken back from white Canadians “through revolutionary violence.”50 In Halifax, where Canadians of African descent lived in the beleaguered settlement of Africville, he toned down the call for Canadian blacks to take up arms and to “be prepared to kill for

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your people,” claiming instead that Black Power should work against racism and capitalism on an international scale.51 White feminists like Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood found common cause, not with Black Power’s sanctioning of defensive violence, but with the understanding that oppressed women were a subjugated homogenous class or caste, akin to downtrodden blacks. They were hardly the first white women to do so. Unsettling comparisons between the status of women and blacks have a long imperial history and were evident in attempts to end black slavery and secure white woman suffrage.52 In fact, educator Shirley N. Weber finds that many groups have “looked to Afro-American movements for direction and frequently have used the same strategies and issues, with slight modification, in their own struggles.”53 Black Power now provided fertile ground for the flourishing of women’s liberation, with women even adopting the same raised clenched fist so emblematic of that movement.54 A couple of years before Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood circulated their document, Casey Hayden and Mary King, two white American women involved in the sncc, distributed a similar memo. In it Hayden and King asserted “[t]here seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between the treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a whole,” and showed that women constituted an inferior “sex-caste.”55 They too observed that sncc men became defensive or derisive when the issue of women’s oppression was raised. Some black women in the sncc objected to their accusations, pointing to the leadership positions black women occupied in the sncc and insisting that their own participation in the organization was based on gender equality.56 Others in the sncc founded a Black Women’s Caucus that morphed into the Third World Women’s Alliance (twwa). Black women’s understanding of sisterhood was complicated by the historical subjugation of black men and women to white women in slavery and by struggles over class and sexuality amongst black women. The twwa contested the sexism of men involved in Black Power, proposed working on class, race, and gender issues, and appealed to Third World solidarity to promote sisterhood among all women.57 By the end of the decade it became commonplace, indeed fashionable, for New Left white women and men to racialize the plight of the oppressed in even stronger terms by applying the word “nigger.” Jerry Farber, an American educator and student-movement supporter, compared students in universities and high schools to plantation “niggers” in

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The Student as Nigger. Pierre Vallières, the intellectual force behind the Front de libération du Québec (flq), who drew inspiration from Third World movements for liberation, penned Les Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White Niggers of America), portraying the Québécois as a people smashed under the boot of Anglophone capitalists, just as blacks in the American South were ground down by white racism.58 Budding feminist academics made the same case for women. Gayle Rubin, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan, attended a workshop on racism at which she “started thinking seriously about the ‘woman as nigger’” because of the parallel experiences of blacks and women.59 Naomi Weisstein, a University of Chicago assistant professor, wrote that women in psychological research were perceived to be passive, weak-minded, and unstable, qualities suited to “a typical minority-group stereotype – woman as nigger.”60 Viewed as “the superlative racial epithet,”61 because of its associations with crushing institutional, individual, and everyday racism against blacks, the word “nigger” was a shorthand attempt to emphasize the abject status of a particular people. However, its use in regard to students, Québécois, and women left unexplored the unearned advantages “white privilege” bestowed upon white men and women and overlooked the maltreatment of Indigenous peoples within North America.62 Morton, one of the coauthors of “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” later conceded the folly of substituting analogy for analysis. All too often comparisons between women and blacks, Morton submitted, “contain an inherent chauvinism both toward black people and toward women.”63 As the women’s liberation movement spread rapidly across the country, divergent political positions arose. A Marxist segment asserted that a socialist revolution to destroy capitalism was necessary for women’s liberation, a liberal segment sought to provide women with equal employment and educational opportunities, and a radical segment concentrated on women’s oppression alone. Here sexism, not capitalism, was the bugbear.64 Nevertheless, the movement continued to be tied to a large and varied left-wing agenda to transform capitalism.65 Viewed through the red-tinged prism of the rcmp security service, the women’s liberation movement in all its variety was vulnerable to infiltration by subversive interests on the left bent on overthrowing the Canadian state, and possibly by violent means. Predictably, the force first opened a general file marked “Women’s Liberation Groups – Canada” on 13 May 1969.66 Shortly thereafter, one surveillance report noted: “During recent months

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we have noted the emergence of Women’s Liberation Groups in Canada. These groups are being organized to publicize the role of women in society and to stop so-called exploitation of women.” While the commentary on file acknowledges that women’s liberation groups were determined to better women’s lives, the Mounties remained on alert. The same report went on to propose that pro-Chinese Communists might have infiltrated a Toronto women’s liberation group.67 To shore up their looming sense of a national security threat, the rcmp security service also placed on file an article that journalist Jack Batten penned for the magazine Chatelaine on the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. Batten noted that, in comparison to the United States, Canadian women’s liberation seemed “Mickey Mouse, not as big, as experienced, as active or as disturbing to smug males.” The content of Batten’s article was largely sympathetic. He interviewed several feminists across Canada and the United States who were demanding equality with men, in addition to the reform of discriminatory abortion, tax, and marriage laws. Batten’s remark that some of these women’s liberation groups were influenced by a Marxist analysis of women’s oppression may have set off Mountie alarm bells. Worse still, the title of Batten’s article, “After Black Power, Woman Power,” resonated with menace on the race and gender fronts.68 By the time Batten’s piece appeared, the rcmp security service had already established a pattern of surveillance of women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities. Yet although the surveillance resulted in a copious number of documents, it was unable to assess accurately just what type of national security threat women’s liberation posed, because women’s liberationists, most of whom were young, white, and middle class, were not taken seriously as political actors, even though their affiliations on the left aroused general misgivings about subversion. Moreover, the force’s understanding of left-wing radicalism did not keep pace with the rapid growth of social protest movements on the New Left, including women’s liberation. In this sense, spying on the women’s liberation movement stymied the Mounties, because they did not comprehend the styles, strategies, structures, and goals of the women’s liberation movement, apart from their familiar red-tinged prism. For example, security-service interest in an offshoot of New York Radical Women, the flamboyant Women’s International Terrorist Con-

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spiracy from Hell (witch), whose members wore black shifts and pointed hats, required a nuanced understanding of guerrilla theatre protest styles.69 When the Regina Women’s Liberation Group recommended: “we can learn from the people of Vietnam that we can and must fight American imperialism and begin to unite with our own working peoples to plan together our own struggle for liberation,” the force needed to view this statement not as a call to arms but as a strategy for anti-imperialist feminist organizing.70 The force’s interpretation of one Saskatoon women’s liberation group as appearing “to be in a disorganized state, having no executive or leader as such with [three members] forming the nucleus of the group, calling meetings on an irregular basis” reflected the Mounties’ lack of familiarity with the movement’s rejection of hierarchical organizational structures.71 Ultimately, the Mounted Police may have had expertise when it came to understanding the machinations of Communists, but it had no similar experience dealing with women whose aim was not the overthrow of government per se but of a status quo predicated on gender inequality. This lofty ambition differed from the more materialist demands of those involved in, for example, the labour movement. Whereas the force was ever on the lookout for links between more established women’s organizations like the Voice of Women (vow) and Women Against Soaring Prices and communism, it deployed its considerable surveillance network to concentrate on the relationship of Trotskyists to women’s liberation. The League for Socialist Action/ Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso) and its youth arm, the Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs), were attracted to the student movement and were, therefore, active in educational institutions from which women’s liberation drew many of its early adherents. Unlike the Old Left’s support for class struggle, unionism, and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the eclectic New Left focused on the importance of students as a force of social change. An increase in enrolment due to the baby boom turned campuses across the country into major sites of political activism on behalf of “social movement organizations.”72 The rcmp speculated that the protest sweeping institutions of higher learning in other countries might also occur in Canada. Mountie reports from Toronto and Vancouver reveal that officers suspected that Trotskyists, alongside Communists and radical professors from the United States and the United

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Kingdom, might foment campus unrest that left-wing groups would exploit further.73 By the end of the decade, one rcmp Investigator in Vancouver anticipated that, if university and college administrators did not attend to student dissatisfaction, “a more militant stand including occupation or violence is not out of the question.”74 Such a broad-brush appraisal ignored the very real grievances many staff, students, and faculty voiced against universities, particularly the complicity of various university administrations in supporting a “military industrial complex” that sustained the Vietnam War.75 It also obscured the complexities of the relationship of Trotskyists to women’s liberation. Joan Sangster’s research shows that the New Left provided fertile ground for the development of several “[n]ew socialist and Marxist-Leninist formations” that included Trotskyist and Maoist “new communist” parties. Despite the differences among them, these parties, which were heavily involved in labour activism, “paid more attention to, and developed new analyses of women’s oppression” with Trotskyists supporting “an autonomous women’s movement.”76 The lsa/lso and the ys/ljs took up the cause of women’s liberation with gusto, holding cross-Canada meetings and participating in a national campaign for the repeal of the 1969 abortion law. Some members of these organizations were dedicated women’s liberationists.77 Other lsa/lso and ys/ljs members involved in student politics joined women’s liberation groups; practicing entryism, they sought to co-opt issues such as access to safe and legal abortion, in order to win a broader section of women over to Trotskyism.78 But the powerful appeal of the women’s liberation movement also enticed women in the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs to commit to spreading feminist ideas within these organizations.79 As well, Trotskyism itself may have been well-suited to the grievances many women’s liberationists had against the patriarchal nuclear family. Trotsky held that traditional families were “nests of medievalism, female slavery and hysteria, daily humiliation of children, feminine and childish superstition,” rectifiable through socializing the family via communal laundries, kitchens, and child-care centres, thereby freeing women from their domestic roles.80 As a woman writing under the alias of “Mary Wood” in the Canadian Trotskyist newspaper Labour Challenge stated, Trotskyists viewed women as “twice enslaved, once as working people, again as overburdened housewives.”81 Significantly, the overlap between the politics and personnel of Trotskyist organizations and women’s lib-

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eration meant that, on some occasions, the rcmp became involved in a parasitic relationship with both. Mountie surveillance of the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs provided intelligence on Trotskyists. But as these organizations became more closely involved with women’s liberation, the security service could glean through them even more information about the women’s liberation movement. This parasitic relationship worked also in reverse: spying on the women’s liberation movement captured far more intelligence about the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs. A similar pattern played out with the lsa/lso, the ys/ljs, and the gay rights movement.82 Ironically, the non-hierarchical, consensus-based, decision-making organizational structure of many women’s liberation groups could have smoothed the path of infiltrators. In his research on Women Strike for Peace (wsp), vow’s American sister organization, Ian McKay discovered that, much to the frustration of red baiters who wanted to denounce wsp as Communist, the organization “had militants but no members; a clearing-house but no politburo; a policy statement but no program.” He observes briefly that this “structurelessness” made it easier for the fbi and the cia to make inroads into the organization.83 Although the wsp was not a women’s liberation group, McKay’s observation echoes somewhat Jo Freeman’s earlier and classic essay on the “tyranny of structurelessness.” Active in the American women’s liberation movement, Freeman claims that the loose organizational structure of women’s liberation groups resulted in personality clashes, power trips, disunity, inaction, and vulnerability “to being taken over by a group of political comrades.”84 To Freeman, this lack of a coherent structure, combined with the sheer dedication and energy of the Trotskyists, allowed the latter to gain positions of leadership in women’s liberation groups.85 Many may disagree with the portrayal of women’s organizations as structurally challenged. However, it could explain how structurelessness in women’s liberation groups may have facilitated Trotskyist entryism as much as it expedited rcmp security service surveillance. Fittingly, a Mountie informant attending a Saskatoon women’s liberation meeting reported that one woman present stated: “these [women’s liberation group] meetings were open to women of any capacity (employment wise) and … all were welcome.”86 Ultimately, schisms within the Fourth International resulted in fragmentation within Trotskyist ranks at home, while the presence of Trotskyists within women’s liberation groups led to ugly battles among activists.87

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The rcmp trained their sights on individuals participating in women’s liberation groups, as these were the most obvious indication of the growth of the movement, using Open Source Intelligence, covert police operations, and informants to conduct their surveillance. Informants played a significant role. In many situations, informants would have been women who could pass as potential converts to the cause in small, women-only gatherings. In larger public meetings, the informants could have been men as well. At times, the informant-provided observations recorded in the declassified documents, as well as the commentaries provided by inspectors and officers, seem crass, naïve, or even amusing, possibly for a number of reasons. The heavy-handed censorship of the surveillance reports means that only strands of information are left behind, giving them a uni-dimensional quality that sometimes lacks substance and coherence. There may also have been an ill-preparedness or over-reaching on the part of some informants, handlers, and/or authors of the surveillance reports in relation to the information they sought. Just as likely, they may have invested that information with their personal biases and conservative points of view. Finally, and most pertinent to this investigation, is the divergence between the women’s revolutionary goal of gender equality and the rcmp security service’s slowness to wean itself from its dependence upon the red-tinged prism for its framing of subversion, resulting at times in an interpretive mismatch between the information the force collected and its assessment of that information. One of the first women’s liberation groups in Canada was the twlm, founded in the autumn of 1968. “I remember one day thinking,” Morton would tell an interviewer in 2005, “‘Gee I said that an hour ago and nobody listened. Now some guy said it and everybody’s talking about it.’ Then I started noticing that’s what happens every time a woman speaks. We started talking and discussion and out of it came the [twlm] … It was very exciting.”88 The rcmp security service was certainly taking notice of the emergence of this new entity. The Mounties sometimes referred to it as the Toronto Women’s Liberation Group. Earlier incarnations of the twlm were a Toronto Women’s Liberation Work Group on the University of Toronto (U of T) campus and a supa Women’s Liberation Work Group.89 In addition to the Mounted Police’s use of open sources – such as a Montreal Star article describing the twlm as a “Marxist” group that “emphasizes changing the capitalistic basis of society”90 – the rcmp garnered plenty of information on the twlm

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from informants. One informant at an October 1969 meeting held on the U of T campus identified five women by first and last name, including Morton, and another three women by first name only.91 Morton and a few other women were said to have “gone to Kingston, Ontario to start a new [women’s liberation] group … They were enthusiastic about the group in Kingston and stated that it was composed mostly of college students in their freshman year. They also mentioned that a group had been, or was to be set up in Montreal, P.Q. No further details on this group were given.”92 The informant noted that the twlm was “involved in everything,” including labour activism, the sds, the Canadian Union of Students, and the Black Panthers in the United States, and reported that a number of women at the meeting stated that “they wanted to be revolutionaries.”93 Informants seeking hard evidence of left-wing revolutionary activity within women’s liberation groups found themselves instead sitting through heady, interminable discussions about the patriarchal nuclear family. One informant at a twlm gathering provided a garbled summary: “Various arguments were put forward, however the reasoning on this was basically that the women’s role in a family unit was one of suppression and subversvients [sic], therefore the family unit was a wrong conception, which must be changed, by revolution if necessary.”94 At another twlm meeting, two women voiced a concern that a Toronto journalist could be planted surreptitiously in their midst, leading the informant to relate that from now on the group “would be very wary of any new members that came to the meeting.”95 Irony aside, this comment indicates that the informant was already an established presence in the twlm. The force clearly tried to keep track of the group’s participants, as can be seen in this rcmp investigator’s concluding remarks: “All those persons mentioned in this report not identified by file number are believed to be members of the [T]W.L.G., however have not been properly identified as yet.”96 In the spring of 1969, some disgruntled members of the twlm left the group to form the New Feminists (nf). The nf deliberately used the term “feminist” to distinguish itself from women’s liberation groups that had a Marxist orientation, a practice that was widely followed in the early days of the movement. Feminist groups were exclusively for women. An informant privy to this split observed that, according to one twlm member, the nf were “mostly man haters and did not have too much contact

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with other political groups,” while the twlm was “associated with most of the Left groups on campus.”97 In a newspaper article that the rcmp kept on file, Bonnie Kreps, one of the founding nf members, was quoted as stating: “Our job now is to make women aware of themselves as a group. The Blacks came to believe they were inferior, and it’s the same with women.”98 The rcmp assessed the nf similarly as “a relatively new group in Canada whose principal aim is to stop the exploitation of women. They feel that everything today, literature, advertising, television exploits sex. They feel that the woman is being treated as an oppressed member of a minority group.”99 Despite these sentiments, the force continued to snoop on the nf, calling it a “[f]ront group of the women’s liberation movement.”100 Mounties were assigned to spy on nf members, even when they protested publicly the publication of an article in Maclean’s magazine by famed Montreal-born anthropologist Lionel Tiger: “The demonstration was over an article that appeared in MacLean’s [sic] magazine entitled ‘Man and Woman.’ In this article, the author, Lionel tiger [deleted under atip] stated that he felt the male was superior to the female in numerous ways.”101 The deletion beside his name implies that Tiger may have had an rcmp file number opened for him, setting him up as a possible target of surveillance. In any case, Tiger continued to be a target of women’s liberationists, who poked fun at his theories about male bonding in primate species. When Tiger spoke to a Vancouver audience in early 1971, the Mounties reported that members of another group, witch, “dressed up as tigers and ‘baboons,’ ran up to the stage where tiger was speaking and disrupted the proceedings.”102 The rcmp had more troubling matters to deal with than women costumed as animals. Women’s liberation, as one investigator remarked with some trepidation, was “attempting to expand to Windsor, Ontario, Kingston, Ontario, and Montreal, P.Q.”103 The force repeatedly assumed that this multiplying movement could be co-opted by subversive elements, leading to possible expressions of violence. When the nf demonstrated outside Toronto City Hall in favour of better wages for women, the Mounted Police recorded: “No incidents were noted,” perhaps having expected something untoward or violent to occur or indicating that the situation was securely under control.104 After gathering more intelligence on the nf, an investigator concluded: “Our interest in the New Feminists to-date lies not in their protest but in the fact that

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there are known political people involved, and their interests in the future will no doubt turn to anti-U.S. and/or political issues.”105 Here the investigator alludes to the potential of the nf to engage in anti-American activism, a realistic worry, as women’s liberation, like so many of the New Left protest movements, railed against American aggression in Vietnam and the imperialistic economic dominance of the United States over Canada. The comment may also have referred to the growing presence of American war resisters in Canadian cities, which had implications for both neighbours at the highest levels of government.106 The next spring, at a provincial conference on women sponsored by the Women’s Advisory Council of the Ontario Department of Trade and Development, an rcmp informant spied on the small number of nf women in attendance. Declaring, “[t]hese radical women were obviously trying to find fault with the whole Provincial Government,” the informant endeavoured to provide something of major political import to his or her handlers, but came up with minutiae. He or she noted that the pink leaflets the nf women distributed “added a gay touch of colour to the white table cloths,” that the invited guests picked up the pink leaflets “in the mistaken belief that they were Conference programmes,” and that a conference organizer warned the nf women to “cease passing out these leaflets [or] the hotel security staff would be called.” Worse was to come. The rcmp informant noted that nf women and women’s liberationists from the New Democratic Party (ndp) submitted approximately 70 per cent of the questions to the conference panellists. Audience favourite Doris Anderson of Chatelaine magazine was asked why she was not offered the editorship of the popular news publication Maclean’s, what she thought of “Hugh Hefner [deleted under atip] (Editor of Playboy) and Helen Gurley Brown [deleted under atip] (Editor of Cosmopolitan) and also the question of nudity and sex in movies.” Once again, the deletion beside these names implies that they too may have been potential targets of rcmp surveillance or at least that files were opened on them by the police. During the question-and-answer session, the rcmp informant judged that “the radical women became more vociferous,” particularly when one of the conference panellists “stated that she felt a course in female studies – comparable to those of black studies in the United States – could be initiated (in Canadian universities or schools) but [when she] added it should be for men and families, rather than for women alone, the radical women responded to her suggestion with boos.”107

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This informant’s observations captured the raucous atmosphere of the conference, but they were hardly political dynamite. The most he or she could do was to conclude that the audience was “rather disgusted” with the tactics of the nf: “What sympathy they had gained was soon lost.”108 The rcmp security service had far more luck in obtaining convincing evidence of Trotskyist interest in the women’s liberation movement, often by piggybacking its scrutiny of women’s liberation groups onto its surveillance of the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs. In May 1969, an informant told the Mounties that the Toronto lsa/lso’s “Committee on Women’s Affairs” advised the assembled of the split between the twlm and the nf and assessed the nf women as “more active minded.”109 In July that same year, the Mounted Police learned through a member of the lsa/lso of that organization’s interest in both the twlm and the nf.110 Later the force discovered that one ys/ljs member from Edmonton, Alberta, would visit each province from Manitoba through Quebec in September 1969 to speak about women’s liberation.111 At the ys/ljs convention in Montreal a month later, an informant netted from a panel discussion the news that women’s liberation groups were flourishing in big cities like Vancouver and smaller centres such as Brandon.112 The rcmp security service was similarly concerned with Trotskyist entryism in women’s liberation groups in Quebec, but the force was just as apprehensive about alliances among Quebec Anglophone and Francophone feminists, trade unionists, Communists, socialists, and separatists. By the end of 1969, a new radical women’s liberation group appeared on the scene, the Front de libération des femmes du Québec (flf), which took its name from the Front de libération du Québec, an organization which, in the name of an independent Quebec, committed a number of acts of political violence. The flf came under suspicion. Meanwhile, the Mounties were already tending files on several other Quebec women’s organizations, including the Fédération des femmes du Québec, the Ligue des femmes du Québec, Voice of Women (Quebec), the Front commun des Québécoises, and mwl.113 For Morton, Trotskyist involvement could not be taken seriously, because Trotskyists were not “a revolutionary force at all. At that period of time they didn’t even think there were any prospects for communism.”114 But most damning from the perspective of Mounties leery of entryism was a document produced by the lsa/lso, published in March

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1970 and selling for twenty-five cents, a copy of which the security service obtained and evaluated as “pertaining to activities of the various Women’s Liberation Movements (Groups) across Canada.”115 The document was made up of a series of one- to three-page reports by the lsa/lso about its activities in regard to women’s liberation groups in individual cities across Canada. The Trotskyist authors of these short reports – sometimes named, sometimes not – described proudly the women’s liberation work of lsa/lso “Comrades.” The Toronto report held that the twlm had a mailing list of 150 members, attracted anywhere from thirty to sixty women at each meeting, and participated in birth-control counselling. The twlm women were said to engage in long-winded “struggle sessions.” In a somewhat boastful nod to Trotskyist interventions in the twlm, the author or authors of the Toronto report claimed that the lsa/lso and a member of the cpc were providing the University of Toronto faction of the twlm with “considerable leadership,” “organization,” and “co-ordination.”116 The nf, continued the author or authors, sought “the elimination of sex roles.” This women’s liberation group had two hundred members on its mailing list, its own monthly newspaper, and a headquarters. Still, the nf was in trouble because of “sharp divisions” over two issues: the optimal size of the group and the relationship of women’s liberation to other political movements. The nf solution to these two issues was to control the voting membership tightly. The author or authors remained confident, insisting that, although lsa/lso participation in the nf “has been somewhat minimal and haphazard,” inroads would be achieved by “taking the initiative in organizing regular discussion groups at the headquarters on current, controversial or basic issues around women’s liberation, which will make the group more interesting and relevant and bring women around on a regular basis.”117 Finally, the author or authors elaborated upon the organization’s women’s liberation efforts within the ndp, municipal elections, University of Toronto student elections, the York University campus, and the anti-war movement, concluding: “[I]n Toronto we are identifying ourselves as the only political movement that promotes the issue of women’s liberation.”118 The success of Trotskyist involvement in the Toronto women’s liberation scene was said to be a model to follow across the country, with the caution that campus-based women’s liberation groups in Canada’s largest

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city were “composed of student women who often get mired in endless discussions about how women must personally liberate themselves from male chauvinism.” Therefore, the objective was “to put ourselves forward as Trotskyists, as known leaders and spokesmen for women’s liberation, to try and tie the discussions together” so as to gather women of all classes into “actions which lead forward.”119 In the spring of 1970, Trotskyist women within the nf split off under the name of the Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc). The rcmp security service tailed the twc closely, determining after two years of its existence that it was full of “L.S.A. and Y.S. members whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of the Canadian Government, through violence if necessary, to replace it with their Trotskyist alternative.”120 The lsa/lso report on the women’s liberation movement in Montreal provides a window onto early Francophone and Anglophone activism. Women’s liberation in Montreal was said to be “at a very early stage of development” when compared to cities in English Canada and the United States.121 There was some limited progress in Montreal; small numbers of women were meeting for consciousness-raising sessions, during which they aired their “personal problems,” and Marlene Dixon, an American professor hired by McGill University, had begun teaching a class on women. Dixon herself came under rcmp scrutiny; on 23 December 1969, the federal Department of Manpower and Immigration supplied the commissioner of the rcmp with information about Dixon’s three-year contract with McGill University, noting that it could be “terminated by any one party at any time.” Further, the letter writer told the rcmp commissioner that “a source at the university has stated that Dr. Dixon is the instigator of a new movement ‘The Women’s Liberation Association’ at the university.”122 The lsa/lso report on Montreal went on to state that the Anglophone women had “no formal structure, no steering committee, no elected leadership.”123 Therefore, there was very little planning and too much discussion. The Francophone group, identified as the “Front de Liberation de la Femme [sic],” was said to have come from a trade union background and wanted “action for the sake of action, without seriously determining the validity of any action undertaken.”124 The lsa/lso had made a little headway with the Anglophone women and was attempting at least the same with the flf. However, the haphazard organizing of Anglophone and Francophone women rankled the lsa/lso so much that they labelled this tendency “Mao-Spontaneist.”125

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Ultimately, the lsa/lso was frustrated by the desire of many women’s liberationists for a “multi-issue” movement for women only. It wanted to shift this desire toward what the lsa/lso termed “an all-inclusive, single issue movement which takes action on issues affecting women – all women – as well as educating the women actively involved about the roots of their oppression, and the way to overcome that oppression.”126 The lsa/lso was aware that this kind of single-mindedness could be met with hostility from women’s liberation groups; nevertheless, it urged members to “be ready to act as a well-organized group within the [women’s liberation] movement.”127 The lsa/lso came closest to achieving this strategy with the vwc. The lsa/lso report on Vancouver elaborated on the growth of the vwc, noting that, as a first step, the lsa/lso placed one woman in the vwc “to work for our [socialist] movement, selling our literature, intervening where possible, and reporting its general activities” to the local lsa/lso. With the rapid development of the Vancouver women’s liberation movement, the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs wanted to seize the opportunity to influence it. The unnamed author or authors of the Vancouver report noted that the vwc’s leadership consisted of “excomrades” and “campus type radicals” and confidently claimed that the women’s earlier “political training in the Trotskyist movement” was responsible for the group’s smooth operation, its newspaper, The Pedestal, and its many actions that garnered a great deal of publicity.128 Significantly, the lsa/lso report on the women’s liberation movement in Edmonton provided the rcmp security service with the information – and even the language – it needed to fill out its very own Organizational Assessment Form, a security-service effort to professionalize its approach to analysis. This form gauged the threat the Edmonton Women’s Liberation Movement (ewlm) posed to national security. The author of the lsa/lso report on the women’s liberation movement in Edmonton was listed as J. Hart. She or he described the beginnings of the ewlm on the University of Alberta campus, its spread to the city of Edmonton, and its lack of direction until the involvement of Trotskyist women.129 The rcmp security service form parroted Hart’s report to the point of plagiarism. A comparison between the two shows just how similar they are. The form labelled the ewlm a “Study and Protest Group,” and estimated that it consisted of forty to sixty individuals affiliated with vow, Students for a Democratic University (sdu), and the ys/ljs. Hart’s report had stated that, between 1967 and 1969, the ewlm “was established

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mostly around the sdu women, in their words, ‘as a reaction against left-wing male chauvinism.’”130 The Mounted Police allowed that the ewlm “functioned mainly only on the campus of the U. of A. [University of Alberta] and was established around the sdu women, in their words, ‘as a reaction against left-wing male chauvinism.’”131 Furthermore, the form determined that, between 1969 and 1970, the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs had become more involved in the group, causing antagonism on the part of sdu women: “[t]he Trots expect some red-baiting but are confident they will win their political position.”132 Hart’s report held: “[t]he response of the sdu women to the ys has become quite antagonistic and we are preparing ourselves for the possibility of a red-baiting campaign but the way things stand now the possibilities are high that we will be able to win our political position in the group and play a leadership role in it.”133 The form concluded that the ewlm was “Trotskyist infiltrated at executive level. For ‘A’ Branch purposes: It is assessed as Trotskyist infiltrated, however, membership in this organization is not necessarily indicative of Marxist ideology.”134 The typewritten word “Marxist” was scratched out and replaced with the hand-lettered “Trotskyist,” perhaps indicating the Mounties’ confusion over the political affiliation of the groups they surveilled or their assumption that all suspect groups bore a farleft taint. Moreover, the reference to “A” Branch was intended for the part of the security service that conducted background and security checks on potential government employees or existing employees requiring security clearance. Thus rcmp documents had the potential to haunt those mentioned long after their involvement in groups that had become defunct. The Mounties may have plagiarized the lsa/lso report on the women’s liberation movement in Edmonton because of laziness or a lack of resources. Large cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver would have had more rcmp security-service staff than a smaller centre like Edmonton. Yet, in other instances, the force expended considerable effort in sketching sexist biographies of women’s liberation group members, even when these women were located in smaller centres, which were included in their “subversive indices.”135 Sometimes the personal details that appear are extensive, including a surveillance target’s full name, present and previous addresses, date and place of birth, nationality, marital sta-

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tus, the names and professions of the target’s parents and siblings, as well as the names of the “subversive organization” to which the target belonged. At times, these personal details are accompanied by derogatory comments about the target’s personal appearance or character, salacious gossip about individuals connected to the target, or comments about the informant’s family relationships. At other times, the information about a surveillance target is simply mundane. To illustrate, another rcmp report described an Edmonton ys/ljs member who was also involved in the lsa, the local women’s liberation movement, and anti-Vietnam War protest, as a “hard-core Trotskyist,” 5!3" in height, 140 pounds in weight, possessing “stringy blond hair and generally sloppy in overall appearance.” She was said to have a quick temper and few friends.136 The rcmp established, likely with the assistance of staff at the University of Saskatchewan, that one woman involved with the Saskatoon women’s liberation movement was a university student who was “considered to be a hard working individual and is receiving average grades in her studies.” Furthermore, she “does not like to be known openly as a Trotskyist, preferring to involve herself in other leftwing movements.” Although the rcmp surveillance report described her as a “whiney, very defensive sort of individual who has no leadership or organizational qualities,” a member of the lsa/lso was apparently persuading her to move to Vancouver to do some organizing for the lsa/lso, dependent upon her ability to sell her current home in Lloydminster.137 This woman had come under suspicion initially because an informant attending a lsa/lso-ys/ljs-sponsored event about women’s liberation at the University of Alberta heard her telling the audience that the women’s liberation movement in Saskatoon was “closed to men,” that “revolution is the only answer,” and that “[a]ll women should be organized into a revolutionary party.”138 Another student at the University of Saskatchewan was targeted for her participation in the Saskatoon Women’s Liberation Movement and in the Committee for Socialist Movement (csm). Her birthdate was recorded, and so too were the names and birthdates of her mother, sister, and two brothers, all residents of Saskatoon. Her father was a professor at the University of Saskatchewan. She was considered a “mainstay” of the women’s liberation movement and one of the csm’s “staunchest supporters.” Her friends apparently called her a “radical.” The Mounties

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were curious about why she had left her parents’ home and speculated that the cause was her “attraction for her male companion,” a man the force sought to identify.139 Other individuals were targeted elsewhere. Thousands of kilometres east of Saskatoon, the Mounties closed in on a Sudbury woman employed by a trade union because of her “Subversive Affiliation” with not only the Sudbury Women’s Liberation Movement but also with a civil rights group and a tenants’ association. In addition to a placing a physical description of the woman on record, the Mounties also quoted from an informant’s assessment of her character: “common person of low moral standards who has been embittered by her experiences with men.”140 One woman, a professor at Sault Ste Marie’s Algoma College, was similarly singled out for her subversive affiliation with a democracy group in Chile and the cpc. The force considered her a rich surveillance target because “[s]he is obviously connected to the C.P. of C. and appears to have the intelligence and ability to lead and influence a viable group in Sault Ste. Marie. Initially she was just thought to be another ‘women’s libber type,’ but now she appears to be a member of the C.P. of C. and would certainly warrant closer monitoring.”141 Surveillance of great depth and breadth resulted in a detailed rcmp evaluation of the first year of operation of the Winnipeg Women’s Liberation Movement (wwlm) and the women who were singled out as central to it. The city of Winnipeg had a history of labour activism going back to its hosting of the General Strike of 1919. The evaluation of the wwlm began with this general statement: The Women’s Liberation Movement is a fairly recent phenomena [sic] in its present form and follows the publication of several works such as Betty friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” on the oppression of women and their second class status in our present society. The ultimate aim of the movement is to change the social structure that prevents their attaining equality with men and the means of effecting this change have manifested themselves in various organizations and programmes. The nature of these groups range from the apolitical Feminists to the Marxist oriented Women’s Liberation Movement, the latter of which has been established in the Winnipeg area.142

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Thereafter, the rcmp security service insisted that, on the local scene, the movement was “dominated by those now or formerly affiliated with the Communist Party of Canada or the Young Socialists.”143 The Mounties allowed that while the women were concerned with issues of birth control, abortion, employment, a redefinition of marriage and the family, and the need for day care, these were “not specifically of a political nature,” a judgment that women’s liberationists would have, of course, rejected because of their stance on gender equality.144 The evaluation maintained that the local movement’s activities ranged from recruiting new members to publicizing their cause and to participating in demonstrations, “the most recent of which have demonstrated a growing propensity towards violence within the movement.”145 The basis for this assertion was shaky; it rested upon the claims of one Winnipeg Free Press article in which both Marxist women’s liberationists and feminists were said to have “a viable potential for violent revolutionary action,”146 and upon the news that, at a protest held in a shopping centre, security guards had to remove two women forcibly.147 In both cases, the Mounties may have viewed the women’s activism as unfeminine and in exaggerated terms. Regardless, the assertion stands out as one of a tiny handful from within the thousands of pages examined that made any direct reference to the relationship between women’s liberation and violence. The evaluation did elaborate upon the reasons why the wwlm was vulnerable to entryism: it was still in its early stages and consequently ripe for the infiltration by Trotskyists. Also on the radar was the possibility of interference by “orthodox Communists” and “militant Maoist factions.”148 Still, the evaluation determined that any such infiltration had been unsuccessful because of the wwlm’s political instability and its commitment to its feminist aims. What was concerning was that women who were attracted to women’s liberation in general “because of the inequalities and inherent weaknesses that are inherent in our political system,”149 were unaware that the movement could be “exploited by anti-democratic political groups and circumvent the primary aims” of the movement.150 This supposition reinforced the rcmp security service’s tendency to treat women’s liberation groups as fronts for sinister left-wing activities and to suppose that women genuinely seeking gender equality could be duped into aiding and abetting those activities.

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The rest of the evaluation was devoted to snippets of information regarding the women’s liberation movement across Canada, gleaned mainly from the mainstream and left-wing press that implicated Trotskyists, Communists, and Maoists, and to detailed activist biographies of five women the force identified as core women’s liberation activists in Winnipeg. The rcmp provided the women’s birthdates, addresses, educational and employment experience, and living arrangements. In a gendered style of reporting, the Mounted Police repeatedly mentioned the marital status of women and the occupation of their husbands or partners, information rarely supplied about male activists. Their participation in the women’s liberation movement took a back seat to their links to left-wing organizations, as in this instance: In addition to [women’s liberation movement] activities, subject attended a meeting on 24-2-70 at the Monkey Tree Book Store sponsored by the Maoist-oriented Winnipeg Progressive Social Science Study Group, an off-shoot of the Communist Party of Canada, Marxist/Leninist.151 Another activist, according to the Mounties, first came to our attention while attending a [cpc] “Talk and Learn” session. In 1967 she attended meetings of the Voice of Women (V.O.W.), the Winnipeg Committee for Peace in Vietnam (W.C.P.V.N.) and the Marxist-Christian Dialogue. She also attended a Students [sic] Union for Peace Action (S.U.P.A.) meeting in Toronto, and as a member of the [cpc] Norman Bethune Club, attended a Party Youth Conference in Montreal and was scheduled to attend a [cpc] National Youth School.152 The rcmp was unsure whether this woman had participated in these various political groups on her own initiative “or whether she has attempted to penetrate them at the instigation of the cpc.”153 A third activist was considered dodgy because she “had frequent contact with various Trotskyists from the League for Socialist Action (L.S.A.) and Young Socialists (Y.S.),”154 while a fourth was described as being “known to have associated with Trotskyists in the past.”155 The fifth received mention for not only being prominent in the women’s liberation and

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peace movements but also for attending a silent vigil at which “she read out the names of American war dead” in Vietnam.156 In effect, the Mounties collected vast amounts of intelligence on the burgeoning women’s liberation movement in Canada. But interpreting the movement through its red-tinged prism to gauge accurately the national security threat it posed was another story altogether. Espionage conducted on women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities proved to be a very difficult assignment for the Mounties. As time would tell, the force clearly underestimated the determination of the women to get across their message of gender equality, because it focused obsessively on the suspected involvement of the women’s liberation movement with Communist, Trotskyist, and assorted left-wing subversion. In this sense, the Canadian experience reflects what historian and journalist Ruth Rosen discovered about the fbi in the United States and its spying on women’s groups in the 1960s and 1970s: Ironically, the fbi searched for signs of subversion in the women’s movement but couldn’t recognize what was truly dangerous. While they looked for Communists and bombs, the women’s movement was shattering traditional ideas about work, customs, education, sexuality, and the family. Ultimately, this movement would prove far more revolutionary than the fbi could ever imagine.157

3 On to Ottawa Redux

The appearance of the women’s liberation movement in Canada coincided with the passage of long-awaited reforms to the Canadian Criminal Code. On 14 May 1969, the Liberal government under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau succeeded in passing legislation that touched most significantly upon contraception, abortion, and homosexual acts between consenting adults. Shortly after the reforms came into effect that August, the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc), a newly established women’s liberation group, took issue with the new abortion law. Determined to highlight the problem of uneven access to legal abortion services, the caucus proposed travelling in an Abortion Caravan from Vancouver to Ottawa for a demonstration on Mother’s Day, 1970. Considering that it was hailed as “the first national action”1 of the women’s liberation movement, there is surprisingly little academic research on the caravan’s origins, participants, and impact. Yet when it traversed the country, it attracted thousands of public spectators who expressed shock or delight at the women’s well-staged discontent. It also enticed a clandestine rcmp audience to track its journey to the nation’s capital. Universities were target-rich environments for the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. The vwc sprang out of the New Left political ferment that swept Simon Fraser University (sfu) in the late 1960s. Founded in 1965 as one of Canada’s progressive institutions of higher education, sfu would be described by one Mountie as the most “far out” in Canada. Students were active in a variety of organizations, including Students for a Democratic University, and causes. They protested the Vietnam War, rejected the building of a Shell gas station on sfu grounds, and pushed for the unionization of teaching assistants. Matters culminated toward the end of 1968, when a group of students occupied the university’s administration building for three days before the Mounties forced them out. It was not just students who engaged in radicalism. Fac-

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ulty in the Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology (psa) department repeatedly fought to create a more egalitarian university. In the end, they lost their battle to the university administration, which suspended and fired psa members and dismantled the department.2 That same year, in July, some women students reconsidering their place in the student movement on campus founded the Feminist Action League (fal). Reflecting the influence of the American Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which barred whites from leadership positions and then from membership, fal followed suit by barring men, and then renaming itself the sfu Women’s Caucus. From the beginning, members displayed an interest in securing women’s reproductive rights. The Women’s Caucus advertised its own birth-control information service in The Peak, the university’s student newspaper, in the common linguistic code for an unwanted pregnancy: “Girls – need help? in trouble? [sic]” The considerable response to the advertisement sensitized the sfu Women’s Caucus to the issue of abortion. In July 1969, it moved offcampus to settle into a downtown Vancouver office. It reconstituted itself as the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc) and began publishing a newspaper called The Pedestal. The vwc was made up mainly of sfu students and professors, a few newly arrived from the United States. The group also attracted University of British Columbia (ubc) students, as well as housewives, single mothers, pink-collar workers, and health-care professionals.3 This eclectic coalition of vwc women was white. It had approximately thirty-five to forty members, but only half of them were core to the group. The twenty-odd core members had middle-class origins and a Christian upbringing. The majority were in their twenties, heterosexual, and Canadian-born. Although some had male partners, few had children. The women had become radicalized while in university, or in left-wing political organizing, or, in a few cases, on the job.4 It was easy to grasp why the burgeoning women’s liberation movement was preoccupied with the question of abortion. In Canada, laws prohibited the sale and advertisement of, and dissemination of information about, contraceptives and abortifacients from the late-nineteenth century onward. Abortion too was prohibited, except to save the life of the woman. This loophole led some non-Catholic hospitals to compose Therapeutic Abortion Committees (tacs) of physicians, which decided on a case-by-case basis whether or not to grant an abortion. Still, most doctors refused to

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perform abortions at all, because they feared legal repercussions. Abortions that were self-induced or induced by medical or non-medical personnel remained an underground practice. Most women survived their abortions, but many others died from resulting septic infections.5 Demands to liberalize the country’s birth-control laws gathered steam in the 1960s. In this decade, Canadian society became more secular, a so-called sexual revolution in attitude and behaviour purportedly condoned sexual relations before marriage for young, white women, and abortion was recognized as a major public-health problem. Birth-control initiatives have often displayed an ugly slant dating back to the eugenics movement.6 This time it was evidenced by the existence of a wellfinanced population-control lobby that raised concerns over overpopulation in the Third World and the development of a potent oral contraceptive known as the birth control pill. The pill was intended for married women in First World nations to space the births of their children, but in Third World regions to slow population growth. Population-control lobbyists were convinced that birth rates in poor nations that had won independence from colonial rule after 1945 were too high. Doomsday predictions held that poverty-stricken black, brown, and yellow hordes would ally with Communist nations to battle the First World for its resources, triggering a nuclear war. Despite the popular perception of positive changes in sexual attitudes and behaviour toward premarital sex, the pill was not readily available to unmarried women, even after the passage of the Criminal Code reforms; doctors feared that, by prescribing it, they might promote sexual immorality among young women and their partners. Within Canada, both eugenic and population-control initiatives were directed at poor, immigrant, and Indigenous women, and involved forced sterilization.7 A month after the long-awaited reforms to the Criminal Code went into effect, an rcmp informant at a meeting of approximately twentyfive women involved with Saskatoon women’s liberation activities recorded the following: “[t]he subject of birth control was given discussion with many of the single women telling of the fears and doubts they experienced when going to a doctor and requesting the ‘Pill.’”8 The same or another informant was also at hand when, in October, at the invitation of local feminists, Dr John Bury gave a lecture on birth control to a capacity crowd on the University of Saskatchewan campus. Bury, an emigrant from England, worked in the Saskatoon Community Clinic in the early

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1960s. During the 1962 doctors’ strike, which was held to oppose the introduction of Medicare, the clinic developed a reputation as a Communist establishment.9 Whether or not the informant was aware of this history is unknown. He or she recounted only that Bury advised that while “sexual freedom” for women was becoming more acceptable, “it has not yet reached the point where women can be considered having those freedoms enjoyed by males without acquiring a stigma.”10 Informing on gatherings was crucial to the functioning of the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. But in so doing, this informant was unwittingly tapping into some of the reproductive discontents Canadian women continued to experience even after the passage of the 1969 legislation. The most egregious of these was the uneven access to legal abortion services. Under the Criminal Code reforms, legal abortion was now available only in hospitals. Hospital-based tacs composed of three to five doctors had to approve each abortion request, based on their assessment of the threat to the life or health of the woman. But few hospitals established tacs; those that did were located primarily in urban centres; the definition of “health” required to evaluate a woman’s case varied tremendously; and there was no mechanism to appeal a tac’s decision. Moreover, doctors were not obliged to serve on tacs, and many doctors, even those who served on tacs, were opposed morally to abortion. As the informant noted of Bury’s brief comments about abortion, “it was his considered opinion [that] the medical profession looked upon abortion as a cardinal sin.”11 The new abortion law resulted in delays and inconsistencies. Consequently, many women were forced to self-induce an abortion, to seek illegal abortions from medical or non-medical personnel, or to travel to other countries that had already liberalized their abortion laws. However, the cost of transportation, accommodation, and surgery was prohibitive unless one could afford the expense, a fact that sensitized women’s liberation groups to the relationship of class to abortion access.12 The vwc charged that the new abortion law denied “all women the right to abortion on request.”13 More severely affected were poor and working-class women, because they could rarely afford to get a legal abortion inside or outside Canada. For the vwc, resistance to abortion was grounded in the erroneous belief that motherhood was a blessing and a fulfillment for all women, whereas, in practice, maternity oppressed women by restricting their choice of career, discriminating against women

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in the workplace, and forcing women to stay at home to raise their children. Women could attain their full potential only if they could choose freely whether or not to bear children. The consequences of this lack of choice were said to be enormous: illegal abortion, widespread poverty, unhappy marriages, and abused children. Therefore, women needed to build a mass movement for abortion on demand that would guarantee control over their bodies and their lives.14 Some vwc members gave voice to the tactical danger of focusing on abortion as the only catalyst for building a mass movement of women. They looked to the experience of late-nineteenth-century British militant suffragettes active in the Women’s Social and Political Union, determining that after “the vote was won, the movement collapsed.”15 Other women in the group, most notably those with ties to the Trotskyist League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso) and the Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs), insisted that because abortion cut across class lines, it was the foolproof issue that would lead to the building of such a movement.16 Initially, the vwc understood that organizing around abortion was but one avenue to reach women. Yet rapidly, the vwc’s abortion-related activities came to dominate the agenda. A few members of the group initiated an Abortion Information Service (ais) in December 1969. The ais provided despairing married and single women with private referrals to doctors inside and outside Canada who performed abortions in their offices or clinics. In Canada, such abortions were illegal, because they were neither approved by a tac nor performed in a hospital, as stipulated by the new abortion law. Because ais members suspected that police tapped their telephones, they supplied women seeking abortions with referrals written out on slips of paper. Their leeriness grew after an undercover policewoman arrested Dr Robert Makaroff, a local physician with whom the ais had worked, for attempting to procure a miscarriage. Makaroff was of Doukhobor origin and a conscientious objector to military service. As a result, he was disallowed from continuing his medical studies at the University of Saskatchewan. Makaroff paid a heavy price for his arrest; he served three months in jail and had his medical licence suspended by the British Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.17 The ais also helped women seeking legal abortions to navigate the narrow restrictions of a tac-approved abortion. During the first four months of operation, the ais counselled three hundred women. Only ten

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of these women managed to obtain an abortion under the new abortion law. In test cases, the ais discovered that women who were married, white, and middle-class were most likely to receive tac approval for abortions.18 Other vwc members engaged in guerrilla theatre that mined mime, satire, symbol, and skit to press the point of women’s uneven access to legal abortion in Canada. Simultaneously infused with the teachings of Che Guevera and Bertold Brecht, guerrilla theatre encouraged activists and artists to be models of change, to ally art with politics, and to make alliances with like-minded organizations.19 In the March 1970 issue of the New Feminist, which the Mounties had on file, Joan C. Johnson wrote passionately of the purpose to which feminists could put guerrilla theatre: “dramatize most effectively the reality of being a woman in a male sexist society. No professional actors are needed for this – only women. We must act, and act, and act again. There will be no feminist revolution until all the world is a feminist stage.”20 Acting, activism, and action took centre stage on 14 February 1970, when the vwc gathered in front of the Vancouver Courthouse to perform a skit that would become an Abortion Caravan standard. It featured a tac composed of three doctors who successively turned down a range of applicants seeking an abortion. The tac gave the green light only to one applicant: a woman costumed in a fur coat and holding a silver spoon in her mouth to indicate her higher-class status. A black-cloaked backstreet abortionist lurked behind those applicants the tac had turned away. One of them committed suicide by drinking a potion. At the end of the skit, the performers, Caucus members, and a few male supporters, holding signs and beating pots with spoons, marched to the Cenotaph at Victory Square. The protesters invoked this commanding symbol of men lost to war to accentuate the violence the government waged against women’s bodies using the new abortion law as a weapon.21 Betsy Wood (then Betsy Meadley), the inspiration behind this Valentine’s Day march, had joined the caucus because of her experiences with wage discrimination in the workforce. When the caucus sponsored a Western Regional Conference at ubc in October 1969, she presented the idea of travelling to Ottawa to launch a national campaign to repeal the new abortion law. In their rare and laudable accounts of the Abortion Caravan, Frances Wasserlein and Ann Thomson both imply that Wood patterned the journey after the “On to Ottawa” trek from Vancouver by unemployed men to the nation’s capital in the 1930s. During

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the Depression, unemployed men, dissatisfied with the poor conditions they faced in work-relief camps, went on strike in British Columbia and then set off from Vancouver riding trains, with their final destination as Ottawa. In the city of Regina, the rcmp and the Regina City Police precipitated a riot against the trekkers that resulted in the death of one protester and one police officer. R.B. Bennett, the prime minister of the day, suspected the trekkers were Communists, intent on overthrowing the government.22 In the case of the Abortion Caravan, Wood stated in an interview that she was determined to travel to Canada’s capital not because of the historic “On to Ottawa” trek, but because her member of the provincial legislature retorted “Go to Ottawa” when she asked him to address the issue of abortion access. Regardless, the affinity between the two odysseys was compelling.23 Wood, along with Vicky Brown, Dawn Carrell, and Marge Hollibaugh, fleshed out the idea in an announcement to women’s liberation groups across the country. A caravan of cars would leave Vancouver to arrive in Ottawa on the Mother’s Day weekend of 9 to 11 May. Activists invested Mother’s Day with political meaning. Previously, the Voice of Women (vow) had used the occasion to advertise their maternalistinspired campaign for world peace.24 Wood and her colleagues courted controversy by choosing the same celebration of motherhood to spotlight their provocative campaign against the 1969 abortion law. The Abortion Caravan’s lead vehicle would bear a coffin to represent the deaths of women from illegal abortions. It would stop at cities along the route to Ottawa, performing guerrilla theatre, meeting with local women’s liberation groups, gathering followers, and raising the profile of the abortion issue.25 After Makaroff’s arrest, the women ramped up their plans for the Abortion Caravan. In the spring of 1970, Wood and Hollibaugh sent a blistering open letter to Trudeau, federal Minister of Health John Munro, and federal Minister of Justice John Turner. The text held the government responsible for doing violence to Canadian women under the new abortion law. They communicated to the government the Abortion Caravan’s purpose, trajectory, and arrival date in Ottawa. Furthermore, they insisted that the government repeal the 1969 abortion law; pardon those convicted under it; fund research on methods of birth control and abortion; and make the teaching of abortion mandatory in medical schools. Finally, the authors of the letter requested a meeting with Trudeau, Munro,

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Turner, and other members of Parliament, concluding: “We consider the government of Canada is in a state of war with the women of Canada. If steps are not taken to implement our demands by Monday, 11 May 1970, at three p.m., we will be forced to respond by declaring war on the Canadian government. We are angry, furious women and we demand our right to human dignity.”26 Historian Shannon Stettner has argued convincingly that the vwc’s opposition to the Vietnam War influenced the adoption of the language of war in the campaign for reproductive rights.27 But, in fact, the militant language of the era was everywhere. In some cases, words spilled over into practice. That same spring Bernardine Dohrn delivered a similar-sounding “declaration of a state of war” against the American government on behalf of the Weather Underground Organization (wuo). This secretive group of young, white men and women emerged out of Students for a Democratic Society in the United States. After the Chicago Police worked with a Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) informant to infiltrate the Black Panthers and murder two of its members, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, in 1969, the wuo engaged in a bombing campaign to protest American imperialism, the Vietnam War, and white racism against African Americans.28 In Canada, the rcmp security service remained alert to any Black Power activity, claiming that its appeal “can be directly associated with the radical Americans, such as Stokely carmichael, who have been allowed entry to Canada to address various groups of students.” Carmichael was blamed for inciting a “near explosive atmosphere” after speeches he gave in Halifax and Montreal. The Mounties were also leery of Canadian Black Power connections to “the Cuban Institute of Friendship with People (a Cuban Communist front),” finally condemning newly formed Black Power organizations as red, because they were “infiltrated by communists, Trotskyists, pro-Chinese communists and anarchists.”29 The rcmp security service appeared to be uninterested in the activities of the ais in arranging abortions. And even more startling, given that it was attentive to the possibility of violent unrest, the vwc’s open letter does not seem to have been taken seriously, despite the fact that the women made a threat of violence – rhetorical flourish or not – against the Canadian government. The declassified files make it apparent that, from the early origins of the vwc onward, the rcmp security service was looking mainly for evidence of this women’s liberation group’s left-wing

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links. Because the rcmp kept tabs on student unrest, it is no surprise that the force knew early on of the existence of the sfu Women’s Caucus.30 The Mounties filed an article by Marcie Thom that appeared in the student newspaper, The Peak. Thom reported on the group’s first meeting, held on 11 September 1968. She claimed that many members of this new group were already involved in “various radical or new leftwing groups espousing social action,” but that all of them as women had been subjected to the “life-long socialization process [that] spelled out definite criteria of ‘femininity’ – the only legitimate tool for snagging a man and thereby building a life. The traditional criteria of femininity are not intellectual development, economic equality, social relevance, political aggressiveness, and sexual self-determination.”31 Thom was clearly expressing the common frustration of women trapped by rigid gender roles. But the rcmp security service was concerned that the sfu Women’s Caucus was one of a number of newly established groups that could become involved in student unrest in British Columbia. Intelligence predicted student unrest might involve occupation of campus facilities, outbursts of violence, and tactical “smearing” of certain professors as racists, fuelled by the “Hippie and drug-oriented element.”32 The sfu Women’s Caucus also warranted watching, because of a suspected tie to an American women’s liberation group, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (witch). The group first emerged after women protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-Communist witch hunts dressed up as witches. The witch members identified with the New Left and with radical feminism, and maintained that witches and gypsies were the earliest women’s liberation activists, because they were “the first practicing abortionists and distributors of contraceptive herbs.” The group opposed “passivity, consumerism and commodity fetishism” and took its message to the streets in the form of guerilla theatre, casting hexes on individuals and locations representing corporate and political America.33 The rcmp security service worried that “witch activities” could be “implemented against the Prime Minister when he visits Vancouver,” because witch members in Portland, Oregon, had recently hexed Patricia Nixon, the American First Lady.34 A mere month after the sfu Women’s Caucus moved off campus to reconstitute itself as the vwc, the Mounties managed to produce a detailed five-page report on the new group. The report traced the origins

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of the vwc, mapped out a schedule of its meetings, noted the location of its office at the Labour Temple on West Broadway Avenue, summarized the content of some relevant articles that had appeared in The Pedestal, and estimated that there were approximately fifty group members involved. The report even announced that the group was planning to hold a Western Regional Conference. The investigator commenting on the report allowed that the academic and non-academic women in the vwc wanted to pursue aims that were “purely social in nature.” These aims, as outlined in the report, included overcoming “how girls are socialized in the school system to become housewives, secretaries, or nurses – in other words, they have no choice, just trained by our education standards to accept this lot in life. Women should be given a choice of what they want to do.”35 Still, in the eyes of the Mounties, the vwc was tarnished because of its long-standing ties to left-wing activism. Indeed, an early position paper by vwc members Marcy Cohen and Jean Rands, which the rcmp security service placed on file, asserted that, although the vwc was not quite a socialist organization, women’s liberation was “a legitimate part of the movement against capitalism … Women’s issues themselves lead to a Marxist analysis. Only a movement with that analysis can challenge the bourgeois family, the role definitions and structure of work inside and outside the home, as it is necessary for the solution of even the most immediate problems of women.”36 In the vwc, commented the inspector, “a definite extreme left and political radical undercurrent is prevailing.” Proof of that current may have been that vwc member Wood (an employee of the province’s Attorney General’s office) had launched a suit against the civil service for wage discrimination against women.37 The Mounties were certainly anxious enough about the vwc’s leftwing links that they had an informant present at the vwc-sponsored Western Regional Conference at which Wood first proposed travelling in a Caravan to Ottawa. Held at ubc over the Thanksgiving weekend of 1969, the conference attracted women from western Canada and the United States to discuss the topic “Reform or Revolution?” The force filed an article on the conference that had appeared in the Georgia Straight, a leftist Vancouver paper that carried sexist and sexualized portrayals of women.38 The piece, complete with a drawing of a bare-breasted, Amazonian-like woman wielding a whip, outlined the conference’s four recommendations to deal with women’s oppression: facilities for child

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care; organization of women office workers; sensitization of unions to women’s issues; and a campaign to legalize abortion.39 The informant at the conference was preoccupied with naming the attendees and/or describing their physical appearances, occupations, and political affiliations. She also provided the rcmp with the gist of each woman’s presentation to the conference. The informant did not relay any information about the idea of a caravan, but observed that Wood was “approx 40 yrs, 155 lbs, 5!3". Reddish hair. Employed as a steno with the Provincial Government. Was a member of one of the [Vancouver Women’s] Caucus panels. Presented a talk, which in brief, pointed out the low salaries women obtain in the Attorney General’s department of the Provincial Government, described how women are overlooked for promotions, advocated that the Caucus ask the Government to change the immigration act to state equality of women in immigration.”40 The same or another informant revealed a tone of antipathy toward conference women who did not live up to conventional standards of feminine appearance and demeanour, describing Margaret Mitchell, who in 1979 would be elected as a New Democratic Party (ndp) member of parliament for the federal riding of Vancouver East, as having a “heavy build.”41 That informant or another at the gathering summarized: “the conference stressed that the greatest need is to point out, at every opportunity, how women are oppressed, and to organize and push for radical political action to recognize the women’s demands.”42 Evidence of this action was laid out in the accompanying vwc schedule of activities for the months of October and November, as well as in a vwc newsletter that the rcmp placed on file. The mimeographed sheets sketched out plans the vwc had made regarding the caravan.43 These plans included contacting other women’s liberation groups across the country for their participation in the caravan. The rcmp files on an organization it identified as the Toronto Women’s Liberation Group (twlg) – also referred to as the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement – provide concrete evidence of these contacts within the context of the wide web of surveillance the rcmp cast over women’s liberation groups. At a 5 January 1970 twlg meeting on abortion held at the University of Toronto’s Sidney Smith Hall, an informant reported that the issue of participation in the caravan was raised, in addition to grievances “concerning lack of help for pregnant women who do not want children, ill treatment of women by doctors, and in general that the woman has no control over

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her body.” The informant went on to append two twlg newsletters that contained information on the topics of daycare, employment for women, and yeast infections.44 A few weeks later, the Mounties deposited on file another newsletter from this group. It revealed that the Toronto women were anxious to “set up a loose structure to begin co-ordination and planning of Eastern Canada’s participation in the Abortion Caravan,” in addition to discussing “the oppression of women – economically, sexually, culturally, politically – and how we as a group see ourselves organizing around this oppression.”45 Early in March, a purloined leaflet about the caravan, likely from the twlg, confirmed that the vwc would transport: “a hearse with a coffin symbolizing the women who have died from illegal abortions, and this coffin will be placed, and with it the responsibility for the death of our sisters, at some appropriate place in Ottawa (perhaps Trudeau’s doorstep, or that of the Minister of Health or the Minister of Justice, or at the House of Commons).”46 The surveillance report accompanying this newsletter noted that the women in Toronto had gathered a month earlier to view a film of an actual abortion being carried out as part of their abortion-related activism.47 A surveillance report summarized the proposed trajectory of the caravan with an eye to women’s liberation activities in Ottawa: “The tentative starting date for the ‘abortion caravan’ from Vancouver is 29-4-70, and anticipated date of arrival in Ottawa is 8-5-70. Of specific interest is the program of action scheduled for the W.L.G. [Women’s Liberation Group] in Ottawa, namely leafleting on Saturday morning (9-5-70) and the asking for a special session of parliament also on Saturday. Sunday (10-5-70) (Mother’s Day) is expected to bring leafleting at the churches and general meetings for W.L.G.’s attending in Ottawa.”48 The rcmp security service attention to the Caravan was undoubtedly driven by the force’s growing suspicions that it was connected specifically to Trotskyist subversion. On 14 April, the Mounties acquired lsa/lso leaflets about the caravan. What the Mounties did next with the leaflets reflected the increased aggressiveness of the Mounted Police against perceived left-wing radicalism.49 Two weeks later, with the caravan already on the road, a senior Mountie, Assistant Commissioner J.E.M. Barrette, wrote to D.B. (Don) Beavis, the secretary of the Security SubPanel, an important bureaucratic body within the Privy Council Office in Ottawa. Barrette included copies of the earlier documents supplied

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by the rcmp security service’s Saskatoon office, pointing out the association of Trotskyists with the caravan, including the involvement of the vwc, a “Women’s Liberation Group (Trotskyist inspired).” In his final paragraph, Barrette informed Beavis that the information about the Trotskyist links to the caravan “may be disseminated at your discretion, however, the R.C.M.P. is not to be named as the source.”50 In passing this information along, the force was clearly providing the federal government with ammunition to be used in an effort to discredit the caravan through politicians and the media by emphasizing its Trotskyist taint. Equally salient was the underlying message of the letter. The caravan did not seem to pose a threat because it encouraged fundamental changes to the laws governing abortion. From the viewpoint of the rcmp, the caravan represented a potential danger because of the relationship between the vwc and Trotskyist groups. The contention that there was a relationship between the vwc and Trotskyists was not an unfounded claim. The lsa/lso and the ys/ljs operated in the interest of becoming large majority blocs in various leftwing groups in order to effect a takeover of the leadership.51 Documents from these organizations that the Mounted Police marked “secret” detail what steps women who self-identified as Trotskyists were taking to join women’s groups such as the vwc.52 As important, the rcmp placed on file a ys/ljs missive that staked out the strategic potential of the caravan to the Trotskyist movement. The caravan was said to be “an excellent opportunity not only to solidarize ourselves with the women’s liberation struggle, but also to become activists and initiators in this struggle – to play a leading role in building and broadening the women’s liberation movement.”53 Indeed, some of the approximately seventeen women from the vwc travelling with the caravan were, like Mary Trew, also members of the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs. The rcmp had its own file on Trew, and she was regularly named in surveillance reports.54 A week before the caravan’s departure, an rcmp investigator made it clear that his main concern was not the vwc’s potential for violence but the possibility of political embarrassment: it will be noted that the V.W.C. consider the government of Canada to be in a state of war with the women of Canada. In retaliation to this, the V.W.C. have issued an ultimatum to the effect that, unless

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the government accedes to their demands re abortion by May 11th, 1970 at 3:00 pm, they will declare war on the government of Canada. Although it is felt that the V.W.C. and the cavalcade which may eventually reach Ottawa, will not resort to violence they will miss no opportunity to embarrass the Prime Minister and the government of Canada, if the opportunity availed itself, and if it was thought to be to their advantage in gaining publicity for their cause.55 As the rcmp’s own documents show, the investigator was nothing if not prescient. On 27 April 1970, the Abortion Caravan left Vancouver. The New Feminist announced its departure in terms that echoed the civil rights movement’s campaign to desegregate racially the public transportation system in the American South using black and white “freedom riders,” who volunteered to sit together on public buses: “The Abortion Caravan is coming to town. Join in. Take a freedom ride.”56 Evoking the language of the civil rights movement was not empty mimicry; rather, it signalled yet again the influence of that movement on women’s liberation and reinforced the notion that women constituted a colonized sex-caste. The lead vehicle bore the coffin on its roof. The coffin itself was filled with dozens of wire coat hangers, a potent symbol then as now of illegal abortion.57 The body of the vehicle was splashed with the phrases “On to Ottawa!” “Abortion Is Our Right!” and, most controversial of all, “Smash Capitalism.” While many caravaners believed that capitalism was responsible for women’s oppression, others were afraid that the phrase would antagonize Canadians and detract attention from the issue of abortion. In Regina, the slogan was washed off. However, the disagreement among vwc members proved to be a harbinger of future clashes that would raise the spectre of red-baiting.58 Tough sleuthing was not required to unearth the caravan’s itinerary; newspapers such as the Georgia Straight, which the rcmp had on file, had printed well in advance the stops the caravan intended to make from Kamloops to Ottawa.59 Each day the caravaners would “drive three hundred miles, do guerrilla theatre, eat and have a public meeting.”60 Spying by the rcmp was a part of this routine. While some of the women noticed that the Mounties were following them in unmarked cars and, on occasion, so too were local police, they also suspected that an informant was present amongst their own ranks. Suspicions boiled over when,

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according to Trew’s recollection, she was accused of being simultaneously a “Leninist-Trotskyist from Hell” and a secret agent working for the police.61 To illustrate the force’s watchfulness, the rcmp monitored the caravan’s entry into Saskatoon on 30 April. Surveillance revealed that three vehicles with British Columbia licence plates traceable to the vwc “bore banners, statements, etc., depicting the role of woman, motherhood and present laws governing abortion.” That night, an informant attending a public meeting in the hall of Knox Church welcoming the caravaners to the city identified by first and last name fourteen individuals in attendance to listen to speakers on the topic of abortion. Dr Thomas Orr noted that there were “three possible risks involved in abortion – medical difficulties concerning bleeding, psychiatric risks of regret, and the question of ethics,” while Trew, from the caravan, “commented that women are unable to control their own lives unless they can control their own bodies.”62 The informant went on to surmise that “the mixed audience consisted of about 1/3 ‘hippy,’ 1/3 high school and university students, and 1/3 non-descript average persons.”63 Local newspaper coverage from the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix dealing with the caravaners was also summarized and placed on file. An rcmp investigator commented on the assembled espionage in a gendered fashion, making an issue of the caravaners’ unfeminine clothing and guerrilla-theatre performances. He concluded that the caravan in Saskatoon “failed to generate interest amongst the public. General reaction was that of distaste for the slovenly attire of the members, and their accompanying antics whilst parading downtown.”64 This was a crude rcmp attempt to estimate levels of support for the movement. When the Abortion Caravan reached the city of Regina, rcmp officers reported diligently upon the protesters in spaced intervals between 1 and 2 May. Already alerted to the caravan’s journey by an earlier rcmp telex, Mounties spotted the three vehicles bearing British Columbia licence plates. Approximately seventeen women who disembarked from the vehicles were first observed between 1:30 and 3:00 that afternoon at the Northgate Shopping Mall: One older uf [unidentified female], approximately 50 years [of age], grey hair and semi-stout, appears to be the group organizer. The women set up loudspeakers on the truck and sing out pop-

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ular songs laced with the colloquialisms of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Some of the subjects do casual shopping and hand out pamphlets.65 Over the next forty-five minutes, the Mounties observed a local newspaper photographer and ten women who arrived to greet the caravaners. From 3:45 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. the three caravan vehicles drove to downtown Regina and stopped at the Student Union Building of the University of Saskatchewan Regina Campus (known as the University of Regina from 1974 onward). Local individuals who met with the caravaners at this point were recorded by name or identified by designations such as “a uf [unidentified female] arrives with a small child by taxi.” Surveillance was discontinued at midnight, just after the Mounties watched some of the women entering a local woman’s home “with sleeping bags and personal belongings.”66 The next day surveillance recommenced at 9:00 a.m. and ended at 10:45 a.m. as the three caravan vehicles headed for a highway out of the city. Two and a half subsequent pages related to this surveillance report were excised under atip regulations.67 As the caravan rolled east, a Winnipeg informant recounted that the caravaners attended a meeting on 2 May in the basement of the Student Co-operative Housing Association of Manitoba and commented on the edgy atmosphere: “the Vancouver women were very radical, and they had the idea that possibly they would be ‘busted’ by the police for their actions in Ottawa. This did not appear to worry them, because they felt that it will be for the good of the cause.” He or she estimated that there were approximately seventy-five people in attendance and identified those affiliated with the New Democratic Youth and the ys/ljs. Perhaps to support his or her claims of the subversive nature of the attendees, the informant found it necessary to remark upon a common gesture of solidarity associated with Black Power militants: “Throughout the meeting, the clenched fist salute was given by everyone.”68 The rcmp tracked the caravan’s arrival in Sault Ste Marie and Sudbury through clippings from local newspapers rather than through direct surveillance, possibly because intelligence resources in these small Ontario towns were limited.69 Writing for the Sault Daily Star, Kay MacIntyre was alternately impressed and angered by these ambitious women, commenting on their youth and their sincerity as well as their “hippie” appearance and their use of certain “disturbing” clichés like “racist” and

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“distribution of wealth.” Also reporting for the Sudbury Star, MacIntyre announced that the caravaners intended to meet Trudeau, Turner, and Munro. If their demands were not “seriously considered, they will take part in a procession from the parliament buildings to the home of Prime Minister Trudeau, where they will place a full-size coffin on the doorstep.” The rcmp did not flag this important information; rather the force took the opportunity to cull the names of women’s liberationists from Sudbury that a reporter mentioned. Cheekily, when the Sudbury Star ran a photo of the caravaners performing their standard skit, they identified themselves using names like “Margaret Sanger” and “Emma Goldman.” Both these women were well-known first-wave feminists who fought for birth control. Sanger, an American nurse, took up the cause of birth control as a socialist but ended up backing a eugenic agenda that would fuel her interest in developing the birth control pill. Goldman, a Russian immigrant to the United States, who lived in Toronto on three occasions, prided herself on her anarchist politics and her support for birth control. Both women practised and promoted free love in relationships.70 It appears that neither the Mounties nor the newspaper caught on to the caravaners’ pointed in-joke.71 The rcmp security service was aware in April 1970 that the vwc was planning closer ties with the women’s liberation’s movement in Montreal around the issue of abortion: Other women’s groups in other parts of Canada are apparently coordinating their efforts with the V.W.C. Following the demonstration in Ottawa, source stated that approximately 10 of the group may go to Montreal to lend their support to a demonstration planned by the Women’s Liberation Group in that city, on 13–14 May 1970. The V.W.C. feel that it is important to help the Montreal group, because, in this way the interest and sympathy of the French Canadian women might be obtained.72 It is unclear whether the informant responsible for this information was referring to Montreal Women’s Liberation (mwl) and/or to the Front de libération des femmes (flf). mwl was an Anglophone group that supported Dr Henry Morgentaler. A physician immigrant from Poland who survived the Holocaust,

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Morgentaler established the first abortion clinic in the city in contravention of the law.73 Hospital abortion access in Quebec was notoriously inadequate. Montreal was home to a large number of hospitals, but the Catholic Francophone hospitals refused to establish tacs. The remaining Anglophone and Jewish public hospitals in the city were, therefore, overwhelmed by abortion requests from all over the province. This state of affairs gave rise to the quip: “If you want an abortion in Quebec … you’d better start making arrangements for it two weeks before you conceive.”74 Under the 1969 abortion law, abortions performed at clinics were illegal; after his arrest for breaking the law, Morgentaler became embroiled in several high-profile court challenges that subsequently landed at the Supreme Court. In its assessment of women’s liberation in Montreal, the Mounties allowed that abortion was “the most predominant issue.” The participation by mwl in the campaign for abortion on demand, rather than the breaking of the law by Morgentaler, led the rcmp to keep a watchful eye on the Morgentaler Defence Committee, which mwl established to raise money for his legal fees.75 Whereas Anglophone women’s liberationists throughout the country were likely to portray Canada as a colony of the United States, Francophone and Anglophone women in Quebec were as likely to condemn Anglophone Canada for displaying an imperial arrogance toward Quebec. Anglophone women’s liberationists in Quebec and Canada were generally keen to learn more about Francophone women’s demands for Quebec independence. When an informant attended a closed-door meeting of the Women’s Liberation Group–Toronto on 13 January 1970 at the University of Toronto campus, she revealed that group members disliked the “superficial” coverage the Canadian press was giving their goals; agreed to invite a “French speaking, politically orientated French person” to speak to them instead of British feminist scholar Juliet Mitchell, so they could learn about the “Quebec situation”; and considered sending a representative to Lakehead University to plan for the Abortion Caravan. Chunks of this surveillance report are censored, but the investigator’s final comments hold that the group “continues to show considerable attention to the Quebec separatist situation and is attempting to have their members indoctrinated to that line of thought.” He also remarked that the caravan plans might be “of interest” to the Mounties in Thunder Bay, the city in which Lakehead University is located.76

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The flf was made up initially of bilingual Anglophone and Francophone women. At a flf meeting another informant learned that same month that the Francophone women in the group wanted the caravan to change its final destination from Ottawa to Montreal for reasons pertinent to Québécois nationalism. A newspaper clipping that the force had on file elaborated upon the reasons why. Members of the flf refused to meet up with the caravan in Ottawa because of their support for an independent Quebec, and were quoted as saying: “We refuse to manifest in front of a government whose jurisdiction over our country, Quebec, we do not recognize.”77 The informant also noted the flf’s determination to get the women’s liberation movement “to come out openly, as a ‘movement indépendandiste.’”78 The flf tied together issues pertinent to women’s liberation and to an independent Quebec under the slogan: “No liberation of Quebec without the liberation of women, no liberation of women without the liberation of Quebec.” It was sympathetic to Black Power, American radical feminism, and decolonization. Six months after the founding of the flf in January 1970, the Anglophone women were expelled and some Francophone women resigned in solidarity with them. The Francophones claimed the Anglophones were too dominant, while some of the Anglophones who were Jewish accused the flf of anti-Semitism. The 1970 flf Manifesto, like its name and its structure of small cells, was patterned after the Front de libération du Québec (flq). The flq’s insistence on an independent Quebec and the use of violence to achieve that goal beleaguered the rcmp, the federal government, and provincial politicians. The flf recognized that Quebec women toiled under the twin yokes of capitalism and patriarchy. Therefore, it needed to push for “women’s liberation, national liberation and liberation from capitalism through socialism.” The manifesto also demanded many of the same big-ticket items that Anglophone women’s liberation groups wanted across the country, including abortion on demand.79 By the time the Abortion Caravan approached Ottawa on the evening of 8 May, the force had on file several months’ worth of intelligence indicating that vwc members wanted to discuss repealing the new abortion law with the prime minister, or the minister of health, or the minister of justice and to present their grievances to the House of Commons. From the perspective of the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism, the caravaners’ cross-country journey was a serious matter, not because of their

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opposition to the new abortion law but because of the real and suspected ties of the vwc to Trotskyists. Theoretically, the proximity of the caravaners to the seat of government constituted, therefore, a potential threat to national security, a threat they had delivered in writing. Yet the actions of the caravaners and its supporters led to two major security breaches, one at the residence of the prime minister, and another at the House of Commons. Both had the potential to cause embarrassment to all, including the rcmp. The morning of 9 May 1970, the caravaners joined women’s liberation groups from across the country in a triumphant meeting on Parliament Hill. The rcmp, Ottawa sib detachment, initially observed: the Abortion Caravan organized by the Vancouver Womens Caucus [sic] [deleted under atip] supported by the Women’s Liberation Groups (W.L.G.) from across Canada, met at the Justice Building at 11:20 A. M. At approximately twelve thirty pm, the Caravan which numbered approximately 300 and consisted mainly of young women in the age group of 18–24, marched onto Parliament Hill carrying placards and chanting slogans for the repeal of the present abortion laws.80 A much smaller number of anti-abortion protestors were also present. Wary of a possible clash between opponents and supporters of abortion, the author of the report remarked that there “was no confrontation between this group and the Abortion Caravan.”81 The rcmp was, however, on the lookout for bigger fish than pro- and anti-abortion protestors. It had placed twenty-two members on standby duty. Two police cars were available as backup. Some officers were tasked with taking surreptitious photographs of the caravaners. One member of the Identification Branch was present in case arrests were made. The preparations were driven not by its own intelligence but by a morning radio report about Maoist involvement in the caravan. The report proved false, but it did ignite consternation among the Mounties. Still, Sub-Inspector E.H. Trefy, the most senior Mounted Police officer at the scene, was relieved by the fact that the crowd milling about Parliament Hill was behaving in an orderly fashion: “The majority by far were teenage females,” he commented in a paternalistic tone, “and there was no reason but to treat them as such.”82

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Trefy’s superior was so heartened by the women’s ladylike behaviour that he went home. Yet shortly afterward he was alerted that the caravaners and their supporters had begun to march en masse to the residence of the prime minister. Whereas the leaders of the On to Ottawa trek had had a face-to-face meeting with Prime Minister R.B. Bennett, the caravaners learned that, except for a handful of ndp members, no politician from the sitting government was prepared to meet with them. The women held a two-hour rally in the Railway Room of the House of Commons. Morgentaler was one of the speakers. He would soon become central to Canada’s pro-choice movement but, at the time, the women booed his speech simply because he was a man. Doris Powers, a founding member of the Just Society Movement (jsm), an anti-poverty organization, also addressed those present. The jsm riffed on Prime Minister Trudeau’s clarion call for a “just society” characterized by individual rights.83 Powers, a Toronto single mother on welfare, who was now pregnant, told the crowd that a tac at a Toronto hospital had turned down her application for an abortion, despite her desperate economic situation. She raised the significance of class differences between doctors and patients seeking abortions, accusing the former of being “hopelessly ignorant of the pressures and strains involved in maintaining a family on an income lower than the poverty level and how that affects a mother mentally and the relationships within that family.”84 Less than a year after Powers addressed the caravaners, an informant at a Saskatoon public meeting would record her making a statement to the assembled that encouraged violence. This statement was by far the most blatant recorded among the very few references to women’s liberation and violence unearthed in the files. According to the informant, Powers told the approximately forty persons in attendance that the women’s liberation movement in Saskatoon “had to forget about abortion and concentrate more on poverty” and urged it “to become more violent, using sit-ins instead of marchs [sic] in addition to resorting to the use of explosives in attacking symbols of corporate capitalism.”85 During her appearance at the Abortion Caravan, however, Powers was busy underscoring in rousing fashion the vwc’s claim that abortion access was grossly uneven and that poor and working-class women were discriminated against under the 1969 abortion law. They could not, Powers told her audience, “fly off to England for a safe, legal abortion. We have to seek out the back street butchers.”86 Cerise Morris, who initially

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had some misgivings about women’s liberation, was present when Powers spoke. Deeply moved, she later recorded her experience of that moment: How can I describe my feelings as I watched and listened to several hundred girls and women roaring their approval as speaker after speaker presented the case for woman’s control of her own body, and cited the chronicles of humiliation and injustice suffered by women because they lacked this right? Delegates from the floor arose to bear witness, and I found tears in my eyes as I listened to a welfare recipient [Powers] recount the indignities she suffered at the hands of welfare workers, male doctors and hospital committees, while desperately trying to obtain a therapeutic abortion.87 Fired by the speech Powers gave, women like Morris spilled out into the afternoon, angry. About half the women broke from the main crowd, determined to appeal to Trudeau in person. A nervous Trefy called for reinforcements to be stationed before the gates of the prime minister’s residence, but he did not want to strip Parliament Hill of its security detail, fearing that Maoist agitators might appear on the scene after all. As the women bore down on 24 Sussex Drive, confusion reigned among the prime minister’s staff, the rcmp, and the local police. All awaited instructions from Trudeau, who was away at the prime minister’s official summer home on Harrington Lake. Trefy ruefully acknowledged that the eight men guarding the two residence gates were no match for the oncoming women by sheer dint of numbers: The marchers approached in orderly fashion and without raising their voices turned from their escort motorcycles and quickened their pace as they advanced on the west gate. The members blocking this gate, assisted by three members of the Ottawa City Police, locked arms and attempted to restrain them. The group, estimated at about 250 to 300, gained three of four feet on our members by physical force and simultaneously fanned out on both sides and ran onto the grounds. The [police] members in the immediate area joined in attempting to control the mob as well as additional standby [police] men from behind the residence. They were corralled in a group and sat down on the lawn at a point about half way between the street and the residence.88

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The women occupying the lawn began demanding an audience with the prime minister. Trefy tried to locate a spokeswoman for the group, so that he could reason with her. Unaware that many women’s groups rejected conventions of authority as elitist,89 he concluded, when no one came forward, that “it was evident they were concealing their leaders.” The senior Mountie was savvy enough to know that the situation was, as he put it, “sensitive.” In the recent aftermath of Kent State, where National Guardsmen shot dead four white university students demonstrating against the Vietnam War on the Ohio campus, scenes of burly male officers physically removing from the prime minister’s residence “teenagers, pregnant women, and at least one woman carrying a child,”90 as Trefy recorded, could result in an international incident. Finally reached by telephone, Prime Minister Trudeau also seemed keen to avoid the prospect. Working alongside Trefy, rcmp Inspector C.A. Philion agreed to let the women deposit the coffin at the west side of the entrance to the residence, if they left peacefully afterward. The women agreed. Philion also permitted “one lady to walk to the casket and remain in prayer for one minute.”91 Neither Trefy nor Philion included in their reports the occasion when the prime minister’s aide, Gordon Gibson, chided the women for calling the Mounted Police officers “pigs,” telling them they were not being “nice.” Nor did they provide mention of the speech a woman read over the coffin left behind. She described how each of the several items placed atop the coffin was used to procure an illegal abortion: garbage bags to pack the uterus, knitting needles to pierce the uterus, Lysol to inject into the uterus, a vacuum cleaner hose intended to suck out the fetus from the uterus. “Those cops,” said vwc member Margot Dunn who was present, “just turned green at the gills.”92 The Mounted Police reached face-saving conclusions over this first security breach: the women had gained access to 24 Sussex Drive because of the lack of adequate personnel, the lack of a barrier between the east and west gates, and the lack of intelligence on the women’s intentions. The last claim was disingenuous. rcmp intelligence had long revealed that the angry caravaners desired to speak to Trudeau about repealing the new abortion law. Dunn provided an alternative assessment. There were very few Mounted Policemen guarding 24 Sussex Drive because the Mounties “took us so non-seriously!”93 Morris, who accompanied the caravaners to the prime minister’s residence after hearing Powers’s

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rousing speech, agreed. The police were not “breaking heads, or perpetuating any brutalities whatsoever … [t]heir worst sin seemed to be a reluctance to take us seriously, a bemusement about the whole situation. Perhaps this was the really infuriating thing: that since we were only women, even our capacity for law breaking wasn’t taken seriously.”94 The Anglophone women from Montreal who came to Ottawa for the caravan had the same impression, and wrote that the Mounties at the prime minister’s residence “had no idea what to do with us, and tended to giggling and blushing.”95 Superintendent C.A. Lougheed placed a final positive spin on the security breach because he believed embarrassment had been avoided: You will appreciate that the demonstration which occurred at the Prime Minister’s residence was spontaneous and of which we did not have prior intelligence. The demonstrators did not cause any damage whatever to the grounds or residence and I believe had we attempted to block their access to the grounds with a number of personnel available at the time, the results of such a confrontation may have created severe criticism. I firmly believe the Officers In Charge acted properly and with good common sense, under the circumstances. The solution, as recommended by rcmp brass in rather phallocentric terms, was the “erection of gates and a fence” to protect 24 Sussex Drive from future such incursions.96 On 10 May, when the flf marched during the Mother’s Day weekend in Montreal in solidarity with the Abortion Caravan, an rcmp informant was at the ready in Jeanne Mance Park. He or she identified by first and last name seven out of approximately a hundred individuals present as members of the lsa/lso. He or she procured two leaflets, both in French, which were placed on file. One stated that twenty-five thousand women in Montreal and a hundred thousand women in Canada had abortions every year, and provided the percentages of birth-control-pill-taking women aged twenty to thirty in various cities in Quebec. The source for these statistics was not apparent. The second leaflet, entitled “Mothers’ Day,” was emblazoned with slogans such as “Queen for one day, slave for 364” and “We want to be free,” referring to the household drudgery to which women were daily

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subject, except on Mother’s Day. The same pamphlet warned women against purchasing common brand-name items as a means of rejecting capitalist consumption. A clenched fist bursting out of the circle-andcross symbol for the planet Venus and meant to represent women decorated both pamphlets. Mounties also placed on file several local newspaper articles covering the protest.97 The following day, in Ottawa, a second security breach occurred. Undaunted by the fact that they had not met the prime minister, the caravaners gathered with women’s liberation groups to plan an audacious protest, this time targeting the House of Commons. Approximately twenty-five women armed with passes containing the forged signatures of various ndp politicians, filed into the public galleries of the House. The women deliberately chose to wear skirts, pantyhose, and gloves, and to carry purses. The strategy worked. The “slovenly attire”98 to which at least one surveillance report had referred was replaced by the costume of respectable, white, middle-class heteronormative femininity more familiar to groups like vow to avoid arousing suspicion. Outside the House, a handful of supporters began to march around the Centennial flame, distributing literature on the need for the repeal of the 1969 abortion law. The women inside the House took inspiration from the militant activities of first-wave British feminists in their campaign for the vote.99 Using bicycle chains they had smuggled in their purses, the women locked themselves to their seats. At the appointed hour of three o’clock, they stood up to denounce the new abortion law. One intrepid participant managed to commandeer the bilingual simultaneous translation system to boom her speech out to the entire House. Another threw a water bomb that landed near the prime minister’s empty chair. Some mps panicked. Several sat stunned, while still others jeered. It took more than fifteen minutes for security guards to free the women. The pandemonium shut down the House for the first time in its history. Although the women believed that they would be arrested (some even carried bail money), no arrests were made. After the women were led out of the Parliament buildings, they joined the rest of the group marching around the Centennial flame. There they burned a copy of the abortion law in imitation of American draft resisters setting fire to their draft cards, cried, and raised their clenched fists into the air.100 Whereas a good deal of rcmp material on the security breach at the prime minister’s residence was released under the atip, rcmp documents

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on the breach of security at the House of Commons have been heavily censored with few exceptions: “[deleted under atip]. 18 women, who had gained entry to the House of Commons public gallery in the afternoon of the 11-5-70, had chained themselves to the gallery seats. These women were participants in the ‘Abortion’ demonstration which disrupted the proceedings of the House of Commons. [deleted under atip] no arrests were made. [deleted under atip].”101 What remains on file are several newspaper clippings the force collected in regard to the incident. In these journalistic interpretations, newspaper columnists, mps, and various security personnel agreed that, if young women barely out of their teens had been able to invade the House, there was no telling what more-dangerous fanatics might do. Like the Mounted Police, these pundits displayed puzzlement over the women’s actions. Indeed, their very obvious fit of pique revealed far more concern over the women’s apparent violation of appropriate gender roles than about the breach of security at the House of Commons itself. The newspaper clippings were chock full of derogatory descriptors of “shrieking and screaming”102 women, “abortion zealots,”103 who “flailed away with their purses,”104 creating “a wild spectacle”105 in the hallowed House as a “pathetic climax to the long, well-publicized drive across the country from Vancouver.” This group of women, wrote one Toronto journalist, “is more committed to confrontation and guerrilla theatre as a means for furthering the cause of women as a whole than in trying to persuade anyone about the reasonableness of ending legal restraints on abortion. The tone of the material the ladies distributed really rejects the normal, slow democratic persuasion to gain an end.”106 In the aftermath of the incursion, some members of Parliament suggested that security could be beefed up with bulletproof glass enclosing the public galleries and metal detectors at the House of Commons. The Mounties were also charged with the responsibility of investigating the forgery of the passes the caravaners used to enter the House.107 Given the rcmp security service’s ongoing surveillance of the vwc and its publicly stated plans for the caravan, it is difficult to pinpoint precisely why the security breaches occurred. It appears that the rcmp conducted a post-mortem of events, but the censorship of several documents means that answers are not forthcoming. A lengthy report on the vwc dated 5 June 1970 appears on file, but all of its twenty-five pages have been excised.108 Without this crucial information, reasons for the

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security breaches can only be speculated upon. The Mounted Police may have experienced a communication failure within its own ranks between the intelligence sector that had been spying on the caravan and those officers charged with guarding the prime minister’s residence and Parliament Hill. Yet given the rcmp’s familiarity with male-dominated protest, it is as likely that the Mounties miscalculated the danger the caravaners posed because of the simple fact that they were women. Here the women’s gender, race, and relative youth seem to trump the red-tinged suspicions of Trotskyist involvement with the vwc. If a lack of communication within the ranks was a factor, it may still have reflected a gendered perception of protest; the security service did not deem a rag-tag women’s liberation group marching against the abortion law of sufficient import to alert their colleagues in Ottawa. Women opposed to the 1969 abortion law needed no left-wing subversive spur to organize against legislation that so many Canadians recognized as unworkable. Even the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, which delivered its report to the House of Commons on 7 December 1970, condemned the current law and recommended amending the Criminal Code to “permit abortion by a qualified medical practitioner on the sole request of any woman who has been pregnant for 12 weeks or less.”109 Yet, despite or because of the rcmp’s embarrassing failure to prevent two important security breaches, the Mounties and their informants continued to pursue, record, and clip information about opposition to the abortion law, providing a textual record of just how seriously women’s liberation groups in Canada were taking the issue of reproductive rights. Surveillance by the rcmp regarding the abortion issue persisted long after the vwc voted on 13 August 1970 to expel approximately two dozen members who were also involved with the lsa/lso and the ys/ljs. These women wanted to trigger an anti-capitalist revolution to end women’s oppression with the assistance of the Vancouver Liberation Front, a group composed mostly of men, and focus on abortion as the main issue that could unite all women. One of the women who disagreed with this stance was Kim Campbell; she would serve as Canada’s first prime minister for a short stint in 1993. At the vwc meeting, she told the group that any split amongst the members “reeks of infantile communism” and that women’s liberation was the main goal.110

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The vote on expulsion, at twenty-three to eighteen, was close; those who lost accused the vwc of red-baiting. The vwc disbanded the following year, with some former members regrouping to form the Working Women’s Association, dedicated to the cause of women and labour.111 Within months of the vote, rcmp informants were kept busy trailing other rifts within the women’s liberation movement. In November 1970, the University of Saskatchewan hosted two hundred women at the first national conference on women’s liberation. A Vancouver informant reported on a disorganized-but-enthusiastic effort, while relaying details of some of the prominent women liberationists in attendance, many of whom already had blossoming rcmp security files.112 The Mounties also acquired the notes on this conference taken by a member of Calgary Women’s Liberation. According to her account, the women present represented only “local white movements.” Women from Montreal did not attend. Neither did Indigenous women, because, according to the note-taker, they did not want “to deal directly with their white sisters.” But by the end of the conference the note-taker detected “a major split” among the women in regard to abortion; some believed that the Abortion Caravan had been a success for drawing attention to the women’s liberation movement, but others claimed it was a failure because it did not address larger concerns, such as adequate health care for all.113 This theme reverberated at a public meeting in the spring of 1971 on women and health in Saskatoon. The informant captured snippets of the mushrooming abortion-law debate that the caravan had activated so spectacularly: while the majority of Canadian women receive adequate health benefits, there are still many minority groups such as Indians, Eskimos, etc. which are under the Government’s responsibility, and receive minimal coverage. It is because of such a situation that a majority of women, particularly those in the lower income bracket tend to suffer the most. In particular, many pregnant women desirous of having an abortion for a number of reasons, have little recourse but to seek an operation through illegal means.114 The Abortion Caravan represented a “perfect storm” for the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. Even though the Mounted Police had

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conducted surveillance on the vwc and the caravan for some time, and considered the vwc a possible national-security threat because of its ties to subversive Trotskyist elements, the force did not comprehend the implications of the demands the women were making in regard to the repeal of the new abortion law. Ultimately, the gender of the caravaners gave them the upper hand over the Mounties’ fixed stereotypical views of ladylike attire and behaviour, even when those same women were suspected of leftist subversion and threatened the government with violence. As a result, the force failed to exercise its responsibilities adequately on both security and criminal fronts. This point needs reiterating. Although the state has considerable power to respond to protest movements, the success of that response is determined by a wide variety of factors, including gender, class, and race. The caravaners not only got the publicity they were seeking for the abortion issue. They also inadvertently managed to skirt Canada’s national police force all the way to the prime minister’s residence and to the House of Commons.

Indochinese delegation in Vancouver with Canadian hosts, April 1971. Library and Archives Canada, R10202-0-4-E, Accession 1995-082, Box C 0539, Album no. 2, Page 4, Lil Greene fonds, by permission from Karen Greene.

Indochinese delegation seated on stage at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto, April 1971. Library and Archives Canada, R10202-0-4-E, Accession 1995-082, Box C 0539, Album no. 2, Page 1 (photo 1a), Lil Greene fonds, by permission from Karen Greene.

In one rcmp security service surveillance report, an investigator summarizes the intelligence pertaining to the Indochinese Conference held in Vancouver, April 1971, and mentions appending to the report various types of material circulating at the conference. His name is censored. Library and Archives Canada, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada – 1971, 30.

Toronto Women’s Caucus member Rita MacNeil performing in Toronto, 1974. The rcmp referred to her in several reports. University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S3-I0589, cwma Collection, courtesy of the photographer, Annette Clough.

International Women’s Day protests, such as this one in Toronto in 1981, were a regular target of rcmp security service surveillance. University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S3-I0247, cwma Collection, courtesy of the photographer, Liz Martin.

The first page of an rcmp security service memorandum, marked “confidential,” declaring that a national women’s liberation conference held in Winnipeg, 1972, is Trotskyist inspired and organized. Library and Archives Canada, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, Women’s Liberation Groups: National Conference, 1972, at Winnipeg, mb, 22.

Promoting the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives at a display table, International Women’s Day, Ryerson University, Toronto, 1990. University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S3-10319, cwma Collection, courtesy of the photographer, Ruth Roach Pierson.

Censored material in this 1975 rcmp security service surveillance report about the Ligue des femmes du Québec (Quebec Women’s League) refers to rcmp file numbers and to the fact that the information in the report was supplied by a “source,” meaning an informant. Library and Archives Canada, access request A-2011-00297, Ligue des femmes du Québec (Quebec Women’s League), rcmp report, 10 October 1975, 50.

This poster from the Front de libération des femmes is just one example among many of material appended to rcmp security service surveillance reports. Library and Archives Canada, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement–Moncton, nb, and Women’s Liberation Movement–Montreal, pq, 36.

Parliament Hill demonstration in the 1980s by members of the Canadian Women’s Coalition to Repeal all Anti-Abortion Laws; a Mountie stands in the background. University of Ottawa Archives and Special Collections, 10-001-S3-I0118, cwma Collection, courtesy of the Breaking the Silence Collective.

4 The Limits of Global Sisterhood

Whereas the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc) and the Abortion Caravan drew national attention to the problem of uneven access to legal abortion services in Canada, the Indochinese Conference aimed to raise international awareness of the savage war the United States waged in Vietnam, ostensibly to stop Communist expansion in Southeast Asia. In early April 1971, Canada’s Voice of Women (vow), its American sister organization, Women Strike for Peace (wsp), and the Swiss-based Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf) joined with women’s liberation and women of colour activists to bring to Canada six Indochinese women and their three interpreters. The women wanted “to meet and talk in order to get a better understanding and strengthen our solidarity so as to put an early end to the war, and to give information to Canadian and U.S. friends on the situation in Indochina.”1 The organizers chose Canada, because the American government was hostile to the prospect of awarding visas to the Indochinese delegation. They settled on two Canadian cities – Vancouver and Toronto – to host the conference, in order to accommodate the vast geographical distances involved. Some savvy conference organizers knew that the gatherings would arouse national security interest. Cora Weiss, a wsp member and long-time American peace activist, welcomed the Toronto crowd with the words, “sisters, friends and members of the fbi [Federal Bureau of Investigation] – yes, they are here,” before demanding that the American government take its troops out of Vietnam, free all political prisoners, and end conscription of American men into the armed forces.2 Weiss was well aware that American women active in the peace movement were spied upon. She learned through her postman, whose wife was also a wsp member, that the fbi was intercepting mail in the post office.3 Yet her comments would have been all the more appropriate had

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she also included the rcmp security service in her opening remarks. Conference organizers assumed that Canada was a safe place to meet to discuss the Vietnam War. Canada has a storied reputation as a refuge for its southern neighbour; in the nineteenth century, black slaves escaped across the border via the Underground Railroad, and in the twentieth, draft and war resisters who refused to participate in the Vietnam War found shelter north of the forty-ninth parallel. The concept of safety was, of course, relative, given Canada’s long-standing treatment of Indigenous peoples through the Indian Act, restrictions on non-white immigrants, the prevalence of anti-Semitism, discrimination in employment and housing against black Canadians, and the internment of enemy aliens from Germany and Eastern Europe during the First World War, and, during the Second World War, Japanese Canadians under the War Measures Act. The federal government invoked the same legislation in October 1970 after the Front de libération du Québec (flq) kidnappings of British trade commissioner James Cross and Quebec provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte. It was lifted that December, but only after serious violations of the civil liberties of ordinary citizens had occurred.4 Despite its importance to several constituencies, there are even fewer Canadian academic sources dealing with the Indochinese Conference than there are for the Abortion Caravan. The conference was of special relevance to the rcmp’s security service, because, unlike the caravan, it touched upon issues long familiar to its red-tinged prism. Officially, Canada sat out the Vietnam War, but its Cold War political interests remained aligned with those of the United States. Clare Culhane, a well-known anti-war protestor affiliated with vow, condemned Canada for styling itself as a neutral nation while it served as “the butcher’s helper” in the systemic slaughter of Vietnamese civilians.5 In keeping with its pursuit of subversion and any attempt to influence Canadian or American foreign policy, the rcmp took note of the event. Specifically, the Mounties spied because of the involvement of the left, notably Communists, in anti-war protests that occurred in Canada, as they did in the United States through the 1960s and into the 1970s. In a 1971 report to the government of Pierre Trudeau, the Joint Intelligence Committee, which included representatives from the rcmp and also the Department of External Affairs, described the Vietnam War as “the major vehicle for Canadian Communists and their front and pressure groups” and noted efforts to link “the ‘struggle’ against war with one against poverty and racism, on

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the basis that the goals of world peace and of ‘national liberation and social change’ are inseparable.”6 Any relevant security service surveillance reports would have gone into rcmp files, but material from them also would have been shared with the fbi and Central Intelligence Agency (cia), both of which had been tasked by the presidential administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon with investigating the anti-war movement, along with campus unrest.7 Lacking a foreign intelligence service, there was little Canada could offer the United States, beyond information about individuals, including Americans, and organizations active within Canada. Thus, for decades the intelligence branch of the Mounted Police provided its American partners with intelligence on the activities of Canadians and Americans active on the domestic front.8 For example, in February 1967, rcmp Deputy Commissioner William Kelly forwarded a lengthy piece of analysis to the rcmp liaison officer in Washington and to the fbi equivalent in Ottawa. The document contained a general description of campus-related radicalism and warned that growing opposition to the Vietnam War was part of an effort to influence Canadian government policy toward the conflict.9 The Indochinese Conference attracted the notice of the rcmp security service for two main reasons. First, the Mounties suspected vow (as well as wsp and the wilpf) not just of having Communist sympathies, but, in a 1971 report, of being “infiltrated at the Executive Level by Communists” to the point that it endorsed “the Communist peace campaign.”10 In fact, vow was foundational to an international peace movement that the Mounties anticipated might influence Canadian foreign policy, thereby impinging upon American designs that stretched from Vietnam to Laos and, more recently, to Cambodia. Second, the conference gave the Mounties an opportunity to spy on American left-wing activists and the Indochinese women attending the conference, so as to relay intelligence to their aforementioned partners, the fbi and cia. In effect, the rcmp security service had two spymasters: the government of Canada and that of the United States. The Indochinese Conference was not just meaningful to the rcmp, however. The conference itself provided a preview of what was to come in some ways for the women’s liberation movement and its promise of sisterhood. The popular slogan, “sisterhood is powerful,” was said to reflect pride in a newfound “group consciousness that has also been so

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important in the struggle for black liberation.”11 Like pan-Africanism, sisterhood was believed possible in a global sense. Nevertheless, some feminists, such as McGill University professor Marlene Dixon, maintained wearily that “the mystique of sisterhood” was a palatable concept only because most Canadian women could relate to discrimination by sex more easily than they could comprehend the impact of class structures, capitalism, and imperialism on women’s lives. As well, “[t]he stress on sex discrimination aims at the liberal core of Canadian politics. In turn, sex discrimination affects all women, irrespective of race, language or class (but that it does not affect all women in the same way or to the same degree is often absent from discussion!)”12 Over the course of the Vancouver and Toronto meetings, major schisms rumbled through the conference, dividing women along fault lines of race, class, age, sexuality, political affiliations, and even national origins. As Ruth Rosen notes in the case of the United States, while state security did not necessarily create these underlying fractures in the women’s liberation movement, it did exacerbate the movement’s growing tendency to judge other women by examining the smallest details of their private lives. Fear of provocateurs paralyzed some protestors. Fear of agents and informants eroded trust. Given the widespread assumption of infiltration, feminists sometimes found it easier to accuse one another of being informants than to accept the inevitable differences among them that, even without the fbi, would naturally result in different feminist perspectives and different ideas of sisterhood.13 Rosen’s statement does not erase the fact that Canadian state security was heavily implicated in the surveillance of the Indochinese Conference. In fact, long before the conference took place, the rcmp targeted vow for surveillance because of its suspected Communist sympathies, its redtinged prism encompassing vast quantities of surveillance documents related to its leaders, members, and activities.14 Women upset with Cold War politics founded vow in late July 1960. It was composed primarily of white, middle-class women who were welleducated housewives, mothers, and grandmothers; some had accomplished careers and were connected to Canada’s political, media, and

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academic elites. Older members had lived through the First and Second World Wars. vow had a pronounced maternal feminist bent that was arguably shared by other women active in organizations on the left and the right, like the Communist Party of Canada (cpc), the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), and the Social Credit Party. But while maternalist ideology legitimized their denunciations of international conflicts, it also locked women into gender essentialism.15 Members insisted on nuclear disarmament as a maternal concern with children’s health and safety the world over. Five thousand strong just one year after its founding, vow members raised money for their transnational peace campaigns by participating in typically maternal endeavours, such as holding tea and coffee parties, selling cookbooks, and donating babybonus cheques. Operating in local, provincial, and regional branches, vow allowed that “men, who dominated politics, were responsible for nuclear brinkmanship, and that it was women’s duty to set things straight.”16 Though vow was not a women’s liberation group, it represented a “crucial link” between generations of feminists; over time vow members became “agents of change on their own behalf as women and not just on behalf of others,” speaking out in favour of more liberal birth control laws, holding consciousness-raising meetings, and self-identifying as feminists.17 Collaboration with international peace organizations such as wsp and the wilpf, support of Communist women’s peace initiatives, and invitations to Soviet and East bloc women to attend peace conferences in Canada showcased vow’s desire to establish strong ties among women peace activists internationally. Yet such efforts aroused Mountie qualms, even though vow declared it was politically non-partisan. When vow organized a “Peace Train” of four hundred Canadian women, representing French, Slavic, and Jewish women’s organizations, travelling from Windsor to Ottawa in March 1962, a surveillance report identified by first and last name sixteen persons gathered at the Windsor station.18 The leader of the Peace Train delegation was Thérèse Casgrain, vow vice-president and president of the Quebec vow branch, the Voix des femmes. Casgrain, who was instrumental in winning women the vote in Quebec, joined several activist causes and became a member of the ccf, the forerunner of the New Democratic Party. A lengthy rcmp commentary on Casgrain included a biographical sketch of the surveillance target:

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Subject was born Marie Therese forget on July 10, 1896, in Quebec City, Que. She married the late Pierre casgrain in 1915 and is the mother of two sons and three daughters. She ran for Parliament in 1942 as an Independent Liberal for the CharlevoixSaguenay seat but lost the election. At this time she was opposed to conscription and incurred bitter criticism of the Quebec Municipal Chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire. In 1949 the subject was elected head of the C.C.F. party for the Province of Quebec.19 Casgrain would go on to lead the Fédération des femmes du Québec and from 2001 to 2012 she would be depicted along with the “Famous Five” – the five women who pursued the landmark “Persons Case” – on the back of a Canadian fifty-dollar bill. The government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper later replaced the portraits of Casgrain and the Famous Five with the image of an icebreaker.20 In the summer of 1962, a man claiming to be an rcmp informant within the cpc fingered vow as being Communist-infiltrated, a charge that vow president Helen Tucker denied strenuously.21 The Mounties at that time were more circumspect, allowing that they were “not in a position to estimate accurately the degree of Communist infiltration,” but acknowledged that vow has been able to exert a great deal of pressure on the Federal Government, although not necessarily responsible for any major policy change, they have certainly provided “Food for thought and seeds of doubt.” Even though the organization is not believed to be heavily infiltrated or influenced by the [Communist] Party, they are unknowingly or otherwise, accomplishing a great deal towards the promotion of the present Soviet Front line of Peaceful Co-Existence and disarmament.22 The force distrusted the friendly overtures Soviets made toward Western nations in the post-Stalin era, asserting that in a “relaxed political climate there can be no doubt that many have lost sight of the fundamental hostility that exists between democracy and Communist totalitarianism.”23 To rcmp thinking, such a climate encouraged peace organizations like vow to function as Communist sympathizers. As vow’s transnational

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peace activism increased from 1963 onward under President Kay Macpherson, the Mounted Police tailed the organization every step of the way. When it was learned that Casgrain, Macpherson, and Tucker were heading to The Hague to protest a nato conference dedicated to building a multilateral nuclear force, it shared information about all Canadian delegates upon the request of the Netherlands Domestic Security Service. An informant working closely with the delegates provided the Mounties with names, hometowns, and transportation arrangements, leading the investigator reviewing the surveillance to write: “[t]his information is obtained from an extremely delicate source and it is requested no action should be taken that could jeopardize the source.”24 Appalled by the carnage the American government rained upon Vietnam, vow shifted its focus mid-decade from nuclear disarmament to the Vietnam War. Polls showed that Canadian support for the Vietnam War in the initial years was high due to fears of communism, but waned somewhat as the war dragged on.25 The conflict was deeply unpopular among Canadian leftists; they viewed the war as symptomatic of the imperialist ambitions of the United States toward less-powerful nations, including Canada. The Vietnam conflict whipped up a socialist-inflected Canadian nationalism and its shadow side, anti-Americanism.26 Furthermore, it stirred up mistrust over Canadian complicity in the war, even though the federal government adopted a non-aligned stance in regard to the hostilities and allowed American draft resisters to immigrate to Canada.27 Between 1968 and 1973, five to eight thousand American draft resisters came northward each year. Wives and girlfriends accompanied them; in fact, during this period, more American women than men who were against the war came to Canada.28 The Americans who crossed the border were not always welcome.29 They soon found themselves under rcmp surveillance because of their participation in anti-war groups and other left-wing causes, and because the Mounted Police was feeding information about war resisters to the fbi. Domestically, Canadians opposed to the war paid a heavy price too: “they would be hounded by the rcmp, spied upon by military intelligence, investigated by the fbi, and denied entry to the United States. They would be beaten with police truncheons, run over by motorcycles and mounted police, and have their mail opened and their phones tapped” among other affronts.30 The position vow took against the war was couched firmly in maternalism, but it was shaded with Canadian nationalism as practised on

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the left. Members of vow buttonholed federal politicians, demanding that Canada pursue a foreign policy independent of the United States, and “called for an end to bombing, use of napalm, burning and devastation.”31 They gave asylum to draft and war resisters, considering it compatible with their peace activism.32 In the early 1960s, vow and wsp conducted a drive to collect children’s baby teeth to test them for Strontium-90, a radioactive substance released into the environment as a result of nuclear testing. Now vow members and their wsp allies embarked on a campaign to knit camouflage clothing and blankets for Vietnamese children that the humanitarian group, Canadian Aid for Vietnam Civilians (cavc), distributed.33 Because of such activities, some Canadians associated vow closely with communism. An informant working for the Mounties reported that, at one vow meeting, members were coached on how to respond to the accusation that they belonged to a Communist organization: “The first reaction of a V.O.W. member would be to ask the enquiring person to check with a known Communist and find out exactly what is a Communist. The V.O.W. member should then mention to the interested party, just how V.O.W. is working for Peace and that they (vow) is not politically inclined.”34 In 1968 Macpherson travelled to Vietnam as an observer at the invitation of Vietnamese women, organized as the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam (vwus).35 Like many Canadians and Americans who visited wartime Vietnam, Macpherson encountered Vietnamese women labouring in farms, schools, hospitals, factories, and militias, and remarked on the seeming contrast between their physical and moral strength and their “fragile as a piece of porcelain” appearance.36 Her admiration for their ingenuity, resourcefulness, and determination in the face of wartime destruction reflects what Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, a professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, calls “radical orientalism.” Standard Orientalist tropes hold Asian women to be passive and exotic creatures, oppressed by misogynist despots and deserving of rescue by white women and men. During the Vietnam War, they were positioned as victims, especially of rape and murder. However, North Americans of various racial backgrounds, several of whom travelled to Southeast Asia to decry the impact of American imperialism in the region, also viewed Vietnamese women as “exemplars of revolutionary womanhood,” because they were workers, freedom fighters, and mothers; indeed, as Wu

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argues, the figure of a Vietnamese female peasant toting a gun in one hand and a baby in the other became an iconic symbol of resistance for many white North American activists, including those involved in women’s liberation.37 Under the leadership of President Muriel Duckworth, vow joined with wsp and wilpf to bring three Vietnamese women and two male interpreters to Canada on a two-week educational tour in July 1969. The goal of the visit was to challenge Canadian and American ignorance of the wartime conditions in Vietnam. Duckworth requested the Mounties provide police protection for the women. They declined.38 In any case, rcmp surveillance had already yielded the names of the vow women planning the tour, “personality conflicts” that emerged among the members, funds raised, proposed travel itineraries, tentative flight reservations, and drafts of correspondence.39 Informants present at the stops along the tour relayed more information to the rcmp. A “source believed reliable” gave notice of an upcoming meeting of the Vietnamese delegation at the Regina campus of the University of Saskatchewan. He or she went on to observe that the questions an audience of approximately forty students, “mostly from the New Left Movement,” posed to the Vietnamese visitors were anti-American in flavour and that communication “proved to be very slow and laborious and many questions were dodged in favour of a slavish repetition of communist revolutionary propaganda.” The same informant also provided ample material for the red-tinged prism: a list of nineteen first and last names culled from those present.40 Additionally, with the help of another informant, he or she turned in a brief that the Regina Women’s Liberation Group distributed to the audience. The brief denounced American imperialism and praised the women of Vietnam for playing “a vital role in their [own] liberation struggle” and for developing “a general revolutionary consciousness regarding the equal role women must play in the new society.”41 Throughout the 1960s and the 1970s, the rcmp tracked opposition to the Vietnam War in Canada. It did so not just because Communists, Trotskyists, and the New Left denounced the conflict. The war involved Canada’s closest economic and military ally, the United States, and the presence of large numbers of American draft and war resisters in Canada also fuelled Mountie interest. Some of the wives and girlfriends of these draft and war resisters joined women’s liberation groups and spoke out

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steadfastly against American imperialism.42 Left-leaning American activists triggered Mountie anxieties not simply because they opposed the Vietnam War but because they were also considered a corrupting influence on presumably milder-mannered Canadian radicals. The Mounties considered Black Power American activists like Stokely Carmichael “an extreme threat to national security.”43 They assessed visits from white American radical activists Jerry Rubin and Mark Rudd to have “a considerable effect at local universities” that could lead to violence.44 And they suspected that the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, described as a “militant group which is associated with or is part of the Women’s Caucus in the U.S.A.,” might implement “activities” against the Canadian prime minister.45 The success of the two-week educational tour of Vietnamese women to Canada spurred vow to plan for an Indochinese Conference after the vwus expressed the desire to meet with three main constituencies: “old friends” (vow, wsp, and the wilpf), “new friends” (women’s liberation activists), and “Third World women” (women of colour) from North America. Such a conference meant that women in the peace movement had to “expand beyond their traditional membership base of middleaged, middle-class, white, maternalist women.”46 The conference was of deep concern to the rcmp. It accorded high priority to gathering intelligence, amassing thick files of surveillance reports and appended material, most of which pertains to the Vancouver meeting. Yet here the security service’s red-tinged prism was challenged yet again. Expecting surveillance to yield juicy proof of subversive anti-American opposition to the Vietnam War on the part of Communists, Trotskyists, Maoists, or New Left activists connected to the conference, it captured instead the broken promise of global sisterhood. Months before the Indochinese women touched down on Canadian soil, the rcmp was at the ready. In January 1971, the force reported on a television appearance by Macpherson, designated chair of the Visit Committee for the conference. She spoke movingly about American and Vietnamese prisoners of war and urged Nixon to end the hostilities. The following month Mounties obtained a letter from vow’s national office calling upon its members to write to Minister of Manpower and Immigration Otto Lang, to ask that the Indochinese women be granted visas to come to Canada from 24 March to 7 April 1971.47 The ultimately successful letter-writing campaign may have been prompted by the re-

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fusal of the same minister to grant visas to a Vietnamese delegation that had been scheduled to attend an occasion in Windsor, Ontario, that January. Unbeknownst to the women, the Mounties had privately intervened with the minister to arrange for the blocking of the visas.48 The rcmp retained on file an announcement dated 25 February 1971 that Macpherson circulated. It summarized vow’s plans to bring “guests” from Indochina to Canada in collaboration with various women’s organizations. The head of vow welcomed women’s liberation, Third World women, and “other special groups” to the Indochinese Conference stating: The war in Vietnam has been going on for many years. As a direct result, disaffection and unrest are taking a grave toll everywhere, particularly among young people in the United States itself. The potential power of women to unite for solutions of world problems has still to be used, and Voice of Women hopes this visit may bring to those in power our concern and our determination to end this appalling waste of human and material resources.49 The announcement highlighted the unity in the diversity of all women. However, as Wu’s sensitive account of the conference reveals, old friends, new friends, and Third World women in North America had identities, agendas, and ideologies that clashed profoundly with each other.50 The six conference guests invited by vow were Vo Thi The, a professor of literature; Nguyen Thi Xiem, a gynecologist and obstetrician; Dinh Thi Huong, a housewife; and teachers Phan Minh Hien, Khampheng Boupha, and Khemphet Pholsena. They were variously active in the vwus, and the Laotian Patriotic Women’s Association. Women from Cambodia were unable to attend. The interpreters were Nguyen Tri, a University of Hanoi French professor, Trinh Van Anh from South Vietnam, and Souban Srithirath from Laos. Originally Montreal, along with Toronto and Vancouver, was to serve as one of the conference sites. These three cities were “the focal points of resistance” to the Vietnam War.51 However, friction between anglophone and francophone women’s liberationists, as well as the imposition of the War Measures Act, nixed Montreal as the third location. The previous December the vwc had spoken out in support of the Front de libération des femmes du Québec (flf), which would go on to

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back jailed members of the flq.52 The vwc published in its newspaper, The Pedestal, an anonymous letter in English addressed to “Dear sisters.” The rcmp security service obtained a copy of the published letter. The letter supported the actions of the flq and the movement for an independent Quebec. It held that there was no truth to rumours that a “foreign commie plot” was at work. Rather, the War Measures Act was, in effect, a cudgel to crush the Quebec independence movement and, therefore, Quebec women’s hopes of living in a society “in which property is abolished. And this means to us, sisters, women freed from being property of men.”53 The flf refused to participate in the Indochinese Conference, stating that its priority was to work only with Québécoises who were oppressed not only as women by patriarchy, but also as francophone women by Anglo-American capitalism.54 The loss of Montreal as a conference venue was unfortunate, because the anti-racism activism of the city’s black community, and its francophone population’s rejection of anglophone dominance, could have positioned Montreal as an appropriate staging ground for the anti-imperial efforts of Vietnamese and Third World women. In fact, the Montreal International Collective, in which Marlene Dixon participated, proposed hosting the conference in the city, arguing that its multiracial and multilingual mix would help advance “the fundamental issues of the Women’s Movement, and, in general, the fundamental issues of the wider revolutionary movement,” including “the revolutionary struggle of French-speaking People of Québec, Canada.”55 Old friends wanted to keep the focus of the conference squarely on the war and the suffering of Indochinese women and children trapped by ever-widening hostilities. As maternalists, they identified strongly with Indochinese women’s desperate attempts to protect their families in wartime. New friends were intrigued by the fact that Vietnamese women and men were revolutionaries, fighting together against imperialist enemies. A brief in the Mounties’ possession indicated that women’s liberation activists coming to the conference desired to enlarge the scope of women’s liberation to include a continent-wide anti-imperialist agenda, to show solidarity with Third World liberation, and to look at the relationship of imperialism to sexism. But these women were also invested in another agenda. They wanted to use the conference to raise awareness of the revolutionary potential of women’s liberation as a political movement for gender equality.56

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The vwc was already making strides in this direction, saluting the Indochinese women for participating in national liberation struggles while creating societies based in gender equality. Unlike Indochina, Canada was not at war, and the primary emergency for Indochinese women was not gender equality but survival in wartime. Yet the vwc associated the many battles Canadian women faced with those of their inspirational Indochinese sisters: We too will have to fight. We must end Canada’s crucial role in developing biological and chemical warfare used in Indochina … We must eliminate the massive unemployment in our society. We must end the racism that degrades and exploits natives and other minority groups. We as women must also demand equal job opportunities, free 24-hour daycare, good medical care, birth control information, and free abortion on demand. We are starting the struggle for a new society in solidarity with our Indochinese sisters.57 This all-in-the-family sisterly approach that many white North American women’s liberation activists took toward the Indochinese women may have arisen out of white ethnocentrism, or it may have signalled different understandings of women’s liberation. To the vwus, women’s liberation must be viewed “through the lens of anti-colonial struggles for national liberation,” but in North America, it often meant women joining the sisterhood to reject “the workings of patriarchy.”58 Moreover, old and new friends together supported the civil-rights movement and had contacts with women of colour in the Black Panthers and in the New York–based organization the Third World Women’s Alliance. Yet, in general, Third World women were represented only sporadically during the planning stages of the conference. This omission was cutting, as women-of-colour activists felt that they had more in common with Third World people fighting imperialist wars than did white women.59 The rcmp security service even kept an article from the March 1971 issue of The Pedestal, the newspaper of the vwc, which attributed this early lack of representation of Third World women to racism.60 As practised by white, middle class women in the First World, the value of women’s liberation to women of colour was fraught with complications. First World white feminists might compare their inferior sex-caste position to that of African Americans and colonized peoples,

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but most did not share the experiences of women of colour in regard to war, cultural genocide, land theft, police brutality, economic exploitation, and sterilization abuse. From this point of view, the suffering of women of colour under capitalism, racism, and colonialism trumped their oppression as women under patriarchy alone.61 A decade after the conference took place, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua published a ground-breaking anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, spotlighting the voices of women of colour in the United States. In Canada, Nila Gupta and Makeda Silvera guest-edited a “herstoric” issue of the feminist journal Fireweed, “The Issue Is ‘Ism’: Women of Colour Speak Out,” as a rebuttal to another edited collection, Still Ain’t Satisfied: Canadian Feminism Today (1982), which left out women of colour.62 As feminist scholarship grew, women of colour on both sides of the border went on to theorize about their relationship to white feminists, arguing for a “differential consciousness” to study race, ethnicity, and marginality in late capitalism, crafting compelling paradigms such as the “intersectionality” of race, class, and gender and the “interlocking” nature of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy, and going on to question whether or not “woman” was a useful category of analysis when examining colonialism. These works contributed further to understanding second-wave feminism in the United States and Canada as “multiracial,” not “hegemonic,” and “characterized by its international perspective, its attention to interlocking oppressions, and its support of coalition politics.”63 Although Vancouver was the conference host, the overwhelming majority of delegates coming to the conference were from the United States. Conference organizers faced demands for three separate meetings with the Indochinese women in order to accommodate the differing agendas of restive old friends, new friends, and Third World women.64 But a letter from Vancouver conference organizers to delegates, dated 3 March 1971, which the Mounties had in their possession, cast doubt on this neat tripartite division. The letter revealed that Canadian women of colour who gathered to discuss their position in relation to the upcoming conference did not side with their American counterparts. They did not see themselves collectively as Third World women, but self-identified as native, black, or Chinese women. They were keen to work with their own communities, rather than as a bloc of Third World women. Even more troubling, they viewed the conference itself as “imposed upon them

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by white Canadian and American women and by third world women in the U.S.”65 Officers in the rcmp prepared this letter and accompanying documentation and asked for it to be “expeditiously submitted to provide hq [headquarters] with up-to-date information on the problems being encountered locally in regards to the preparation for the Indochinese Conference.”66 Indeed, in the letter, Vancouver conference organizers also fretted to their “Dear Sisters” about delegate quotas that were ignored, inadequate billeting, and a lack of direction from Third World women. Worse, they feared a collapse of the entire gathering, cautioning “many women have lost sight of the goal of this conference – that is, to build an anti-imperialist struggle and to end the war in Indochina. Our own struggles are important in relation to this, but our primary consideration must be our responsibility to the Indochinese women.” The conference organizers pleaded with the women’s movement in Canada and the United States to “learn from the example of our Vietnamese sisters and their success in building a solid United Front.”67 This appeal to sisterhood was to little avail. Mountie informants in Vancouver learned that the conference had already become a lightning rod for personal, political, and organizational gripes. One woman active in the local chapter of the wilpf was so upset about the way vow was organizing the conference that she hoped the Canadian government would not grant visas to the Indochinese women. After the government did grant them, a member of the cpc surmised that conference plans were “in the hands of Trotkyists,” as well as with “other ultra-left groups” in the city. The Indochinese women were, therefore, “playing with the enemies of the Communist Party.” Furthermore, the cpc member was concerned over the influx of “500 Negroes in the Third World [deleted under atip] coming here, as well as Trotskyists and Maoists, with the latter battling it out.” It was further expected that cpc leaders like William Kashtan would discuss the disturbing “confusion” when he was next in Moscow. Two local members of cavc noted that the interaction between old friends, new friends, and Third World women was so tense that they would refuse to participate in similar conferences in the future. They blamed vow for a lack of enthusiasm toward women’s liberation and Third World women, but then also faulted some vwc members for wanting to take control of the conference.68 Thanks to a press release from vow in Toronto, the Mounties got wind of the Indochinese delegation’s cross-country itinerary.69 When the

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women landed in Winnipeg on the morning of 30 March for a short meeting with the Manitoba vow, the Mounties conducted surveillance at the airport, accumulated documents put out by local organizers, whose names were duly noted, and collected newspaper accounts of the visit.70 Informants were also present in Vancouver, the delegation’s next stop. Here informants were privy to a heated discussion among old friends, new friends, and Third World women about the provision of security for the Indochinese delegation. In the name of national security, the rcmp security service was wary of the potential for revolutionary violence on the part of left-wing activists. But Third World women were hyper-alert to a potential violent attack on the delegation, because of a history of American state violence toward activists of colour; they insisted, therefore, on assuming sole responsibility for the physical security of the delegation.71 A document that organizers had prepared for Third World delegates about security at the conference found its way into rcmp files. American organizers reminded Third World delegates to obey Canadian legal prohibitions on guns, knives, and slingshots and, in the derisive vernacular of the time for police officers, to watch out for “pigs” in uniform, including the Vancouver City Police and the rcmp. The Mounties were said to be “similar to the fbi. They function as a national police force.” The University of British Columbia (ubc), the venue for the conference, was reported to have “only the rcmp and their own rent-a-pig” for security.72 Throughout their Canadian visit, the Indochinese women were accompanied by vow member Duckworth and her husband, Jack,73 and vow had also arranged for the delegation to be billeted at the home of cavc members Kay and Alan Inglis in the tony Vancouver neighbourhood of Shaughnessy. A member of the vwc remembers that the American women wanted to carry weapons from Los Angeles to Vancouver for armed patrols; shotguns in Shaughnessy struck local women as “so hilarious.”74 An informant present at the heated discussion took note of far more elaborate security arrangements that Third World women wanted to make at the Inglis residence: they wanted two people on guard 24 hours a day in the house, on a shift basis; they wanted to floodlight the house; have two people sitting in a car all night outside; have a man walk around the premises during the day and barricade the windows where the Vietnamese

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would be sleeping, after inspecting such rooms. At first these militant types would not agree to the police being advised of the arrival of the Vietnamese, but later they changed their minds.75 The security arrangements remained a sore spot for many attendees. The informant went on to report that a small number of Third World delegates, calling themselves the “Red Guard,” had “intimidated” some women but were supported by others who believed in their “philosophy of throwing out the old culture, their elders and all their bourgoise [sic] tendencies.” The informant was possibly alluding to delegates who belonged to the Red Guard Party, usa, an organization of Asian-American allies of the Black Panther Party, that likewise opposed the Vietnam War and racism against minorities of colour in the United States and was also partial to Maoism.76 Vancouver resident Kathleen Aberle was singled out by the informant as sympathetic to the Third World delegates, “because she feels, fundamentally, the revolution is right.”77 Aberle was a respected British anthropologist, who did research on societies in Africa and Asia. She appeared on the fbi’s radar for her outspoken support of Marxism, criticism of the American handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, opposition to the Vietnam War, and membership in wsp. Denied tenure in the United States, she moved to Canada to take up a teaching job, but at Simon Fraser University she fell afoul of the debacle in the Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology Department, and thereafter became an independent academic.78 At the end of the heated discussion, an informant recorded that Kay Inglis rejected the security arrangements the Third World women proposed because “she refused to have her home invaded by such people,” and sent her husband to welcome the delegation at the Vancouver airport. There more confusion reigned, because the Red Guard referred to in the surveillance files apparently took the Indochinese women “into a waiting room, locking the door to prevent any other groups from entering while they had a private interview.” Inglis’s husband was refused entry. So too was Aberle; the Red Guards even searched her briefcase.79 Despite this inauspicious beginning, Aberle produced a generous account of the Indochinese delegation’s encounters on 1 April with old friends, with Third World women on 3 to 4 April, and finally with new friends on 5 to 6 April at ubc. Some of these gatherings were closeddoor sessions and some not. Open-door sessions gave informants more

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opportunities to infiltrate and report on the Vancouver portion of the conference. By Aberle’s estimate there were six hundred women in attendance, nearly half of whom were Third World delegates. She held the Indochinese guests in high esteem, remarking on their “gentle dignity, self command, and deep concern for others.”80 She went on to provide a synopsis of the harrowing testimonies they recounted on the first day of the conference. One of the Vietnamese guests, The, whose brothers and father were killed in the resistance against French colonizers, told the audience that she had received no news of the remainder of her family since the battle of Hue in South Vietnam. Xiem lost several siblings to the war. She attributed the high rate of miscarriages and births of deformed children to the pellet bombs and chemical agents the Americans were using in South Vietnam. Huong also lost family members, including a young niece. Her daughter was imprisoned and tortured. She similarly endured several rounds of imprisonment and was tortured brutally. She witnessed the death of many other prisoners, including women and children. Hien’s husband and children were still alive, but were separated from her as a result of the war. She pleaded for the departure of the American soldiers, so that she could help rebuild her village. In order to reach the flight that took her to Canada, she had walked for three months from South Vietnam to North Vietnam. Boupha and her family fought against French occupation and were now experiencing heavy aerial bombardment by the Americans. Thousands of schools had been destroyed, making her work as a teacher difficult to continue. Pholsena recounted the cia-organized assassination of her father and the maiming of her mother and spoke about the need to pursue peace. Some members of the audience shed tears at the testimonies of the women and gave Huong a standing ovation.81 After the women delivered their testimonies, Aberle and the rest of the audience learned that President Nixon had just agreed to have First Lieutenant William Calley, Jr, transferred from prison to house arrest. Calley, who was convicted by a US military court martial of the 1968 slaughter of hundreds of men, women, and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai, was originally sentenced to twenty years in prison. Some of the soldiers in Calley’s unit also raped a number of the village women and mutilated their bodies.82 Although the news must have been a blow, the Vietnamese women at the conference refused to blame individual American soldiers for atrocities committed in Vietnam. Rather,

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they held the American government accountable and asked for presidents Johnson and Nixon to be tried and executed for war crimes. Unmoved by the day’s proceedings, a Mountie informant observed that vow and women’s liberation activists displayed their literature on a table, that the testimonies of the Indochinese women were delayed by fortyfive minutes due to disagreement on the part of the organizers, and that The’s “talk was very similar to the one given by her during her visit [to Canada] in 1969.” This comment suggests that the informant was familiar with The’s earlier address, perhaps indicating that she was a member of vow. Three workshops were scheduled later that afternoon. The informant identified workshop leaders by first and last names and reported that one of the workshops featured an “Indo-Chinese [woman] who appeared to be a peasant.” The informant summarized the gist of this woman’s speech, remarked upon its propagandistic quality, and observed just how many workshop participants were from the United States: women in this fight were not afraid because there are now too many women around the world, i.e. U.S.A. and Canada, who are now in the fight and they would have to arrest all women if they arrested all those who fought U.S. imperialism. She outlined that the liberation movement would have to be confronted. She outlined on the map the liberated areas of Indo-China, after giving another large amount of history intermingled with propaganda. The workshop adjourned. Of the 75 women in the workshop, [deleted under atip] estimated 80% were American.83 The same or another informant went on to describe the American delegates in an unflattering light. Reasoning that Americans felt less restricted protesting the Vietnam War in Canada than they did south of the border, the informant commented that the American delegates “were bolder than anyone else, shouting against President Nixon at times, showing their fists in the air at the smallest suggestion of revolution and shouting slogans such as ‘power to the people’ and ‘down with U.S. imperialism.’ They were just stirring trouble and the feeling was that they were doing here what they could not have done at home.”84 The following day the same or another informant gave a sense of the chaos that reigned at a plenary session with approximately four hundred attendees. One of the Vancouver organizers tried to compose a telegram to Nixon, but the

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audience could not agree on the wording. Some yelled “words of obscenity” and others called out “free Angela Davis.” The fbi had arrested Davis, a black philosophy professor, radical feminist, Communist, and supporter of the Black Panthers, because weapons she owned were later used in a crime. Davis maintained her innocence from behind bars and became an international cause célèbre.85 The informant recognized that one older woman present waited thirty minutes for a chance to speak, but did not succeed. vow members left. Those delegates who stayed behind were noted to have smoked marijuana openly, while one “W. Lib [women’s liberation] girl sang about freeing herself from the chains of being a wife” and a “Negro woman talked and sang against nixon and U.S. imperialism.”86 An unnamed source described “the scene as sickening and expressed the opinion that the Americans were particularly poorly behaved.”87 Part of the informants’ negative assessment of the American delegates had to do with the singular focus on security of the Third World delegates. Red Guards, some of whom were men, were stationed outside conference rooms; an informant reported that they were “belligerently questioning people who wanted to attend sessions.”88 So zealous were the Red Guards that, according to informant-provided information, they mistakenly excluded a Canadian Métis woman from attending conference sessions because they “were not previously aware of the existence of such a social group.”89 When the Third World delegates met with the Indochinese women, an informant placed the number of attendees at 250 “mainly coloured people,” most of whom were from the mainland of the United States. Others came from Hawaii and Puerto Rico and from as far away as the Philippines, Argentina, and Chile. Aboriginal people were referred to as “native Indians” and were said to be staying at Vancouver’s “Indian Centre.”90 Informants made particularly caustic comments about Third World delegates who “acted as if they were the big show,” claiming that even “local radicals” who billeted them “found it very difficult to tolerate” them.91 They went on to undermine the political authenticity of American Third World delegates in the following description: It was obvious that Third World delegates were predominantly Americans, and of ethnic backgrounds. This indicated that the ethnic groups have the biggest “axe to grind.” From the appearance

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of dress of the women present, they did not appear to be from the poorer segment of American society and did not appear either too depressed or dejected … most of the women coming to the conference appeared to treat it as a holiday.92 When informants recorded the names of various delegates, they occasionally attached racial identifiers, such as “white,” “black,” “brown,” “Negro,” and “Negress.” This type of racial profiling is unusual in comparison to the other surveillance reports perused for this book. However, as writer David Austin has shown, the rcmp was assiduously tracking black activists in Montreal, especially those Afro-Caribbean students involved in the riot at Sir George Williams University.93 The racial profiling in the surveillance reports pertaining to the Indochinese conference may have reflected the racism of the informant, or attention to the divisions that arose at the conference, or American-style policing. More likely than not, the Mounties were keen to have informants at the conference racially profile individuals suspected of Black Power activism, so that they could share the information with their American counterparts. In fact, just a few months before the conference, a senior Mounted Police officer asked field personnel to identify “Black Panther Party support centers,” noting that two Toronto women were “believed responsible for offering assistance to Black Panthers.” One of these was Peggy Morton, a co-author of the document “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen” and a women’s liberation activist. The second woman aroused even more suspicion because of her profile. In the typical fashion of the red-tinged prism, she was noted to have visited Cuba, and was connected to the Toronto Student Movement, a “militant Maoist organization,” and the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement, “a pro-Chinese Communist infiltrated group.”94 Regardless of the actual intentions of the rcmp security service, Third World delegates were racially profiled and disparaged by informants. One woman was described as “black, San Francisco, very belligerent and caused a lot of the trouble.”95 The informant referred at times to her as “the Negress,”96 perhaps revealing that the informant was an older woman, because she employed racial nomenclature more familiar to the 1950s than to the early 1970s. Informant-provided material ignored what Aberle recognized as the key connection between the Indochinese women and Third World delegates: the United States oppressed violently people of colour both outside

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and inside its borders.97 The Indochinese women were aware of the racism faced by people of colour in the United States and used it to their advantage during the conference. They told the audience of the large numbers of black American soldiers serving in Vietnam, of their mistreatment in the army, and of their growing sense that the only war worth fighting was the one against racism in the United States.98 Notably, Stokely Carmichael had famously defined the draft as: “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend land they stole from red people.”99 And racism was said to be an even greater factor contributing to the post-traumatic stress disorder of black American Vietnam veterans than actual combat in Vietnam.100 The Indochinese women also advised American delegates concerned about disunity among antiwar factions in the United States that there were no “multi-issues, only the single issue of the struggle against imperialism.”101 Informants scooped up a letter to this effect that Angela Davis sent to her Indochinese “sisters in struggle.” Read aloud at the conference to the cheers and clenchedfist salutes that the informants witnessed, Davis expressed the same sentiments as did the Indochinese women: As ever larger sections of our communities – Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Asian, Native American, white – achieve higher levels of consciousness and commitment, the threads which tie our fight to the courageous struggle being waged by the People of Indochina become increasingly clear. We are fighting a common enemy.102 When local Vancouver Indigenous women invited the Indochinese and thirty-three delegates for an “Indian supper” on 5 April, they delivered a comparable message that caught an informant’s ear: We, the native women of western Canada, are here to express our solidarity with Indo-Chinese people’s struggle. Indo-China is presently locked in struggle with the world’s greatest enemy, U.S.A. Canadian native people are beginning to come together and deal with Imperialism also. We draw courage and strength from the determination of Indo-Chinese people in carrying out their National Liberation struggle, against U.S. aggression. Our common enemy brings us together in solidarity and common struggle against Im-

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perialism and racism. Let our common victory bring us and all people together in the struggle for peace in years to come.103 Aberle was struck by the “internal unity, discipline and political seriousness” of the Third World delegates, and conceded that their sensitivity to racism was exacerbated by their lack of inclusion in the planning stages of the conference. She blamed women’s liberation for this oversight and pronounced women’s liberation delegates “the most disparate and disorganized” of all, chalking it up to their divided class backgrounds, youth, poor leadership, inability to function well outside a small group model, and their factionalism. Aberle observed that one faction of women’s liberation was made up of anti-imperialist women who tended toward socialism, on occasion worked with men, and invested in women’s issues such as abortion, daycare, and women’s employment, but disagreed over Marxism. Another faction was concerned with alleviating oppression, but was amorphous and unprepared for ideological conflict. A third faction, which also included lesbians, held that the oppression of women was the main oppression in society. Aberle believed that this faction was the most remote in perspective from the Indochinese women.104 The rcmp knew that, before the conference began, a “Fourth World Manifesto” on women’s liberation, authored by a group of white women from Detroit, had been circulated.105 The authors of the manifesto held that women constituted a global colonized caste they labelled the “Fourth World,” a powerful appellation that placed all women into a sex-caste category as vast and consequential as that of the First, Second, and Third worlds. The manifesto took issue with the conference organizers for concentrating on an anti-imperialist agenda, rather than on women’s liberation. The authors even sent an advance copy of the manifesto enclosed in a letter addressed to “Our Indochinese Sisters,” expressing regret that the conference was too poorly planned to permit meetings between the Indochinese delegation and women’s liberationists.106 They slammed male-dominated groups on the left for their very narrow depiction of imperialism and insisted that any understanding of imperialism must take into consideration the subjection of women by men. They believed that this subjection had created a male culture and a female culture. The former was associated stereotypically with strength and the latter with weakness. Therefore, the unsettling comparison between women and

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blacks should be reversed; the oppression of blacks should be understood as comparable to the oppression of women. Ultimately, the manifesto warned against the co-optation of women’s liberation by male-dominated left-wing groups, which refused to recognize men’s responsibility for war and violence, as well as women’s ongoing oppression in capitalist, socialist, and post-colonial societies. In these groups, imperialism was nothing but a fad that induced division, righteousness, and guilt in followers. Women’s liberation activists needed to avoid such a trap.107 The co-optation – which the rcmp understood as infiltration by subversives – of women’s liberation by left-wing groups was precisely what the force had worried about since the first glimmers of the movement. However, informants relayed the news that many conference delegates mistrusted the few Trotskyists who showed up and tried to stop them “from wielding any influence,” for which the Indochinese women were apparently grateful. One Canadian delegate told an informant that the lsa/lso had prepared a leaflet calling for a “Women’s Contingent” against the Indochinese war, which the lsa/lso hoped would win the support of the Indochinese delegation. Some delegates may have viewed this call as a co-optation strategy, because an anonymous pamphlet warning conference-goers against Trotskyists circulated amongst delegates. Reproduced by the Mounties in their surveillance reports on the conference, the pamphlet was assessed as red baiting, because it blamed the Trotskyist tendency to “disrupt conferences, programmes, and meetings and planned actions” to gain an advantage in the name of democratic openness.108 Another Canadian delegate let on that the conference had attracted many women who self-identified as anti-imperialist, but who were presently inactive in women’s liberation. Despite the Indochinese women’s insistence that the struggle against imperialism was the only issue that should unite all those opposed to the Vietnam War, they had much to say about their approach to women’s liberation at the conference. In question-and-answer sessions, they allowed that their battle for national liberation included the struggle against male dominance. They claimed that the women in their region of the world were now represented in many sectors of society, including politics and warfare. The Indochinese women also spoke of private difficulties between men and women that had led to a number of social-engineering projects, such as teaching men

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to care for children and to practise monogamy. In their societies, abortion was now available in hospitals freely, and so too was contraception.109 The Indochinese women were, however, ill-equipped to respond to the issue of lesbianism, which a number of American delegates raised. The rcmp informants discovered that the circulation of the Fourth World Manifesto ahead of the conference had encouraged radical lesbians from California to make demands on the organizers for more lesbian representation. The Mounties had long treated gays and lesbians in the Canadian civil service as potential national-security risks, because of their “character weaknesses.”110 Communists were viewed as sexually promiscuous, if not utterly depraved. So too were gays and lesbians. The police believed that Communists and homosexuals excelled at deception, a putative talent that anchored the plotlines of pop-culture depictions of spies and queers.111 Soviet intelligence, noted a top-secret 1967 report of the rcmp security service, could discover and exploit character weaknesses like homosexuality in their search for undercover agents employed by the Canadian government.112 The response of the New Left to lesbianism was dubious, as was the reaction of many women within the women’s liberation movement; like red-baiting, “lesbian-baiting” was all too common. The New Feminists (nf), a women’s liberation group that split off from the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement, engaged in an uneasy rapprochement with lesbian feminists; so too did the Toronto Women’s Caucus, founded by a small contingent of lsa/lso women who had left the nf because of red baiting. Communications between straight and gay women were riddled with confusion, fear, and guilt, imperilling their sense of sisterhood. Still, several women’s liberationists made a strong case for lesbianism as an explicitly feminist sexual and political practice, one which offered women unrivalled physical pleasure, while overturning a bankrupt hetero-patriarchal order.113 Old friends, new friends, Third World women, the Indochinese delegation, and Mountie informants now faced delegates who proclaimed their lesbianism unapologetically. Informants singled out the lesbian contingent for close surveillance from the first day of the conference: Some women present were boldly displaying the publication “Lesbianism is Revolution.” [deleted under atip] Calgary appeared to have spent the afternoon with the Gay Liberation women. In the

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evening, she was boldly displaying a copy of “Lesbianism is Revolution.” [deleted under atip] earlier in the afternoon, she appeared to have been quite drunk.114 Radicalesbians, a group from the San Francisco Bay area, had authored “Lesbianism Is Revolution.” The pamphlet lauded the Fourth World Manifesto as recommended reading for all women. Like many of the Third World women, Radicalesbians too complained that lesbians had been sidelined during the planning stages of the conference.115 On the second day of the conference, an informant at a plenary session stated that the crowd consisted of “many Americans, including many coloured people, some lesbians, and many young hippie women. Copies of lesbian literature were evident everywhere.”116 Members of Radicalesbians had come to Vancouver armed with a packet of educational readings on lesbianism. It is not known what the rcmp security service made of these readings, which were appended to the surveillance reports. Several of those in the packet associated heterosexuality, racism, and masculinity with imperialism, and lesbianism with revolution. One reading in particular, “Smash Phallic Imperialism,” argued that sex “serves the needs of boys. It has little to do with pleasure for the greatest mass of oppressed people: women.”117 Another reading, “Woman-Identified Women,” by a group of white New York lesbians, described a pronounced divide between lesbians and the Black Panthers, because of the sexism of the latter, and concluded defiantly: “Fuck that. We women of a dispersed nation will build our community, speak in a woman’s language born from our women’s oppression, grow strong together and explode in our Women’s Revolution.”118 Still another reading insisted that the cause of lesbians was as noteworthy as that of any other oppressed group. Here lesbianism was not about deviance or self-contempt but about liberation, because heterosexuality was an act of “sexual imperialism.”119 Discussions about lesbianism in relation to imperialism bogged down, in part because of the difficulties the interpreters had in translating, linguistically, culturally, and politically, what was meant by “lesbian.”120 An informant remarked that the delegates asked “whether the Gay Liberation should be part of the revolution, or should try to achieve their aims independently. [deleted under atip] the general feeling of the gl [Gay Liberation] members was that the tww [Third World women] did

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not really accept or recognize the apparent persecution of the Gay community.”121 On the third day of the conference, pressure on the Canadian organizers increased. The lesbians “demanded a workshop so they could determine their position in the struggle against the Indo-Chinese war.” A total of five workshops were set up the next day: on Canada and Quebec; Women in Revolution; Child Care; Anti-War Movements; and Gay Liberation.122 Informants reported that the Radicalesbians told the Indochinese women that “they regarded the struggle of women as being of more importance than the Vietnamese struggle. They claimed that men, as the imperialists, are responsible for the war and therefore are the real enemy.” The Indochinese women did not understand this political position, and treated the questions about lesbianism “with amusement, which angered the Radical Lesbians.” Tri, the University of Hanoi–based French professor, who served as one of the interpreters, was observed trying to manage the misunderstandings between the Indochinese women and the lesbians at the conference, but “without any great success.”123 While American delegates squabbled over the various meanings of imperialism, Canadian organizers and delegates smarted over the imperious behaviour of their southern neighbours. The Canadian contingent saw itself playing much the same subservient role toward American delegates that women played toward men in New Left organizations. The document about security intended for the Third World delegates asked American delegates travelling to Vancouver to recognize that they were “foreigners in a nation colonized by U.S. imperialism” and to respect their Canadian hosts. Yet some Canadian organizers and delegates saw the behaviour of American delegates around the issue of security as “a way for [American] groups to flex their muscles and gain power positions at the conference.”124 According to one account by a Canadian delegate: some Canadian delegates (and some non-delegates who had been involved with the conference) … felt that they were being shit on by the whole structure of the conference and by the attitudes of the other delegates. The position of the Canadians as janitors and shitworkers was evident from the beginning, as only thirty Canadian delegates were permitted to attend from all the Western provinces, as opposed to the approximately 400 (including 34 “Third World Women”) from the western United States area.125

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Equally annoying were some of the welcomes offered to the Indochinese delegation by American delegates: “Welcome to our country” and “In this country, we …” ignoring blithely the fact that the conference was taking place in Canada and not the United States.126 Toward the end of the conference, pent up frustration against the Americans exploded. A few Canadian women, calling themselves the Canadian Union of Rabid Senseless Extremists (curse), turned up to perform guerilla theatre mocking the American domination of the conference. Americans in the audience objected. A physical fight ensued, and a pregnant woman was apparently punched. Once the melee ended, the evening’s scheduled entertainment began. It featured a skit in which a woman endures a series of obstacles, from workplace harassment to abortion, only to be called up short at the Indochinese conference. Third World delegates label her “Racist,” lesbian delegates label her “Heterosexual,” and women’s liberation delegates label her “Liberal.” In the end, the woman is so overcome by guilt that she drags herself offstage.127 The skit seemed to concretize what the Fourth World Manifesto had warned women against. The Vancouver leg of the conference did not evolve into a grand anti-imperialist alliance of women to end the war in Indochina, but dissolved into recrimination and resentment that lingered even after the Indochinese delegation departed for Toronto. Surveillance reports show that the Indochinese women were disappointed with the conference and with women’s liberationists “as they did not think this latter group of women were going to help the anti-war movement.”128 Tri, the interpreter, joked that he was going to found a men’s liberation group in Vietnam.129 Vancouver organizers were upset at the lack of financial support from some of the American delegates. Third World women continued to be the target of anger, because “their rudeness with legitimate people wanting to attend open sessions had had an adverse effect and consequently there were fewer people attending these sessions than had been expected.”130 Inglis remained incensed about the way Third World women barged into her home: “She compared them to the taking over of a country at the way they took over her house.” Nevertheless, she agreed that the Indochinese women had more in common with Third World women than they did with old friends or new friends.131 In preparation for the Toronto meeting with the Indochinese delegation, women’s liberation activists in the nearby city of Kingston prepared a brief on imperialism, arguing that, just as the United States behaved in

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an imperial fashion toward Canada, so too did the city of Toronto toward Kingston. They pointed to the case of the Abortion Caravan, noting that although they had wanted to host the caravaners, it was women from Toronto who decided upon a route that bypassed Kingston. Now the Kingston women objected to Canadian organizers bowing to the demands of the Americans by agreeing that a significant number of Canadian delegates to the conference had to be Third World women: “This sounded extraordinary to us,” wrote the Kingston women’s liberationists, “because, although we wish it were otherwise, we have yet to hear of a White women’s liberation group in close contact with groups of their Indian, Eskimo, Black or Quebec sisters in this country … If Americans, in their old role of imperialist and in their ignorance of the Canadian movement, made such demands, did Canadians even under pressure have to accept them?” The comment reflected the authors’ resentment toward American dominance over the Canadian-based conference, but it also relayed a sense of the profound disunity within the women’s liberation movement in Canada.132 The Mounties continued to track the Indochinese delegation in Toronto, but declassified surveillance reports regarding this leg of the conference are much more limited. Informants in attendance in Vancouver may not have journeyed to Toronto or were unable to infiltrate the closed-door sessions due to increased “security precautions” taken by the Toronto organizers.133 The Toronto meeting organizers took security very seriously, because they were aware of the breakdown of the Vancouver meeting, insisting that it had been “disrupted by right wing groups … [and] we should be prepared if they show up.”134 Exactly which groups were supposedly involved is unclear. However, the focus on security exacerbated the divisions among the women; some attendees in Toronto complained that “security checks,” including frisking, served only “to keep out opposing ideas.”135 Still, the rcmp security service was aware of the delegation’s arrival on 7 April and of the welcome vow organized later that evening. On file, a clipping from the Toronto Telegram newspaper provided an indication of the wide assortment of women who came to the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education to hear the Indochinese delegation speak. White women, women of colour, women who were older, younger, American, Canadian, grandmothers, mothers, daughters, married and single, students, housewives, activists, and those who had lost sons in the Vietnam War were there. Each name mentioned

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in the clipping was underlined and check-marked, indicating that the rcmp was keeping tabs on the attendees. Also on file was an article from the Canadian Tribune, the organ of the cpc, which noted that the delegates endorsed the “Toronto Pledge,” which committed the women present to ending the Vietnam War.136 Although there were caucuses at the Toronto meeting for women of colour, African-American, Asian, and Puerto Rican women criticized the dominance of white women. Lesbians protested the cancellation of a workshop on lesbian issues, but were condemned for being disruptive when they wanted to discuss their exclusion.137 An rcmp report assessed that the Canadian organizers “felt that the Americans had monopolized the conference” and that vow would never want to sponsor another such event.138 Reviewing the intelligence, an rcmp inspector provided a lengthy summary that reflected the perspective of the informants and authors of several newspaper articles that the Mounties clipped and stored. It was noticeably devoid of any mention of subversive activity on the left. Instead, vow’s experience of the conference was described as “traumatic.” Whereas the 1969 visit of Vietnamese women to Canada had been a success, this time, the women from the older peace organizations were continually pushed aside, and could never quite find a common basis of understanding with the Third World Women, the [Women’s] Liberation groups, or mount a united front against these other groups. It is doubtful if a similar conference will be held under vow sponsorship again. The conference as a whole could best be described as a forum where individual groups continually tried to dominate conference proceedings, and in several cases, left the conference when unable to achieve their own ends. The American delegates were particularly guilty of factionalism, and forgot all courtesy to their Canadian “sisters,” in spite of the latter being the official hosts. Belligerence was often displayed; emotion ran high, and at times, resulted in fist fights. The Americans appeared to take the opportunity of expressing their dislike of American foreign policy while they were outside their own country. The conference appeared to have little positive result for other than those already committed to such activity. Possibly the biggest single benefit emanating from the week long series of meetings was the re-

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newal of old and the establishment of new contacts between the Indo-Chinese and both Canadians and Americans. Considerable sympathy for the conference surfaced locally, as evidenced by the offering of billets, etc., to the conference delegates.139 President of vow, Duckworth, who had accompanied the Indochinese delegation across the country, but was barred from attending one conference session with black women because she was white and middle class, remained resolute about her powerful connection to the Indochinese women. She wrote eloquently about what they, not the conference, had taught her: They told us very directly that we must have unity, flexibility, patience and good organization, if we are to have a part in bringing about fundamental social change – ending the war, doing away with racism, repression, poverty, miseducation. And I would add, from knowing them, that we must have discipline and courage and a deep understanding of the situation.140 Many decades later, Weiss of the wsp recalled similarly that, although there were many fractures among the women at the Indochinese Conference, “working with women in Canada was a wonderful, collaborative, high quality experience. We were natural sisters. They were great people and we supported one another. I am grateful for the experience and to this day I continue to be in touch with Canada’s vow.”141 Given the close relationship between the Canadian and American governments, it was in the interest of the rcmp security service to interpret the Indochinese conference through its red-tinged prism, showing that the Vancouver and Toronto gatherings had failed to cement anti-American opposition to the Vietnam War among women from Indochina, Canada, and the United States who may have had subversive left-wing agendas. In spying on the conference, however, the force inadvertently bore witness to the broken promise of global sisterhood. The ruptures that tore through the conference in Vancouver and Toronto signalled the development of feminist identity politics that often resulted in divisive agendas and probed whether or not political and personal unity among women was possible or even desirable.142 Such existential concerns were not on the table for the rcmp security service and its

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red-tinged prism. The Indochinese conference was significant to the Mounted Police because of Cold War stratagems, not feminist identity politics. The conference generated interest because of the anti-war movement and its left-wing connections, and because of the potential of that movement to swing Canadian foreign policy decisively against the bellicose actions of the American government in Indochina. In that sense, the rcmp-fbi relationship paralleled that of American and Canadian feminists gathered in Vancouver and Toronto when it came to the exercise of American interests in Canada. Ironically, in expressing their resentment toward their American counterparts, Canadian women at the Indochinese conference proved to be less subservient to American hegemony than their country’s national police force.

5 Evolution and Decline

The Indochinese Conference established how complex it was to build a sisterhood united around a single issue, in this case, anti-imperialism. Nevertheless, spurred by the Abortion Caravan, some women involved in the Canadian women’s liberation movement, most especially the Trotskyists, continued to believe that the issue of abortion could bring women together in large numbers. The participation of Trotskyists, who already belonged to what amounted to a nation-wide organization, afforded a greater opportunity for achieving this aim. With their coast-to-coast presence, keen organizing skills, and political zeal for entryism, they homed in on abortion to drive social protest forward, while bringing in more recruits – and, inadvertently, guaranteeing even more rcmp surveillance of Trotskyists and women’s liberationists. But the rcmp security service and the women’s liberation movement had just over a dozen years left to their awkward relationship, one that the former would exit first. The 1970s and 1980s would be a period of consolidation and change for the Mountie spies. Part of this era would see major shifts in their range of domestic targets, including women’s liberation, under the rubric of countering subversion. Surveillance of women’s liberation spread outside the main cities, as did women’s activism, but then it began to decline slowly, especially in the second half of the 1970s. This decline in surveillance occurred for a variety of reasons. Some of these were connected to what was happening in the women’s liberation movement; additionally, there were wider modifications under way in the domestic security sector. Critically, it did not occur because the security service acknowledged that spying on non-violent political protests within a liberal-democratic state was in any sense illegitimate or pointless. One aspect of the decline in surveillance was related to the general evolution of women’s liberation as a movement, as the initial women’s

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liberation groups gave way to the vast breadth of second-wave feminist activism. The debate over abortion demonstrated the impasse faced by women’s liberationists: could they work for gender equality in a capitalist society from the top down via political reform or from the bottom up by building a large revolutionary sisterhood around a potentially unifying issue like abortion? A difficult battle loomed within the Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc). The Mounted Police tracked the dissension between the pro-Trotskyist women, who wanted to focus on abortion, and others, who sought a wider approach to women’s liberation.1 These tensions rose just before the start of a second national women’s liberation conference, this time held at the University of Winnipeg in March 1972. Almost 250 women (and five men, who would later be barred from the meetings) from across Canada, plus a handful of Americans, gathered together to discuss various issues, including repealing the 1969 abortion law. According to documents the rcmp had on file from the Ontario Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition and the Manitoba Abortion Action Coalition, legal attacks on access to abortion services and federal government inaction had spurred a mass movement for repeal.2 The conference triggered an rcmp Trotskyist alert, as the security service asserted it was a red-tinged affair, “inspired and organized by the Canadian Trotskyist Movement through their Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition groups (Trotskyist fronts), which are located in most major cities across Canada. The main purpose of this conference was an attempt by the Trotskyists to unite women’s liberation groups across Canada into a national coalition.”3 Amidst the women assembled at the conference there was at least one female security service informant who had journeyed to Winnipeg from Hamilton to observe the apparent subversion from up close. A subsequent police report, aided by her account to her handler back in Hamilton, contained at least thirty-seven names of those in attendance, accompanied by a few short biographical sketches and rcmp file numbers for readers at headquarters charged with organizing relevant material that came in from the different divisions. A young woman identified as Rita MacNeil, who would go on to become “Cape Breton’s first lady of song,”4 was described as “from Toronto Women’s Caucus. She’s the one who composes and sings women’s lib songs.”5 Also relayed were the contents of meetings and speeches, often given to all-female audiences, copies of documents distributed at the meetings, and a breakdown of delegates by age and loca-

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tion, with almost half in attendance being nineteen to twenty-five years old.6 Even social activities related to the conference had no immunity from the Mountie gaze. The same or another informant, through salacious and crude homophobic comments, revealed either her own obsessions or the details she believed her shadowy employers wanted to know: One hundred sweating uncombed women [were] standing around in the middle of the floor with their arms around each other crying sisterhood and dancing. The church had banned the “wine and cheese” part of the party so they all got bombed on vodka. Two dykes had been imported from the U.S. to show everyone how it was done which they proceeded to do in the middle of the floor.7 The majority of the conference materials that the informant transmitted to the security service underscored a passionate dislike for the 1969 abortion law. The informant revealed that the upshot of the Winnipeg conference was the founding of the Canadian Women’s Coalition to Repeal Abortion Laws (cwcral) and the adoption of four significant proposals: the repeal of Criminal Code sections dealing with abortion; the right to sex education as well as birth-control information and devices in elementary and secondary schools; the rejection of forced sterilization and abortion as means of population control; and the right of every woman to decide whether or not to bear children. Significantly, the conference attendees came out in support of Dr Henry Morgentaler. Barely a month after the Abortion Caravan’s cross-country journey ended, Montreal police had arrested Morgentaler after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) alerted the rcmp to the possibility that the physician would perform an abortion in his clinic on a teenaged girl directed to him by an abortion referral agency in the United States. Since he was unable to attend the conference because he was preparing for trial, the attendees sent him a “Solidarity Telegram” that read: “As 250 women from all across Canada who have gathered to rally our forces to get abortion out of the Criminal Code, we would like to express our gratitude for your courageous personal action.” The text appeared in the documents appended to the informant’s report.8 Also in attendance at the conference was Eleanor Wright Pelrine, whom the informant identified correctly as an “authoress.” Pelrine had criticized the 1969 law for its uneven application and excessive red tape,

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both of which resulted in lengthy wait times for abortion services. At the conference, Pelrine mocked former justice minister Pierre Trudeau’s quip: “there’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” before introducing his government’s Omnibus Bill, which made sweeping reforms to laws concerning contraception, abortion, and homosexuality.9 Now that Trudeau was leading the government, Pelrine, according to the informant, “[a]ttacked the Prime Minister since he has said he does not want to be in the bedrooms of the nation but seems to want to catch us on the way out. She made the only amusing and entertaining speech of the whole weekend.” On the lookout for Trotskyist involvement, the informant detected little of note to offer. However, the rcmp report labelled Lorna Grant, elected at the conference as the executive secretary of the cwcral, a “Trotskyist” and concluded that the narrow focus of Trotskyists on abortion “has been one of the main areas of conflict within several women’s groups which they have infiltrated in the past. Ultimately, these conflicts have resulted in Trotskyist expulsions, fractionalization and/or complete disbanding of the [women’s liberation] group.”10 The rcmp cannot be faulted for this assessment. The combustible politics of sisterhood led the original women’s liberation groups to dissolve or split up regardless of infiltration by external forces, including state security organizations, even as their activism carried on. Many women’s liberationists were uncomfortable about making abortion the central issue to unify the movement when several other impediments to gender equality could be identified. On the one hand, as Catherine Dunphy, author of a biography on Morgentaler, writes, the “revolutionary rhetoric” of women’s liberation and the “ulterior motives” of those who wanted to keep it focused on abortion dissuaded “small lliberal middle-class women from the movement.”11 On the other, the rejection of abortion as the central issue for women’s liberation could sideline broader left-wing analyses of gender inequality to which the issue was connected. One of the Abortion Caravan participants, Bobbie Spark, stated perceptively: I think it’s important to understand that when you take on what appears to be, in the public eye, a single issue, in fact if you really follow it through you find that they all interlock and dovetail. It puts you up against capitalism, against the church and against the

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state, and against all the structures that support these institutions, and they all have a vested interest in opposing women’s rights.12 But at the close of the Indochinese Conference, Vancouver attendees Anne Roberts and Barbara Todd expressed more rueful sentiments, noting that the theory that all women are oppressed “results in a tendency to neglect or ignore the way in which women are oppressors – some women are in the ruling classes and white North American women are part of the system of racism and exploitation of coloured peoples at home and in the Third World.” The focus of the women’s liberation movement on sexism created destructive divisions that could be overcome, they suggested, with constructive criticism and a stronger socialist movement that included both men and women.13 The intransigence of a federal government that refused to repeal the 1969 abortion law ensured that both women’s liberationists and Trotskyists would keep the issue of abortion on the front burner. Nonetheless, a wider feminist agenda for gender equality, which the 1970 Royal Commission on the Status of Women (rcsw) set out, was in limited ways starting to be addressed by those with political power during this period of second-wave feminism.14 As the women’s liberation movement evolved, it assumed a more liberal shade once federal institutions began primitive efforts to accommodate or even co-opt demands for gender equality. Changes were driven through protest, policy, and law.15 For the most part, the changes were far from radical, and reflected the significance of the liberal strain of feminism operating in parallel to the socialist and radical segments. In 1971, amendments to the Canadian Labour Code prohibited discrimination on the grounds of sex and marital status, provided a seventeen-week maternity leave, and reiterated the principle of equal pay for equal work. The following year, the Income Tax Act allowed women in the workplace to deduct the cost of child care.16 At the same time, based on a recommendation of the rcsw, Trudeau’s government launched the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, with a mandate to raise and inform the general public about women’s issues.17 In 1973, the Ontario Advisory Council on the Status of Women was established under the leadership of Laura Sabia. Five years later, the Supreme Court of Canada established property rights for married women in a case involving Helen Rathwell, a Saskatchewan farm wife. In the same year, the federal government passed the Canadian Human Rights

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Act that included measures related to equal pay for work of equal value and prohibition of sex discrimination. It also prohibits discrimination on grounds that included disability and race. And, of course, the repatriation of the British North America Act and the subsequent passing of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 enshrined not just gender equality in the Canadian constitution but also protected programs designed to ameliorate gender inequality.18 The advances for women extended to the Mounted Police itself. In its report, the rcsw had recommended that the rcmp, which it identified as a “male preserve,” begin enlisting women. This recommendation, along with pressures from women’s groups, the United Nations (un) declaration of 1975 as International Women’s Year, the hiring of women police officers in other jurisdictions, and labour unrest within the force itself pushed the rcmp to hire women as officers. In September 1974, the first group of thirty-two female recruits arrived in Regina for training. By the following spring they were on the job as regular Mounted Policewomen. The rcmp maintained publicly, if somewhat defensively, that the force’s transition to gender equality was smooth: “the initiation of women into the force is no bow to the age we live in and no fulfilment of any stereotype … it is simply an evolutionary process, one that was to be expected and one that will in all likelihood be carried off without a hitch.”19 The more mainstream the message of gender equality started to become, the more the movement split between women who wanted revolutionary action and those with less ambitious agendas who could be swayed by limited liberal change. Inevitably, priorities emerged, and choices had to be made. Privileging abortion as an issue, as many Trotskyists did, was not necessarily relevant to all women. Even some Trotskyists came to acknowledge this reality. In late August 1971, at a Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs) conference in Waterloo dealing with high school and university students, an informant conveyed the gist of a remarkable panel discussion attempting to distinguish between “feminists” and “Women’s Liberation” by virtue of sexual orientation. The former, according to the unnamed discussants, “hate men because they’re men. In other words, they are Lesbians or homosexuals.” By contrast, women’s liberationists “want to destroy the feeling of male superiority and the dependence that women feel on men. They want to establish a role for themselves as women or as people in their own rights, with their

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own goals, and their own proficience [sic].” Therefore, the ys/ljs was not as interested in the feminists or the man haters as they are interested in Women’s Liberation. The reason for this is that Women’s Liberation will and does attract a broad cross section of the population more so than the feminists do. The feminists of course, only attract practicing latent or expectant homosexuals, whereas Women’s Liberation should attract practically any woman who feels that she has been getting a raw deal out of her marriage or use of her role as female in society. Women’s Liberation then doesn’t necessarily define sexual relationships within a marriage and they make no attempt to restrict membership to only those women who have cast aside normal heterosexual relationships. Of course the overall goal of Women’s Liberation is to destroy the nuclear family. A tactic which is used to accomplish this is to raise transitional demands … [such as] free abortion on demand. While the demand for abortion on demand is reasonable and it appeals especially to lower social economic groups in society, free abortion on demand on the other hand is an impossible demand to grant.20 The panel discussants suggested that, tactically speaking, equal pay for work of equal value could replace abortion as the catalyst issue with which to build a mass movement of women. The proposed substitution indicated a potential expansion of the route to gender equality. However, for women’s liberationists, resources, including the time they could commit to activism, were limited. Equally significant was a “federalizing” of the women’s liberation movement by the state, as public funding became available to various feminist organizations. In return, a moderating or mainstreaming of gender-equality demands was required. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women (nac), established in 1971, received state funding into the 1980s.21 Over the years, nac itself would attract some limited security-service attention.22 The socialist and radical segments of the women’s liberation movement took separate but interrelated paths, forming independent groups and organizations, publishing their own literature, and developing initiatives that arose out of grassroots activism, but they too depended on federal funding for some of their projects. Socialist feminists focused their efforts

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on analyzing the politics of housework, making the case for wages for domestic labour, backing union labour and strikes, promoting equal pay for work of equal value, spotlighting the poverty of single mothers and elderly women, demanding protections for immigrant and Third World women workers, and insisting upon daycare and reproductive rights. They were likely to see capitalism and patriarchy as jointly oppressing women. Socialist feminist groups played a major role in Anglophone Canada, even participating in nac. Radical feminists invested strongly in combatting the oppression of women as women, rejecting traditional gender roles, petitioning to include discrimination by sex in human-rights codes, taking action against pornography, sex work, violence against women, and restrictions on reproductive rights and asserting that women-only spaces were needed, because women had their own culture and values. Out of radical feminism developed ideas of radical and lesbian separatism that included communal living and certain styles of dress and grooming that rejected conventional white, middle-class femininity. Both socialist and radical feminists made major contributions to the implementation and content of university courses in women’s studies, programs, research, and publishing that continue to thrive today. Although many feminists claimed “sisterhood is global,” opposition arose from several quarters; some feminists refused to accept that pornography or sex work was oppressive to women, arguing that they are a matter of choice. Others argued that the concerns of Indigenous women, women of colour, disabled women, and transgender women were marginalized. While all feminist segments endorsed abortion, an anti-abortion movement gained traction alongside a backlash of anti-feminist, conservative, pro-family organizations that affirmed women in the role of wife and mother.23 In the aftermath of the 1972 Winnipeg conference, the rcmp reflected internally and externally to the Trudeau government on the significance of what had occurred. In a letter to Robin Bourne in the Solicitor General’s office,24 Assistant Commissioner L.R. Parent pointed to the divisions within the women’s liberation movement, particularly over abortion, but also downplayed the threat, either in terms of subversion or violence, posed by Trotskyists: 2. The potential success of the “Canadian Women’s Coalition to Repeal Abortion Laws” is limited to the ability of the Trotskyist (League for Social Action and Young Socialist) to keep it function-

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ing through their national organization, publicity, speaking engagements, financial assistance and membership support. 3. The Coalition will no doubt fail to gain the support of all women’s liberation groups in Canada because of its political orientation and the isolation of the abortion issue. The position of “socialism” and abortion play a limited role in the total concept of women’s liberation … 4. The Trotskyists, who are known to be great opportunists, have been instrumental in organizing several women’s groups around many issues … The prominence of the Trotskyists in these organizations is usually only temporary. 5. Our analysis of the Trotskyist involvement in women’s liberation, which is based on intelligence received over a period of two years from 1970 to 1972, is that there is no political or physical threat presented by them in this area of endeavour.25 Even as the conference in Winnipeg was ending, Superintendent Murray Chisholm, a senior member of the security service, argued in a memo that a wide variety of interests previously placed under surveillance by the force, including proponents of women’s liberation, were “legitimate pressure groups in the main, and have to be viewed as such.” However, neither his interpretation, nor the recognition by Parent, in the passage just quoted, of the empty threat Trotskyists posed, put an immediate end to surveillance against such groups. Instead, Chisholm offered a rationalization for the continued spying on legal activities in a democratic society. He wrote specifically that it was police interest in individuals with subversive agendas operating within the legal groups carrying out non-violent and legal protest that justified the continued surveillance against them.26 This institutional backside-covering mindset was further on display in an August 1973 rcmp summary of women’s-liberation projects at the University of Toronto, including the beginning of women’s studies courses: The concept of women’s liberation is now firmly established as a fact on campus. There has been a successful series of women’s courses and the administration has also set up an ad hoc committee on the status of women at the U. of T. to examine areas of discrimination against women. This shows that women’s liberation is accepted as

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a truism on the campus and is an example of what was considered a few years ago as a major plank of the New Left’s program has now become accepted by the majority of society. It should be added that there is still a small vocal minority who are attempting to use women’s liberation as a means to radically alter society.27 To that “small vocal minority” in theory the Mounties would now turn their main attention. And yet this reasoning was nothing new; it had long been used against other mainstream groups, organizations, and institutions that operated non-violently and legally, especially familiar ones like the New Democratic Party (ndp), the opposition to the Vietnam War, or various Canadian universities. The force was not interested in spying on peaceful organizations, but did so only because of its interest in certain individuals within said organizations. Or a targeted organization was not a threat at the moment, but it had the potential to engage in subversive behaviour in the future and, therefore, monitoring had to continue. Such an approach was an obvious rationalization for the ongoing surveillance of groups and activities that the force itself, let alone the wider society, had declared as legitimate. Then there arose both the internal justification of resources and even the wider existence of a domestic spy agency continuing to pursue the ill-defined category of subversion. The rcmp in its counter-subversion branch sought, in essence, to justify to itself the work it continued to do, particularly in an era when other priorities, such as Quebec nationalism, loomed. This rcmp “but” justification remains highly significant to the post–Cold War security milieu in which extremism and terrorism have replaced subversion and communism as priorities. For instance, a 2014 leaked rcmp intelligence briefing, entitled “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry,” states that the force is not interested in peaceful protest movements per se but rather violenceprone elements within such peaceful movements.28 Surveillance of women’s liberation was a mixed bag following the 1972 gathering in Winnipeg. Security-service reports in Toronto already had started to highlight what the Mounties perceived to be a drop in participation in demonstrations or other activities on the part of women’s liberationists. A 3 September 1972 report, for instance, noted the waning of the twc – which still had thirty-four women turn out for a gathering – primarily, the reporting officer argued, because of the abortion issue.29 Demonstrations earlier in the year against the prime minister had been

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ineffectual and were said to have failed to cause any “embarrassment,” a theme that also emerges in the rcmp security service comments related to the Abortion Caravan, but whether this comment referred to the prime minister or to the Mounties is unclear. Protests around abortion in January of the same year had equally occurred without incident, as had one held at the US Consulate in Toronto along with other groups, which the rcmp filmed using both video and 16mm technology.30 By February 1973, the security service filled out an “Organizational Assessment Form,” which included categories such as “Affiliation and/or Links” and “Number of Members who also hold membership in an approved organization.” It noted that, while the twc had ninety members, the Trotskyists had been expelled in April 1972 by the “non-subversive element.” As a result, suggested the author of the report, the twc “continued to function thereafter in a limited capacity … [but it] is now all but defunct.”31 Then, in a move straight out of the decades’ old red-tinged prism, appeared the following summary “Assessment”: “June 1970–April 1972 – Trotskyist controlled, however, membership or participation in the activities of this organization in the absence of other involvement in a Trotskyist organization is not indicative of Trotskyist sympathies or affiliation.”32 There was significance to the above passage that extended far beyond the short lifespan of the twc. In some ways, it was a major cornerstone behind the rationale for the surveillance by the security state that had developed over the twentieth century. The labelling as a result of the information collected through spying served as a tool to assess the political affiliation, and thus threat level, of past, ongoing, or future targets. Thus, simply belonging to the twc did not automatically make a woman a Trotskyist. However, that connection, coupled with other Trotskyist links, could lead to an official labelling of the said individual as a subversive, in the same manner that the rcmp ferreted out suspected Communists. Being labelled as a Trotskyist or a Communist, or more generally as a subversive, potentially carried a double jeopardy: it may have meant more intrusive surveillance, not only in Canada but when travelling abroad as well, since the security service shared information with allied intelligence agencies. The designation additionally had the potential of affecting future employment possibilities, particularly with the federal government. The rcmp is not known for jailing or torturing or assassinating Canadians suspected of subversion. But long after an individual’s political involvement in a radical organization may have ceased, or the

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organization itself may have dissolved, that previous connection could be used to deny government employment or a security clearance for the already-employed, with no possibility of a response.33 Nor was this just a hypothetical threat. A scandal erupted in the 1970s when it was revealed that the federal government had a blacklist of those with past involvement in radical activities, which was used either to refuse them employment in the civil service or to drive them out if they already had jobs.34 Overall, it is impossible to make definitive conclusions as to what impact surveillance had, because of the limited access researchers have to rcmp security-service records. Even as coverage declined in Canada’s main urban centres, other parts of Canada received rcmp attention when it came to the women’s liberation movement. Halifax, Moncton, Saskatoon, Regina, Hamilton, Niagara Falls, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnipeg, Sudbury, and Sault Ste Marie were some of the cities in which the Mounted Police carried out surveillance against women’s liberation groups. The coverage speaks both to the extent of the rcmp’s reach outside the main cities, and correspondingly illustrates the spread of women’s liberation activism from these larger to smaller locations. Equally, it demonstrates that even small numbers of women active in causes in smaller locations would draw a level of attention of the type that, in larger, target-rich environments, might have been skipped. Activists in Sault Ste Marie and Sudbury, including Mercedes Steedman, who would go on to work on rcmp surveillance of labour women and co-edit a general collection about rcmp surveillance, had detailed reports filed about them in 1974.35 In Regina, an rcmp informant reported that the women’s liberation movement there had largely been inactive since the beginning of 1972 and had split between Trotskyist and non-Trotskyist members, the former wanting to concentrate on the abortion issue.36 This division, plus the presence of a pro-feminist ndp government in Regina, meant that the movement had largely fallen into inaction.37 There the Organizational Assessment form noted the same trajectory as with the twc, and that “Regina Women’s Liberation Movement is composed of socialist activists (including women affiliated with the Waffle),38 dedicated to achieving equal rights for Women and abortion on demand. Included in the Membership are members and Sympathizers of the cp of c (M.L.) [Maoists] and Sympathizers and Contacts of the Trotskyist movement.” The writer

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added that, despite the presence of the ideologically motivated, “little ideological influence is exerted by the members within the Women’s Liberation Movement.”39 Women’s liberationists in Regina would later be drawn into the rcmp’s surveillance net when two of their offshoot organizations, the Working Women’s Calendar Group and the Organization of Working Women, contacted the rcmp to request permission to use Mounted Police photos related to the 1931 Estevan Coal Miners’ Strike in a calendar they wanted to publish. The Mountie who received this seemingly innocuous request contacted the security service for details about the groups. Inspector D.H. Mumby of the security service wrote back to provide the background on the letter writers, including their women’s liberationist credentials, but claimed that their influence in Regina was “limited.” He added that “[s]ome of the Directors have come to Security Service attention in the past as they have been affiliated with subversive groups – primarily the Communist Party and associated front groups. None are of major interest however.” Apparently having more knowledge about women liberation than about his own force’s history with respect to its policing of the Estevan Coal Miners’ Strike, in which three miners were shot and killed and thirteen others wounded by the police, he concluded that there was no objection to the use of the photos.40 Abortion remained a preoccupation of many Canadian second-wave feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, as Morgentaler’s legal strife inched in the direction of the country’s Supreme Court and opposition to legal abortion grew stronger. Targeting efforts to protest Canadian abortion laws thus remained a priority for the Mounted Police. As with the Abortion Caravan, the surveillance had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not laws were being broken through attempts to procure abortions for women illegally. The rcmp security service was a political police force charged with investigating ideological deviations from the stateapproved norm. Here emerged a fundamental difference between the spies and the spied-upon in terms of how they viewed the fight over abortion. For many of the demonstrators, abortion was part of the endgame toward achieving a more gender-equitable society. For the rcmp, abortion was a means to an end for the demonstrators. So, when the Mounties spied on a bc Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition protest in Vancouver on 1 May 1972, they took photos and acquired literature that

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was being distributed, but interpreted it in explicitly red-tinged terms by referring to May Day, an annual celebration generally associated with socialist support for organized labour: “compared with past may day [sic] demonstrations, this one was poorly attended.”41 Similarly, Mountie surveillance of a Niagara Falls demonstration by the Ontario Women’s Coalition to Repeal Abortion Laws against opponents of abortion stated the obvious, which was that it had “made little or no impression on the anti-abortion rally.”42 The levels of women’s liberation activity and concomitant police coverage varied by region. In the Maritimes, by July 1972, an rcmp informant in Halifax found it newsworthy to report having learned from a local activist that a women’s liberationist from Fredericton had arrived in town. The visitor apparently lamented that the wlm in Fredericton in the neighbouring province of New Brunswick should be viewed “in the same light as the Voice of Women [vow].”43 This comparison from the perspective of some women’s liberationists might be considered insulting, because vow was, unfairly or not, seen as a stodgy organization of maternalist women. To the east in Quebec, one name that made it onto the rcmp’s radar during this period was Anne Cools. Cools told an informant that a women’s caucus was being established at McGill University; the same report included details on her movements over several days; a separate report included information, undoubtedly courtesy of either the fbi or a human source, or both, on a trip Cools had made to New York in December 1971. Twelve years after her appearance in a police report, Cools became the first Afro-Caribbean Canadian to be appointed to the Canadian senate by the same government that was in power when the rcmp began spying on her.44 Elsewhere in Quebec, the rcmp security service, in a February 1973 summary report about the Trotskyist League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso), supplied information on a wide range of women’s liberation activities, seemingly with the goal of ferreting out the involvement of Trotskyists, but instead showcased the rapid growth of women’s liberation. The lsa/lso continued to grumble about the failure of the Abortion Caravan to rally all women around the issue of abortion. Yet it asserted that the rapid growth of the women’s liberation movement would enhance the potential of women’s liberation activists to influence Trotskyists and, in turn, of Trotskyists to influence the movement, stating admiringly:

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Never before has there been a feminist movement as radical in its critique of society, as irreconcilable in its opposition to oppression, and as potentially powerful a force for helping to end that oppression, as the emerging feminist movement of today. This new feminist movement, which stands on the shoulders of the struggles for equality of the pioneer Canadian feminists, has already reached into all layers of society.45 From the perspective of the Mounties, it had its hands full, courtesy of the Trotskyists. There was a women’s conference at the ywca, at which “men were not welcome,” a detail that underlined further the need for the rcmp security service to hire female informants. A women’s study group emerged at McGill University, as did a lesbian group called Gay at McGill, and its nineteen-year-old founder was surveilled by the rcmp; a teach-in for women was held at l’Université du Québec à Montréal where instruction in two family history courses began; a consciousnessraising group arose at Pointe-Claire; another such group included a woman who worked at Dawson College; and an English-language feminist newspaper was founded. At l’Université Laval, an effort to examine the different roles of women in society took place. There was the “Information Center for Women,” which was founded “in order to give women information as to where they can have their problems solved and needs satisfied. They received a grant from the Quebec government to form this agency and it is run by eight women.”46 A French-language equivalent of the agency also received a mention. Finally, the rcmp, likely through an informant or informants, reported at length on a conference in Montreal involving a number of women. The informant rebuffed an approach by a Trotskyist woman to participate in a separate demonstration. The conference separated into workshops to discuss several topics, including Gay Liberation and women and the law. When they finished, familiar divisions among the women appeared, alongside a few explanations for them: After the workshops the women gathered together again and discussed briefly what took place in each workshop and they then attempted to form an umbrella group which would coordinate the actions of women and produce more unity. [Anne] cools reported that in her workshop she had received a lot of hostility towards

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marriage from her group. She also stated that the women’s movement in the U.S. had never dealt with racism and that is one reason why it is driven into the ground. One woman from cools’ workshop objected to the reference made to racism and felt that the discussion in the workshop was argumentative disagreement but not racism. Mary trew from Toronto agreed with the woman. The group of women then got into a hassle as to whether or not others from the workshop [the remainder of the passage is deleted under Access to Information and the Privacy Act (atip)].47 It was not just Trotskyists who sought to tap into the issues unleashed by the women’s liberation movement. Although carrying an extensive history in relation to the woman question, when it came to the women’s liberation movement the Communist Party of Canada (cpc) had appeared slightly behind the New Left since the 1960s. The cpc, a familiar target for the rcmp’s red-tinged prism, now prioritized the cause of women in the mid-1970s by making concerted efforts to mark 1975 as the International Women’s Year. A year earlier, the cpc had reorganized the Central Women’s Commission, and the party leader, William Kashtan, attended its first meeting to encourage an emphasis on party work in the field of women’s labour, particularly among trade unions, so as to take full advantage of the international celebrations. Helpful to the cpc from the party’s perspective was that one of its own, Grace Hartman, who became the first woman to head a union in North America when she took over the Canadian Union of Public Employees in 1975, was also chair of nac.48 In 1975, the cpc put out an issue of its in-house publication, Communist Viewpoint, devoted to women and a pamphlet detailing the life of one of its most famous female members, labour activist Annie Buller.49 It included an article by Kashtan under the title “Communist Action Program for Women” that listed four key areas for party activism among women: to fight against tokenism, connect the struggle for peace with women’s equality, show that only socialism could solve the woman question, and promote women within the cpc.50 A key player on the international scene was the Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf), a Soviet-sponsored, socialist ngo. Established in 1945, the widf became the largest international women’s organization. It promoted anti-fascism, world peace, women’s rights, and improved conditions for children, an agenda that fit well with vow

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and Women Strike for Peace. It established strong links between women from the Eastern Bloc countries and developing nations, providing a transnational anti-imperialist platform. The widf was responsible for convincing the un to promote the International Women’s Year. In honour of the initiative, several international conferences focusing on women’s issues were held.51 When Canadian delegates gathered in East Berlin, with approximately 2,000 men and women from 140 countries for a World Congress of Women hosted by the widf in late October 1975, an rcmp security-service surveillance report, one of the few to comment on an event outside Canada, noted the excellence of the arrangements, including “operas, concerts, tours, receptions and guides and interpreters,” but was wary of East German surveillance. Delegates apparently noticed that outside each hotel room was “a black box approximately 12" square, 4" deep, which contained a glowing red light; [deleted under atip] this was technical coverage of some sort.” As potentially troublesome as recording devices in hotels, was “a certain relationship that developed between a married male British delegate and a very attractive East German ‘tour guide.’” The use of quotation marks suggests the Mounties believed that the tour guide could have been an enticing Soviet secret agent out to seduce and entrap delegation members.52 Ultimately, the report’s author was swayed, possibly by a summary of the World Congress of Women from vow delegate Terry Padgham, who declared the gathering a failure on several grounds. Unaware that her damning observations would make their way to an rcmp security-service surveillance file, Padgham objected angrily to East German surveillance of the delegates, expressing her annoyance at sexist male guards who were “always demanding our passports, stripping us with their eyes as we walked past.” She observed that the official speeches condemned fascism, imperialism, racism, and, occasionally, Zionism, but never sexism; discussions were superficial and propagandistic; and there appeared to be little gender equality under socialism if the lowly jobs the East German women held were any indication. Even the Canadian delegation raised her ire, because of a split between anglophone and francophone women. The latter rejected any association with Canada, including the flag. The former, most of whom were said to belong to the Canadian Congress of Women (ccw), had all “the pizzaz [sic] of Sunday School teachers.” A frustrated Padgham contended that large international gatherings of women were too problematic to be taken seriously.53 An rcmp

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investigator assessing the report went further, declaring the World Congress of Women and, by extension, the International Women’s Year, a failure. In prejudicial fashion, he speculated that sexism was not on the agenda because of “certain countries’ attitudes towards women in general, e.g. India, Japan and in particular the Arab nations.”54 The investigator did not allude to a fundamental contradiction; his commentary positioned South Asian, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries as intrinsically antifeminist, although it had been only one year since his Canadian operation opened its doors to women rcmp officers for the first time in its history. Closer to home, other Communist-led women’s organizations emphasized economic issues in the same way that Trotskyists had prioritized social issues. The cost of living in the 1970s became a major political debacle in an era marked by rising prices, unemployment, and a recession. In English Canada, Women Against Soaring Prices (wasp), which had been established in the 1960s, took up the cause. In Quebec, there was the Ligue des femmes du Québec, under the leadership of Laurette Chrétien Sloan. These groups immediately sparked rcmp security-service attention.55 In this return to the familiar, the Mounties fretted about the renewed emphasis of the cpc on women’s issues. Particularly concerning to the force was the involvement of the cpc’s Central Women’s Commission in the ccw. The Toronto membership of the ccw had doubled to forty members, and chapters across Ontario were in the process of being reorganized. Contained within a surveillance report was a subversion rationalization as old as the beginning of the Cold War but that raised the spectre of the women’s liberation movement: “One cannot speculate whether the cp of c influence within the Ontario Working Women’s Coalition will remain as good as it is now. It easily could become a nasty feminist labour vehicle controlled by communists, at its worst.” In the case of wasp, the security service determined it would be “watched because in the past, [it] has received considerable media publicity. If this re-occurs, polarization of public opinion about prices could put pressure on the federal government’s prices policies.”56 There were more radical female consumer groups than wasp that occupied the space between women’s liberation and the economic problems of the 1970s and that caught, as night follows day, the attention of the Mounted Police. A case in point was the Toronto Wages for Housework Committee (twhc), which the Mounties filed in their “Unaligned Marxist and Pressure Groups” category of subversion under the Freudian

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slip–like title of Toronto Wages for Housewives Committee. The group, which the police listed as being “composed of radical Marxist feminists,” advocated that homemakers be paid a wage, something that had arisen earlier in the decade from the women’s liberation movement. The report itself quoted at length a disparaging comment from an individual whose name was deleted, likely a police informant, which revelled in class bigotry, sexism, and homophobia: The T.W.H.C.’s membership has been described by [deleted under atip] as being “Born Lowers” who in appearances and attitude are both lower working class and welfare cases and involved in living alternative lifestyles. This is especially true of the radical lesbians in the W.D. [another group called Wages Due], who take a perverse pride in de-feminising themselves by cultivating the dirty and unkept [sic] appearance. The general employment level of the membership is either menial office work, [deleted under atip] the social service field i.e. social workers or unemployed. Also, most seem to be single and just about everyone is under 30 years of age.57 These comments derided female targets for not conforming to respectable, white, middle-class, heteronormative femininity. In addition to remarking on the background of those involved in the twhc, and their efforts to make inroads among Italian immigrant women, the police focused on connections the committee had made with a Black lesbian group from the United States called Sisters of Sappho, advancing the idea that poor women were somehow racially and sexually suspect. In any case, crossborder connections between Canadian and American feminist activists had long received special police scrutiny, in part because they would also be of interest to the fbi.58 The rcmp went on to detail the problems of the twhc, including its isolation from other women’s groups because of its ideology. The media coverage it had received had been entirely “negative,” and “they have received no support worth mentioning.” Piling on further, the security service concluded that from the evidence available the T.W.H.C. is unlikely to change in any significant form for some time to come. However, they do represent an excellent example of Unaligned Marxist group operating in the

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extremes of the Feminist Movement. Thus, our present low level of coverage is going to be maintained on this organization. In a sense, this interpretation represented a more discerning approach to framing by the rcmp, but it still had difficulty giving up limited coverage on a group that even it viewed as obscure.59 In some locations, anyone with a connection to the causes associated with women’s liberation could find their activities monitored by their neighbourhood security-service office. In Saskatoon, in April 1978, groups mentioned in the police coverage of a celebration of International Women’s Day, with the accompanying file reference removed under atip, included the Rape Crisis Centre, the Federal Advisory Council – Status of Women, Women in Society Today, Saskatchewan New Democratic Women, Planned Parenthood Saskatchewan, and the Saskatoon Women’s Liberation Movement. The last of these produced a six-page single-spaced position paper that the rcmp acquired and filed away.60 By the late 1970s, many of the counter-subversion files opened by the police in the busy years of 1969 to 1972 would be mothballed due to increased rcmp reluctance to carry out surveillance and the disbanding of certain groups. At the front of several of the files pertaining to women’s liberation, a repetitive commentary would be placed in August 1977, in an apparent move by the security service to contextualize the targets of its attention. The commentary reveals the rcmp’s fixation on the left and its potential influence over the “lower echelon of society,” and even contained an allusion, perhaps in an effort to be witty, to both communism and menstruation: Women’s Liberation, like all other mass movements, is directed at, and appeals to the lower echelon of society (the worker, the disfavoured) and thus provides fertile ground for the left wing element in which to grow it’s [sic] revolutionary seeds and achieve its own ends. The movement is spotted, throughout with red (from the executive down).61 What then accounts for the decline of the surveillance of the women’s liberation movement across the 1970s? A factor already identified pertains to the evolution the women’s liberation movement underwent in the era. Proceedings in 1971 at the Indochinese Conference displayed

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publicly the underlying fractures of the movement around sexuality, politics, ethnicity and race, generation/age, and even nationality. Organizing a feminist politics around women’s identity differences, as opposed to their similarities, grew in significance over the 1970s and 1980s.62 In Born at the Right Time, Douglas Owram’s study of Canadian baby boomers, he suggests that a backlash against youth, combined with rising unemployment as part of an economic downturn in the early 1970s, helped dampen down protest.63 In comparison, Bryan Palmer, in his more recent history of Canada and the 1960s, finds such explanations unsatisfactory, because “historical understanding of [New Left] organizations and their meaning remains underdeveloped.”64 If the 1960s and 1970s brought social change to Canada, those doing the spying did not escape unscathed either. Beginning in 1972, securityservice members found themselves being pushed in new directions. Incidents in Quebec in October 1970 prompted this pressure, although there was a wider concern about the security environment, particularly with the potential for American violence to spill over into Canada.65 The kidnapping of British trade commissioner James Cross and the kidnapping and murder of provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte by the Front de libération du Québec (flq) and the subsequent restriction of civil rights through the War Measures Act led the Trudeau government to pay much greater attention to the security service and its activities. It believed, unfairly according to the most recent and comprehensive history of the rcmp’s spy agency, that the Mounties had failed to produce adequate intelligence regarding the flq.66 That perceived failure, combined with a desire for a proactive approach to domestic security threats, a tension that always existed in the midst of having a police force carry out intelligence work, would lead the security service to go on the offensive against its perceived enemies. A key figure was the security service’s first civilian director general, career diplomat John Starnes.67 On 24 September 1971, he met with Trudeau and several of his senior cabinet ministers on Parliament Hill for a security-service briefing that included accompanying slides. The presentation, entitled “The Threat to Security from Violence Prone Revolutionary Elements in Canada,” purported to present a preview of potential domestic unrest and violence that lay ahead over the 1970s. Women’s liberation was not one of the threats explicitly referenced. The presentation reflected, once again, growing fears about violence in the

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United States uniting with the domestic unrest of the October Crisis.68 Six months after his meeting with the government, Starnes conferred with senior security-service personnel and ordered them to be “more vigorous in their approach to disruptive activity” by using “well-conceived operations.” “Reticence” in carrying out such duties, he added, might be responded to with disciplinary action or a transfer elsewhere.69 The “more vigorous” order indicates that disruption operations were already under way, as indeed they were. The escalation that followed would subsequently trigger the downfall of the security service. “Dirty tricks” operations in Quebec are well documented. They include the infamous 1972 barn burning in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, carried out by security-service members to foil an alleged meeting between flq and Black Panther members, and the 1973 break-in at the headquarters of the Parti Québécois to steal party membership lists.70 Less well known is that the Mounted Police did not confine its destructive activities to Quebec, but engaged in them elsewhere. Carried out through a series of “disruptive measures” from April 1971 to December 1973, these activities were mainly organized by the Special Operations Group within the rcmp security service under the codenames of oddball and checkmate. The purpose of these operations against targeted organizations was, according to Murray Chisholm, the senior Mountie in charge, “to create confusion within their ranks, discrediting their leadership and/or their programs, all with the purpose of turning their attention and energies inward as much as possible, rather than outward to the community.”71 Some of the disruptive measures the rcmp security service deployed encompassed the forgery of tax returns, threatening phone calls, media manipulation, and the distribution of at least one fraudulent letter, the latter being an effort to undermine a Trotskyist leader.72 The leaders of the lsa/lso hit back in a press release, denouncing the government for spying on putative subversives. They asked, “Who is the subversive?” accusing the federal government of subversion for secretly harassing and intimidating “Canadians and Quebecers with dissident views.” Furthermore, they blasted the government for imposing the War Measures Act to deal with the flq, for targeting Trotskyists in an attempt to stop the growth of democratic movements – such as the women’s liberation movement – in which the lsa/lso was active, and for deploying against these movements “the same old discredited tactics of the Communist

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hunt it tried to use when faced with the threat of the Quebec Independence Movement.” Needless to say, a copy of this press release ended up in an rcmp file.73 Whether the rcmp ever directed disruptive measures against the women’s liberation movement will likely never be known, as the Mounties later destroyed relevant operational records, in an apparent effort to avoid the risk of embarrassment of the type suffered by the fbi in 1971 after its Counter Intelligence Program (cointelpro) became public, thanks to a break-in at its office in Media, Pennsylvania.74 There is some evidence, nevertheless, as will be chronicled later in the chapter, that although their actions were not on the scale of “dirty tricks,” the rcmp did attempt to disrupt the women’s liberation movement. However, the destruction of documents, combined with a lack of open access to surviving records, makes it impossible to offer a conclusive interpretation of either the extent of such efforts or their impact. Whatever the case, it was in Quebec that the revelations of rcmp illegal activities would generate maximum publicity and, ultimately, strike a fatal blow against the security service. Two separate commissions, the Commission d’enquête sur des opérations policières en territoire Québécois (often referred to as the Keable Commission after its head, lawyer Jean Keable), appointed by the separatist Parti Québécois government of Premier René Lévesque once it won the provincial election in November 1976, and the better-known Royal Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (more popularly referenced as the McDonald Commission after its leader Justice David McDonald) are noteworthy. The Trudeau government established the latter in July 1977 and the former earlier in the same year. Both led to a heightened climate of popular skepticism toward the rcmp and its security activities and, concomitantly, a Mounted Police more relunctant in terms of carrying out investigations into subversion of the type that had the potential to generate controversy.75 Internally, the security service had also moved to prioritize its operations because of an ongoing issue: too much information was being collected and not enough useful intelligence was being generated from the haul. A senior Mountie referred to this decades-old problem as “a shotgun approach of collecting all and sundry information that comes to our attention without always considering why or what is its significance.”76 Established in the 1960s, the “Key Sectors” program, operating

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out of the counter-subversion branch, had been an effort to prioritize targets, so as to address this concern. By the 1970s, it too had fallen into difficulties over the prioritizing of targets and defining what constituted a threat in relation to subversion.77 The problematic nature of rcmp security-service priorities in domestic counter-subversion surfaced during a November 1975 conference held in Ottawa. Sixteen members involved in covering French-language areas of Canada, principally in Quebec but also in New Brunswick, met to discuss the twin threats of domestic terrorism and subversive activity. Both categories fell within the domain of “D” Ops, the security service’s countersubversion branch. Since the mid-1960s, a popular label emerging out of West Germany for those protesting the political status quo outside conventional politics was “Extra-Parliamentary Opposition” (epo), a term that was soon adopted by some Canadian radicals as well, and which could be applied to a wide range of activities. The Mounties adopted the epo label as well, since it seemed related to a considerable amount of their counter-subversion operations from the late 1960s into the early 1970s.78 But, in a reflection of the changing nature of protest in Canada and evolving perceptions of it, the assembled security-service Mounties in 1975 decided that epo was a dated term and concept. Their new label was “Unaligned Marxists and Pressure Group Activity,”79 a designation that applied to a lengthy and wide-ranging list of counter-subversion targets, including the aforementioned twhc. The subsequent list demonstrated how different the perceived subversion landscape for the security service had become, compared to what existed before the 1960s, when the cpc represented nearly the entirety of the red-tinged subversive universe. It equally exemplified the growing importance of social-protest groups that were organizing around issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, labour, and the environment. Finally, and most significantly, the 1975 gathering in Ottawa provides a bridge to a post–Cold War future in which domestic intelligence agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada would monitor protest groups not because of the risk of subversion but on the grounds that they were tied to extremism, violence, or terrorism: (A) Third World Groups (B) Latin American Working Groups

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(C) Racism Issue Oriented Groups – [C.A.R. (Committee Against Racism)] (D) International Caucus of Labour and Affiliates (E) Environment Groups (Greenpeace Foundation) (F) Committees Against Airports (G) Religious Oriented Groups (Children of God, Church of Scientology) (H) Unemployed and Tenants’ Groups (I) Women’s Liberation Groups (J) Homosexual Pressure Groups (K) Committee for an Independent Canada (L) Groups of Interest in Your Respective Areas.80 The targets on this shopping list, which include women’s liberation groups, did not necessarily indicate they were a high priority or that surveillance was active against them. When asked about the value of these groups and how they were dealt with, one Mountie present responded bluntly, “this area is generally referred to as the ‘Old’ New Left area and has the lowest priority, and is looked at when everything else has been done.” A member from “C” Division in Montreal added that his colleagues were already “fully employed preparing for the Olympics.” 81 The 1976 Olympics, which took place in Montreal, represented a massive security operation for the Canadian government and the rcmp, particularly in the aftermath of the deadly anti-Israeli terrorist attacks on athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It also served as a preview of a post–Cold War security milieu dominated by counter-terrorism. Thus, the increasingly problematic nature of counter-subversion, combined with other security priorities – specifically Quebec nationalism and the 1976 Olympics, plus the emerging dirty-tricks scandals – would lead to a security service that paid less and less attention to countering domestic subversion in all forms, including the women’s liberation movement. The Mounties may have proactively sped this development along by contributing to the fragmenting of women’s liberation groups through disruption tactics of the type encountered by other targeted groups. As profiled in Chapter 3, the rcmp, using a strategy directly out of the playbook of the fbi, secretly disseminated information about the involvement of Trotskyists in the Abortion Caravan to the media via the federal

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government in an effort to discredit the protest.82 Whether or not informants within women’s liberation groups engaged in disruption tactics is unknown, although simply the involvement of an informant in an organization would have had in some way an impact on the activities of the infiltrated groups. The evidence from the United States of the extent and impact of disruption tactics against the women’s liberation movement is mixed, with historian Ruth Rosen arguing that “[w]e may never know the full extent of this infiltration, what damage it caused, or how it affected the trajectory of American feminism,” although, ultimately, she discounts that “fbi infiltration decisively alter[ed] the trajectory of the women’s movement.”83 Where evidence does exist of the rcmp being proactive in their efforts to undermine women’s liberation groups is in relation to money that some groups received from the federal government. Funding was crucial to all these groups, and blocking it represented a key means of undermining them. This approach reflected a wider concentration on the sources of funding in general for alleged radicals. Of particular concern was the possibility that government grants were being awarded by other radicals who had infiltrated the federal government. Indeed, the security service maintained a file in the 1970s entitled “Subsidization of Subversion by Government Departments.”84 In June 1971, the securityservice director, Starnes, wrote to Solicitor General Jean-Pierre Goyer to warn him that “funds have been allotted to various individuals and groups of interest to the Security Service by the Secretary of State Department’s Opportunities for Youth Program. [deleted] … The foregoing information indicates that radical and subversive elements view the Opportunities for Youth Program as a readily available source of funds to finance their activities.”85 Women’s liberation activists were among those applying for and, in some instances, receiving government funding. Later in December of that same year, the security service provided the Department of Manpower and Immigration with a list of funding applications for various grassroots projects, details on how much government money was being sought in each application, and secret and detailed Mountie information on those involved in the respective applications, which demonstrated the extent of police knowledge of individuals selected for attention. Project 51107, a Women’s Centre in Vancouver, was heavily scrutinized for its connections to Trotskyists, university activists, and other radicals:

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14. It came to our attention in August of this year that the Vancouver Women’s Caucus, a radical New Left women’s liberation movement, had outlived its purpose and would disband. It was suggested that their meeting place, 511 Carrall Street, be turned into a drop-in centre for women … 15. The coordinator of this project [name deleted under atip] was a teaching assistant at Simon Fraser University … She was one of 114 persons arrested following the occupation of Simon Fraser University [deleted under atip]. During 1970 she became actively involved in the vwc with, amongst others, the two individuals who forwarded letters of recommendation on behalf of this project [deleted under atip] 16. [deleted under atip] was known in 1969/70 to be a sympathizer of the Progressive Workers Movement [deleted under atip], however, her activities since have been almost solely confined to the vwc. 17. [deleted under atip] as with [deleted under atip], was a campus activist during the Simon Fraser University upheaval but has since been mostly involved with the vwc while maintaining her contacts with known Marxist revolutionaries. 18. Although their backgrounds and activities are somewhat condemning through the duration of the vwc’s activities, these three women seem to have remained apart from the two more militant groups involved. This organization suffered attempts by both the Trotskyists and revolutionary youth groups for control of the vwc but it was, in part, due to the efforts of these individuals that these elements were removed from the organization. It is difficult for us on the basis of information at hand to predict what may result from the financing of this project.86 Just over two weeks later, the security service warned the government about another application, this one by the twc, for the same reason: 1. … [W]e are providing for your consideration, information concerning a project application from Toronto, the Women’s Involvement Program (a Division of the Toronto Women’s Caucus) … 2. The Toronto Women’s Caucus is a Trotskyist controlled front organization … As such [it is] mainly comprised of L.S.A. and Y.S.

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members whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of the Canadian Government through violence if necessary, to replace it with their Trotskyite alternative. It is our feeling that a large percentage of the money granted to the project would filter into the L.S.A. and Y.S. coffers, and as the Canadian Trotskyist movement has strong international ties, may also be used to finance international ventures. [deleted under atip] Although we have no substantial information, there is little doubt that the majority of the twenty jobs that this project will create will be held by L.S.A. and Y.S. members. It is suggested therefore, that if this project is approved, consideration might be given to closely scrutinizing its progress to ensure that funds are not being diverted from the actual reasons for which they were intended.87 The outcome of the Vancouver application is not known, but in the case of the latter, the Mounties’ intervention arrived too late, as the application had already been approved; it did ultimately have an impact, however, as in March 1972 the Department of Manpower and Immigration launched a review into all projects about which the security service had raised objections. In the case above, the department inquired whether the funds were being used properly under the terms of the project; it asked the Mounted Police for “any information” they could obtain regarding the twc grant.88 In response, the Mounties admitted implicitly that they had been wrong in their previous warning about the funds being misused. In fact, the group spent the money “to produce a series of television programs concerning the plight of women,” and thus it appeared that the grant was “being used within the guidelines in which it was made. Should further information come to light a report will be submitted.”89 The police effort to influence funding occurred in 1972. By the end of this decade and into the early years of the 1980s, the environment had changed. The women’s liberation groups that the Mounties had spied on were gone, and the force’s domestic hunt for subversives was under much greater scrutiny. By then, security-service surveillance had in essence travelled full circle, returning home to familiar territory. Truthfully, the red-tinged prism had never gone out of style, but now it was being used as originally intended, at least when it came to women: to concentrate mainly on communism. In 1982, for instance, a report appeared under

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the title: “Communist Party of Canada (cp of c) Policy and Activity Re: Women’s Group.” The compiling Mountie noted that the Communist Party was sending two delegates to the annual meeting of nac.90 Ample coverage centred on cpc involvement in the economic issues that affected women’s lives. Extensive and intrusive surveillance from the late 1970s and early 1980s, using informants with intimate knowledge of the personal lives of a number of Communists involved in women’s organizations and celebrations around the annual International Women’s Day, appears in files. Details supplied ranged from the travel itinerary of wasp member Nancy (Nan) McDonald, also the cpc’s main women’s organizer,91 to intimate details about another activist’s private life. In 1981, an informant learned that this activist had communicated with her husband “about leaving the party but she said he just doesn’t seem to listen and it isn’t worth trying to talk to him about it.”92 Other personal information supplied by an informant about another party member was considered pertinent to include in an official report in that same year. This activist, according to the informant, told her mother about her upcoming marriage: “She stated that she would have her operation … and they will marry a week later.”93 These invasions of privacy by the Canadian security state against individuals who were engaged in legal and peaceful activities add emphasis in personal terms to the entire sinister practice of counter-subversion. Yet, recording these intimate details served two practical purposes for the security service beyond the normal accumulation of information. Such material could be used to recruit informants in the future or to destroy or disrupt those in leadership roles by undermining them or targeted organizations by encouraging factionalism within their ranks. Nor was material collected only through informants. Some of the coverage during this period, generated from meetings held at the cpc’s long-time headquarters on Cecil Street in Toronto, contains such extensive detail on proceedings and conversations, sometimes in a verbatim way, that the building seems to have been bugged. This was a tactic that the rcmp’s allied organization, mi5, resorted to in the United Kingdom against the Communist Party of Great Britain.94 Even a report in the early 1980s related to protests around abortion, an issue previously tied to the women’s liberation movement, was justified by the involvement of a cpc-connected group. It involved a 1983 demonstration in Toronto in support of Morgentaler. It received coverage

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from the Mounted Police, including a mention of the attendance of Toronto alderman Jack Layton, who appears to have had a securityservice file in his name. The effort was half-hearted, as the report noted that most of the information about the demonstration had come from a Toronto Sun article.95 The nature of the coverage in 1983 undoubtedly reflected the fate awaiting the rcmp security service. Its surveillance of the remnants of the women’s liberation movement ended completely on 21 June 1984, when, as recommended by the McDonald Commission, it was disbanded and replaced by a new civilian service, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis).96 In practice, many of the members of the former security service simply joined the new intelligence agency, in the process bringing their red-tinged world view with them. Counter-subversion continued to be a mainstay of csis until November 1987, when a review led by a senior civil servant, Gordon Osbaldeston, recommended in a report that such investigations cease, as they did not justify the resources expended in their pursuit.97 Even with the disbandment, the so-called subversion clause in the csis Act, in which the spy agency is charged with investigating “threats to the security of Canada,” continues to this day: “(d) activities directed toward undermining by covert unlawful acts, or directed toward or intended ultimately to lead to the destruction or overthrow by violence of, the constitutionally established system of government in Canada.”98 Three thousand files were distributed to the remaining csis branches from the now disbanded counter-subversion unit, although, in the words of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, “only a small percentage of these” continued to be “under active investigation.”99 Those women’s groups still “under active investigation” in the early days of csis usually had a connection to communism. At weekly countersubversion meetings, senior csis personnel, who previously had been senior rcmp security-service members, huddled to discuss the pressing threats to Canada, in addition to more bureaucratic duties, such as dealing with complaints about unilingual English-speaking correspondence sent to their Quebec branches. In December 1984, there was mention of the relationship between the cpc and the ccw. Two months later, the discussion noted that the Quebec Women’s League was seeking funding from the federal government.100 By then, other priorities had arisen. In 1985, 329 people, including 268 Canadians, died when a bomb hidden by Sikh extremists in a suit-

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case on board an Air India flight travelling from Canada brought the Boeing 747 down into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland. A separate bomb planted aboard a second flight killed two baggage handlers at a Japanese airport.101 In deadly fashion, violence associated with extremism and terrorism became the dominant priority for csis, as subversion and communism faded as national-security interests in tandem with the closing years of the Cold War. A 1987 report by the Canadian senate pointed to the growing significance of terrorism as a threat to Canada. This included groups that, the report warned, “could in the immediate future become sources of domestic terrorism,” including “radical left-wing/anarchist groups, extreme elements of certain anti-abortion groups, extremist right-wing/racist groups and radical ‘animal liberation’ activists.”102 One type of violent extremism would connect both the legacy of the women’s liberation movement and the rcmp security service. It speaks to an internal double standard inherent in the domestic security state’s approach to protest: not all dissent is treated equally. This is a point well made in There’s Something Happening Here, David Cunningham’s comparative study of fbi surveillance in the 1960s of the New Left and the Ku Klux Klan. Both the Klan and New Left faced fbi scrutiny through intrusive surveillance, including by extensive networks of informants, and each was subjected to cointelpro disruption operations designed to destroy them. Yet, despite employing similar tactics and seeing each as a threat, the fbi did not frame both movements equally. From the bureau’s perspective, the New Left was a foreign menace that could not be countenanced because of the fundamental anti-Americanism that was part of the movement’s cloaking fabric. On the other hand, the fbi framed Klan racists as misguided patriots, who could be rehabilitated because of their deeply rooted Americanism.103 The intelligence branch of the rcmp security service had displayed a similar inconsistency as far back as the 1920s in its differing coverage of Communist Party activity versus that of the Klan.104 Since 95 per cent of members of the rcmp security service in 1984 chose to join the newly formed csis, it is hardly surprising that the pre-existing double standard was embedded into the new agency.105 An outgrowth of this phenomenon, with particular relevance to state surveillance of the women’s liberation movement, emerges in the aftermath of R. v. Morgentaler, the momentous 28 January 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision to strike down

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Section 251 of the Criminal Code related to “supplying or procuring a miscarriage,” because it violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The legal decision was noticed by csis. Specifically, one of its agents based in Toronto contacted headquarters a week after the court decision with a pertinent question that addressed long-standing fears of the impact of American violence on Canada, and now in terms of violence against abortion providers and clinics: While pro-abortionists are clearly ecstatic the other side is very upset. Given the example of the United States where bombings of abortion clinics have occurred and the potential for the same to occur in Canada it is requested that hq make a determination as to whether or not the abortion issue is political in nature. If so should the Service be considering any violence associated with the issue as politically motivated?106 The designation was critical. If it were violence without a political motivation, then it would be a matter for local police jurisdictions, not csis. Pursuing politically motivated violence, which by many definitions constitutes terrorism, was a core mission for the new security agency, particularly in the aftermath of the disbandment of the counter-subversion branch. Nonetheless, the csis officer in Toronto did not accept his junior colleague’s argument. He or she rejected it on the grounds that evidence linking anti-abortionists to violence, the crucial requirement for the security agency to intervene according to its mandate, but also based on the recommendations of the Osbaldeston report, had not been provided. Violence occurring against abortion providers in the United States, the respondent added, was irrelevant to the situation in Canada, unless a connection could be demonstrated. Besides, the writer continued, For the most part the supporters of the Pro-Life movement in Canada have always demonstrated a respect for life and our democratic values. They also enjoy a strong lobby with the various levels of government. To resort to violence at this time would only discredit their movement, if not their cause. Should such violent acts occur, we believe that they would be penetrated by individuals frustrated with the [R. v. Morgentaler] Supreme Court decision and would

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therefore be investigated by the police. This of course does not preclude csis from keeping informed of social and political issued [sic] and pass to the law enforcement authorities information of a criminal nautre [sic] that the Service might learn while conducting its mandated investigations.107 Regardless of the appearance of tolerance and greater sophistication in terms of targeting, there is a strong element of double standard – in addition to the use of the term “Pro-Life” – contained in this rationale for the lack of attention paid to the anti-abortion movement. Less than two years after this was written, attacks on abortion clinics and abortion providers in Canada, including arson, assault, and attempted murder, would begin.108 Despite the continuity between the csis and the rcmp security service, the rationale offered in 1988 for not investigating potentially violent anti-abortion extremists was never applied earlier to the women liberationists and others who campaigned tirelessly and peacefully to change existing abortion laws. The fact that anti-abortionists had the ear of various levels of governments clearly meant, from the perspective of the csis author, that their movement had a legitimacy which state security never afforded to a women’s liberation movement that challenged the highest levels of government. The women’s liberation movement outlived its secret antagonists and changed Canada profoundly, but it did so while being resisted by security agencies that supposedly exist to protect the democratic freedoms of all.

6 The Paradox of the Mountie Bounty

This book, which is based upon thousands of pages of Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) intelligence files pertaining to the women’s liberation movement in Canada, allows that having even fettered access to government documents through Canada’s 1985 Access to Information Act and the corresponding 1983 Privacy Act (atip) is a good thing. Such a statement does not deny the complications, complexities, and contradictions inherent in the process of working with such declassified files. At a numerical level, it appears that we, the co-authors, had a veritable abundance of surveillance reports and appended material to peruse. Yet, despite this Mountie bounty,1 there were so many gaps in the information contained therein that we counsel readers to be as circumspect as we must be about the preceding chapters. The surveillance file, as academics Margaret Henderson and Alexandra Winter have observed in the Australian context, is “fragmentary, repetitive, and delusory” and, therefore, symptomatic of the “political paranoia” of state security agencies ever on the lookout for a growing list of subversives.2 Consequently, although this book is not a work of literary fiction, we can be viewed as “unreliable narrators.”3 This is not because, in the postmodern sense, absolute truths do not exist, or because we are untrustworthy scholars, or because we have attempted to blend together our separate research interests in state security and second-wave feminist sexual and reproductive politics and have fallen short. Rather, it is because researchers must treat Mounted Police surveillance files, or any state security records for that matter, as archival productions of a national security state, recognizing that their fractured nature means that our rendition of the stories they tell are, if not fictitious, then fragile. This chapter represents, therefore, an opportunity to reflect in hindsight upon three interconnected critical ethical challenges we faced when working with these documents as researchers and co-authors. First, there

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are the implications of writing a history of rcmp security-service surveillance of the women’s liberation movement in Canada, in which surveillance reports are subject to censorship by the state and in which some of the appended material is produced by a state agency carrying out surveillance against women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities, including through infiltration by informants. Second, there are serious concerns about the privacy of surveillance targets, given that the surveillance files sometimes contain, in contravention of Privacy Act rules, uncensored names and/or personal details about individuals involved in women’s liberation, however directly or tangentially. Some of these individuals are still alive and were spied upon by informants. Third, material appended to the surveillance files, meaning documents that are related to women’s liberation, is rarely censored, and constitutes a treasure trove of ephemera. This material is especially valuable to researchers, because it is not always on the public record. Given the prevalence of informants within these groups, however, there is a possibility that they could have had a hand in collecting and creating some of this material – such as pamphlets or position papers – that are retained on file. Surveillance reports are, in many cases, heavily censored when declassified, and contain information solicited by a state agency carrying out surveillance, often through the use of informants. Because this information was presented to rcmp readers and packaged for the consumption of their superiors, the reports cannot necessarily be trusted in terms of the accuracy of their observations and assessments. Furthermore, the surveillance reports have been subject to a series of deletions large and small under atip, the very same legislation that supposedly allows researchers access to information. Making sense of the words that remain after portions of sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages or reams of pages are deleted is akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without an original image to guide the activity. During the writing of this book, it was difficult not to think throughout of the “puzzle women” in the former Stasi headquarters, toiling diligently to piece together in archeological fashion the remnants of millions of surveillance files that the former East German government shredded as it teetered on the brink of collapse after the fall of the Berlin Wall.4 Both of us have experienced our own share of frustrations with this kind of censorship (as have several other researchers5) but Hewitt far more so than Sethna, as he works more regularly with such documents.

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Interestingly, Hewitt observes that there appears to be a greater number of deletions and exemptions than when he began his research on the rcmp in 1991. The dates of the surveillance reports do not seem connected to this development. Instead, cynically, this development may represent a reaction against a range of critical scholarship about the rcmp security service and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis) that has appeared since the 1990s. Thus, censorship becomes an exercise not in championing Canadian security but in insulating institutions and brands from negative publicity. Perhaps more troubling, less information being released may simply be the result of a lack of historical memory on the part of those doing the censoring. The censors may simply not know about the past of the institutions collecting the surveillance reports or those groups and individuals they targeted. Regardless, the result is a distorted vision of the past that deliberately prevents Canadians and others from ever having anything but an incomplete knowledge of what was being done at home by domestic state security in the name of safeguarding democracy. Hewitt’s experience gives added weight to historian Gregory Kealey’s assertion that scholars requesting such reports should be “forewarned that they will have to battle [csis] every step of the way,” even to access documents from as early as the 1920s,6 since csis and not Library and Archives Canada (lac) has final say as to what gets released. Deletions under section 13(1) of atip ensure that the government will not reveal the secrets of other governments and their agencies, because these revelations might unearth secrets of its own. Hence, governments will wage extensive campaigns to block the accessing of such files. This was seen in 2009 and 2010 in the United Kingdom over the release of counter-terrorism information supplied by the Central Intelligence Agency (cia) and in past years by the US government to impede the release of records within the Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) file on John Lennon that had been supplied to it by British intelligence.7 Under section 15(1), csis is permitted to remove anything it deems to be “injurious” to the national security of Canada and to “the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities.” This could include evidence of the use, lack of use, or the sophistication of technical sources, even if occurring as far back as before the Second World War. Such information is deemed secret, runs the logic of deletion, since it could offer an indication to Canada’s enemies of the technical capabilities of do-

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mestic security, through an extrapolation to the present based on what was available in the distant past. Significantly, section 15(1) also includes protections for informants, namely concealing in perpetuity the identities of informants. Consequently, the declassified surveillance reports identify informants only as “source” or “reliable source,” and information in them can be deleted if it points in some way to the identity of the informant. This is the main reason why csis and various governments have fought continuously to stop the complete opening of files, as in the well-publicized legal case surrounding names in dormant files, such as that of the former premier of Saskatchewan and leader of the federal New Democratic Party (ndp), Tommy Douglas, revered as the “Greatest Canadian” for his support of universal health care. During the Supreme Court trial over the release of the Douglas dossier, which consists of 1,142 pages, a representative from csis admitted that, if famed Métis leader Gabriel Dumont had been an informant for the government of Canada at the time of the 1885 Rebellion, csis might continue to censor documents into the twenty-first century to obscure this fact. As csis itself has admitted, the reality is that concealing the identities of informants, whether dead or alive, is less about safety issues and more about ensuring the future recruitment of informants to carry out domestic surveillance based on the fact that their identities will remain secret. In other words, people will not inform if they have to worry that their actions might one day be revealed.8 Section 19(1) deals with the release of personal information about individuals who are still living or who have been deceased for less than twenty years, and is governed by the restrictions imposed by the Privacy Act. The researcher must prove that the individual in the document has been deceased for more than twenty years before the individual’s name can be released. In the case of little-known individuals or individuals who have changed their names, the task is labour intensive. It requires guesswork in the first place, for, if the name is completely or partially censored, it is difficult to determine the person’s identity in order to make a case for the release of the name. Then there is content that has been obtained from other governments, such as records from the fbi or the cia or their equivalents in other countries linked to Canada through the intelligence world. In general, csis expends more effort on defending the operations of security forces, including a long-dead one in the form of

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the rcmp security service, as opposed to protecting the identities of those targeted for surveillance by said force, many of whom may still be alive. Understandably, the issue of privacy has received a great deal of attention, not only after Edward Snowden revealed the extent of spying on government and individual communications by a range of security agencies, but also because of the general sense that the privacy of ordinary individuals with no connection to security threats is endangered by the globalization of surveillance networks and the increase in technologies of surveillance in the everyday.9 When dealing with the past as well, privacy concerns abound. It can be particularly upsetting when individuals still living, whose names and/or personal details appear in these files, discover that they were targets of state surveillance conducted at times by unnamed informants who may well have been their long-ago or current colleagues, friends, or even partners. Perhaps the best-known account of someone learning that they had been a target of state surveillance is Timothy Garton Ash’s memoir The File: A Personal History. Claiming, “a file opens a door to a vast sunken labyrinth of a forgotten past,” Ash uses the broadened powers of access to Stasi surveillance documents to reassess the time he spent in East Germany, and to question informants who passed along information about him to the secret police. Ash, who can afford to be somewhat detached emotionally from his investigation, given that he is a British national and a well-known scholar internationally, acknowledges that, for everyday East Germans who have made similar discoveries, past surveillance can do to serious damage to relationships in the present. Indeed, Hewitt has emphasized that “[s]urveillance does not affect everyone equally,” because a surveillance target who is privileged in society by means of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, or religion may experience surveillance as objectionable, but not necessarily as intrusive or dramatic in its consequences.10 We discovered that there was a serious unevenness in shielding the identities and/or personal information of those targets of surveillance. The deviation from this approach applied obviously to informants, but also to Mounties below the level of senior officers, who were doing the spying, or to anyone who might still be active with the rcmp or csis. In other words, csis and lac protected the identities of the spies, while inadvertently revealing, contrary to legislation, the names of some of those being spied on. In that sense, institutions of the Canadian state can

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be said to revictimize the targets of state security surveillance. Remarkably little reflection over the issue of privacy has occurred in nations like Canada with atip legislation, as opposed to former Communist countries, which had extensive labyrinths of informants in Eastern Europe. In turn, these revelations have led to major clashes over informants’ records and extensive regulations around access to them in some countries and their politicized use in others.11 One option, of course, would be for the records to remain closed and possibly even be destroyed, in order to protect the privacy of those who appear in the documents. Such actions would, however, constitute the worst possible outcome, since it would allow the security state to escape without scrutiny and remain unaccountable for its activities. Furthermore, it also runs the risk of providing “power to the new myth makers, in particular, any demagogue who wants to make up a past.”12 This point is reinforced by historian Carolyn Elkins, who found that the British government purposefully destroyed, removed, and withheld archival evidence of the torture and murder of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya. Similar practices occurred in regard to other former British colonies, and involved the participation of British state security agencies.13 From the perspective of writer and art historian Charles Merewether, to “permit file destruction is to endorse the powers of secrecy and erasure that repressive regimes have exercised over their citizens.” A researcher, according to Merewether, must “intervene and appropriate the records not only in order to expose the falsifications and erasures they embodied but to offer a re-elaboration, a working through. Access to the archive and the critical dissemination of its contents are ethical actions.”14 Rachel Beattie, a scholar of Library Science, in writing about the Stasi, goes so far as to argue, in words that appear as sacrilege in an era of increasing emphasis on individuality and privacy, that “records are so essential for redress from crimes committed by the record creators that they trump privacy rights.”15 On the other hand, leaving the Stasi model aside, should security files be completely open to researchers in a Canadian context? The authors of this book split on this issue, which led us to grapple at times over how to present the information in the surveillance reports. Hewitt would argue in favour of transparency, holding that the records should be uncensored, so that all can see what the Canadian security state did against those in Canada, dead or alive, for nearly a century. Sethna would encourage

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paying more careful attention to privacy matters, acknowledging the possible harmful impact of the documents on security-state targets who discover haphazardly that their names and/or personal details appear in the surveillance reports. A few years ago, when news broke that we had found mention of Rita MacNeil in surveillance files related to women’s liberation activism, the popular songstress was reported to be “flabbergasted.” The famous songstress and recipient of the Order of Canada was quoted as saying: “I find it kind of bizarre, given what we were doing … When I look back, I can’t recall anything that would have been a threat to anyone. To think that we were being watched – it’s a surprise.”16 Like Garton Ash, the late MacNeil was well-known enough at the time the news broke to have the luxury of experiencing astonishment, or possibly even pride – rather than trauma – at the sudden knowledge that she had been a surveillance target for however short or long a period of time. However, we did nothing to alert MacNeil ahead of the public disclosure. MacNeil’s response led Sethna to reflect more deeply on the issue of privacy in regard to surveillance files. So too did her research on women who travel to access abortion services within Canada, which has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc). It is, therefore, subject to strict guidelines in the Tri-Council Policy Statement, which applies to research funded by sshrc and governs the ethics of conducting research involving live humans. These guidelines are meant to reduce the risk of harm to live humans when they are recruited as research subjects. Informed consent, anonymity, and confidentiality are, therefore, paramount to research study designs from their very inception.17 Neither of us is keen on placing additional restrictions on the process of declassifying surveillance files. Sethna views privacy in regard to targets of surveillance, however, as a delicate matter that may fall through the cracks of atip legislation, the Privacy Act, and Tri-Council guidelines, making it incumbent upon researchers to handle the information released to them with care. Some archivists have raised similar concerns. In their comparative study of the disposition of surveillance files, Katherine M. Wisser and Joel A. Blanco-Rivera ask: “[r]egardless of the access policy, are archives also placing the privacy of individuals in these files at risk?”18 These questions are not unique to researchers working on surveillance files. In a related fashion, New Zealand biographer Michael King muses compellingly about the possibility of es-

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tablishing “ground rules” for the practice of writing about biographees. He examines what information should remain private or be made public, and goes even further by asking what, if anything, is owed to the biographee’s living relatives.19 Matters came to a head after we perused one particular surveillance report. In it, an informant provided information about a male activist, identified by his full name, who was approached by a woman friend, also identified by her full name, about her suspected unwanted pregnancy. The male activist gave his woman friend the name of a women’s liberation group to which she could go for assistance, and the suggested price of an abortion. Quoting directly from this exchange would provide additional exciting proof of the embedding of informants in the political and personal lives of surveillance targets – and, by extension, their associates, most of whom are likely still alive. Yet including their names, or eliminating their names but citing the file and page number reference for the above exchange, could lead to the outing of private information that is potentially still sensitive, over and above the knowledge that these two individuals were spied upon. In a real sense, the woman in question has been victimized three times. There is the targeting of her by the state because of her association, however tangential, with the main surveillance target. There is the private information shared with the state by an informant whom the woman may have known. And then, years later, there is the revelation of that private information through the atip process. There is no need for researchers to revictimize surveillance targets by invading their privacy once more. Because we were torn between transparency and privacy, we compromised by agreeing, on a case-by-case basis, not to use the names of some surveillance targets listed in the surveillance reports, especially if they may still be living, while revealing some details of a personal nature. In the aforementioned example about the woman facing an unwanted pregnancy, we did not include any reference to the file in which the information was found, the only such instance in this book. When individuals had high public profiles, or were in prominent positions within organizations, we included their names. Hewitt has long believed in greater openness for surveillance files. But what might documents in Record Group (rg) 146, the record group of csis and its rcmp security-service forerunner, look like if they were not censored at all? What secrets would emerge if they migrated to researchers intact? What lies behind the Wizard of Oz–like curtain shrouding our

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view of the classified page? As co-authors, we can offer only partial answers beyond the hypothetical, as one of the remarkable things to happen to us while writing this book was receiving the result of an atip request we made for the 1970s records of the Ligue des femmes du Québec (lfq). The lfq focused its energies on women, unions, and immigrant working women. It was Communist dominated, and in some ways, was an adjunct of the Quebec Communist Party, which brought it to the attention of the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. Its influence was limited as far as the general public was concerned, but it “kept the feminist cause alive” in Quebec in the 1950s, and in the 1960s was part of the “vast network of women’s organizations [that] came to challenge the religious and patriarchal interests of a previous era” in the province.20 Although the lfq did raise issues important to women, the group was not part of the women’s liberation movement that is the overall focus of this book. Regardless, Hewitt and Sethna requested the group’s rcmp files for background information, and received a surprise through the post. One segment of the group’s rcmp security-service file, volumes 6, 7, and 8, covering 1 February 1973 to 31 December 1977, contained 513 pages without a single excision! We soon realized, with some disappointment, that this was not the result of a startling new openness in Ottawa but because of a mistake either on the part of the lac or csis or both. While researchers occasionally benefit from such blunders on a page-by-page basis, this is the first occasion that we know of in the atip era where an entire rg 146 request has been released without having segments redacted first. What state secrets did this unexpected gift disclose? All of the different file categories and specific file numbers for groups and individuals contained within the rcmp security-service reports are often uncensored. However, this is hardly an earth-shattering revelation, since Hewitt’s earlier research has already divulged considerable detail about the rcmp security-service filing system, which obviously bears no relation to the current system used by csis.21 The documents also confirm an extremely close partnership between the rcmp security service, the Montreal City Police, and the provincial police of Quebec, the Sûreté du Québec. This partnership involved the sharing of informants, including the reports and intelligence generated by them. The rcmp security service equally enjoyed a close relationship with other federal government departments, which included both the sharing of information about targeted groups

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and individuals and the acquisition of information from the federal government. Even the telephone company chipped in through a liaison officer who, in an era before electronic database searches, supplied the force with the telephone numbers of targeted individuals.22 No, the real revelation within the uncensored documents, and the primary reason that decades-old records continue to be censored in the twenty-first century, are interrelated: the security service did not use mainly technological surveillance, as many may have believed, but informants to carry out its surveillance; in turn, csis heavily censors documents in order to cover up this fact and to remove clues as to the identities of informants. The involvement of informants, typically removed under atip, is visible in the “Sources” section of surveillance reports, in which the reporting Mountie provides the origins of the information contained within. Even if this section is excised under atip, trace evidence of the involvement of an informant might remain in the report, but researchers would have no way of ascertaining whether more than one informant was involved in a particular report or whether it was the same person across multiple reports. Normally, the actual names of informants are not listed in any of the reports. Instead, references are made to information supplied by a “reliable source” with a code name appearing in the “Sources” section of the report. The code names often indicate the point of origin or control of a human source. Many of the human sources employed within these particular reports have the prefix “mc,” which stands for Montreal City, and indicates that the sources originated with and/or were still being shared with Montreal Police or were just based in that city. In 1973 alone, twenty distinct Montreal-based informants with the designation mc, followed by a code number, supplied information to the Mounted Police about the lfq or its members on at least one occasion. Across the entire 513 pages, 85 per cent of rcmp reports list an informant in the Sources section of the report, with 9 per cent of the reports mentioning multiple informants. Several of the informants were regular contributors, supplying intimate details of the group’s operations, including documents and future plans. As a result, the police occupied a position of omniscience courtesy of their hidden assistants, some of whom clearly held executive positions in the lfq. In addition to these twenty sources, in 1973 information arrived from the Toronto area via informants codenamed os, indicating that they were operated by the security

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service out of the rcmp’s “O” Division. Finally, one individual was designated as sa 212a, seemingly indicating a “special” or “secret” agent who appears to have operated as a high-level and long-term penetration source on the executive of the Quebec Communist Party. The Mounties who wrote the reports continually warned their readers, “no action should be taken which may jeopardize our source.”23 Despite the fact that the informant supplying the details is identified only through a code, the reports sometimes provide strong clues as to his or her identity. If a particular individual consistently appears in the same report as a specific informant, for example, then that is strong evidence that the informant is either the person in question or someone extremely close to that individual, with knowledge of intimate details of his or her life. To reference a specific illustration, there are two versions available of a report on a group of women from the lfq going to the World Congress of Women in East Berlin in 1975. In the excised version, the following passage is removed: “On September 30, 1975, our reliable source informed having been in temporary possession of the following telegram sent to Berlin by Laurette Sloan.”24 Laurette Chrétien Sloan, president of the lfq from 1975 to 1985, who died in 2009, is repeatedly mentioned in reports in which the source of information is an informant codenamed mc 222. In fact, she appears by name in thirtysix of thirty-seven reports in which mc 222 is listed as the source of the information, with the only exception being a report detailing conversations repeated by a companion to a “reliable source.”25 Thanks to mc 222, detailed aspects of Sloan’s life and activities were available to the rcmp, as evident in this police report from 18 May 1973: 1. On May 14, 1973 Laurette Sloan informed our reliable source that she had made reservations for four persons on the cn Rapido Car #6508 to Toronto for Friday 18–5–73 at 4:30 P.M. Sloan mentioned that the four persons going to Toronto are: Herself (Laurette Sloan) Dora Brenton (27094) Vitorina Bronzatti (34767) Beatrice Ferneyhough (3330) Sloan pointed out that the four persons are paying their own fare and that she (Sloan), Bronzatti and Ferneyhough would be returning

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to Montreal on Sunday 20-5-73 via cn Rapido Car #6403 at 4:30 P.M.; While Brenton will be returning on Monday 21-5-73.26 And mc 222 appears as the source for information about the travel plans of Sloan’s husband, Edward: 1. On March 12, 1973 Edward Sloan (9760) informed our reliable source and Laurette Sloan (13944) that the Canadian delegation to Moscow for the preparatory meeting would leave from New York City for Moscow on Wednesday March 15, 1973 at 8:00 p.m.27 Collectively, these uncensored reports reiterate the importance of informants to surveillance carried out against women. Surveillance reports, which included the input of informants, were intended to provide evidence of left-wing subversion and of the violent potential of subversives. And because the pack rat–like Mounties sought out every possible scrap of information about their surveillance targets in order to keep tabs on them, they appended large amounts of material to those reports. In the surveillance files pertaining to the women’s liberation movement, the appended material consists of pamphlets, letters, briefs, posters, minutes of meetings, newsletters, funding applications, poems, song lyrics, schedules of events, position papers, cartoons, sketches, mainstream women’s and left-wing newspaper clippings, and popular magazine articles. Some of this material, such as newspaper and magazine clippings and articles, is on the public record and reflects a heightened interest in the women’s liberation movement on the part of the popular and alternative press. However, a considerable amount is obscure and not easily traceable or retainable, a problem that researchers seeking records of the women’s liberation movement have already encountered.28 Nor should this type of material be dismissed as merely ephemera. It represents the diverse and prodigious textual output of women’s liberationists to understand in revolutionary ways the depth and breadth of women’s oppression and to report on their progress toward gender equality, thereby making a major contribution to feminist literary cultures.29 Indeed, the appended material appears to be an unusual textual archive, apart from the surveillance reports. “What counts as an archive?” asks Antoinette Burton in her Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House,

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Home, and History in Late Colonial India. For Burton, an archive constitutes “traces of the past collected either intentionally or haphazardly as ‘evidence.’”30 Other scholars have suggested: An archive might be an official repository of state records, it might be a private collection of papers, or it may be a means of bringing together materials related to a specific group or agency. It might be easily accessible, for instance, freely available online, or it might require that visitors make some effort, or travel some distance, to view its contents. It might be restricted to certain people, or it might be closed altogether, whether permanently or for a defined period. Visitors might require permission or documentation to access it, they might be obliged to conform to certain protocols, or they might use an online search facility.31 Burton’s searching question emerges out of decades of scholarship devoted to exploring the shifting landscape of the archive. For Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, archives are physical or metaphorical spaces associated with the preservation of disciplinary power.32 The needs of empire, European state formation, and nation-building are implicated in the growth of the disciplinary power rulers wielded over individuals and populations through official records that were kept secret as a means of protecting the state from subversives.33 In Canada, historian Steven Maynard calls specific attention to the materialist nexus between police and archives, raising issues of queerness, public access, and accountability. Researcher Joan Schwartz and archivist Terry Cook insist that the “unlikely troika” of archives, records, and power are profoundly implicated in public-policy debates around the right to know, freedom of information, and privacy protections. Military historian Tim Cook elaborates upon the weighty, but largely invisible, role archivists play in selecting, categorizing, and managing archival documents. And in a collection edited by Isabelle Perreault and Marie-Claude Thifault, contributors point to the methodological difficulties and rewards of writing about individuals living on the margins of society, who may appear in and disappear from official archival records.34 Whether or not archives are considered to be institutions or metaphors for collective memory, archives are said to generate what Derrida, using a Freudian interpretation of the archive, labels “archive fever.” For Der-

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rida, archive fever was a “subconscious and always-already doomed desire for the originary, or worse, a violent playing out of the ‘death drive,’” while for Foucault, it represented a passionate and embodied “longing to pursue archival research simply for the love of dusty old documents.”35 Civil-rights lawyer Albie Sachs observes that, in post-apartheid South Africa, those who opposed the racist white minority government are now victimized by a Derridaesque virulent strain of archive fever. Brutalized at first by the regime’s National Intelligence Service, opponents now tussle feverishly over the conflicted meanings of the vast spy archive the nis accumulated: To begin with the documents are as partial as you can get. They were documents that were collected by a ruling minority, confident and assured in relation to its right to rule, and not only to rule but in the right to record their own history, the story of the world in which they functioned, from their own point of view, which they saw as the natural point of view. As for the majority of the population, they weren’t agents of history, they were subjects of anthropology. They didn’t live in time, but existed as units of unchanging social structures. And if any information at all was collected from what were called the native people, it was assembled not with the view to understanding their society as it understood itself, but with a view to more effective administration through cooptation, control and subordination. And so this apparently neutral collection of documents called the archive immediately appears to be as partial as you can get. The silences become far more dramatic than the speech, the absences from the record more resonant than anything you read. You want to know what has been left out but how do we find out what’s not there? How can we interpret what is there without knowing about the silences and the gaps? And to make it worse, huge quantities of these documents that would seem to be particularly revealing were destroyed, deliberately intentionally destroyed, to ensure that the picture that came through was a partial picture of a partial picture. Can you be surprised that your head seems split and your vision blurred?36 Sachs’s poignant diagnosis of archive fever is impossible to override. Yet it must be said that the same strain of archive fever that infected the

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rcmp’s security service has unwittingly created an enviable collection of documents valuable to feminist history that threaten to contaminate us with Foucault’s passionate and embodied longing for the archives. Professor of English Linda Morra, employing a coy conceptual twist, distinguishes between two types of archives. “Arrested” archives uphold male authority and “sanction and render visible certain individuals, but also vigilantly control those records with which individuals are associated.” “Unarrested” archives refer to documents that are rarely kept in formal institutions, escape notice, or involve social and political mobilizations. These are associated with women, because the “omission of women and women’s contributions from sites of knowledge production suggests both partial and limited ways of knowing their histories and experiences, which were otherwise mediated and governed by patriarchy and dominant culture.”37 Although they are critical to safeguarding the historical record of women’s activism, archives relevant to second-wave feminism, like collections related to gay and lesbian history, are often small, scattered, under-resourced, or sheltered in libraries as part of “archives and special collections.”38 Moreover, women involved in such activism may not even have been aware of the need to preserve evidence of that activism for posterity. Cora Weiss, an American peace activist who participated in the 1971 Indochinese Conference, remarked: “We never for a moment thought we were making history, we never put the year or the date on posters, fliers or notices … come on Monday, it would say, come on Monday, January 10th, no year … no way to preserve anything for archives, for history.”39 In this fashion, women’s archives are said to be promising, because in preserving and providing access to women’s histories and intellectual, political, and cultural materials, they signal the possibility of women’s emancipation.40 Therefore, it is no small irony that the targeting of women’s liberation for state surveillance, often using human sources as informants, resulted in a collection of primary sources concerning organizations about which little is known, or which existed only for short periods, that is now housed within the records of the rcmp’s security service at the lac. After reviewing the work of several scholars of women’s archives, authors Maryanne Dever, Sally Newman, and Anne Vickery validate the cultural significance of ephemera to discovering how women lived out their intimate emotions in the past.41 For her own research, Ann Cvetkovich,

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a professor of women’s and gender studies, uses a wide array of ephemera from several archives and sources, such as photographs, letters, journals, monuments, films, novels, essays, and performances, as “a point of entry unto a vast archive of feelings, the many forms of love, rage, intimacy, grief, shame, and more that are part of the vibrancy of queer cultures.”42 A similar emotional habitus is likewise evident in the appended material. To the security service of the rcmp, it might have represented potentially valuable data about subversives on the left. But while much of the appended material brims with anger about women’s oppression, there is no smoking gun related to subversion against the state. Rather, in addition to expressions of anger over women’s oppression, there is also curiosity, sensuality, irreverence, confidence, humour, and optimism arising from the women’s ideologies, idealism, camaraderie, and experience. This gamut of emotion, feminist theorist Claire Hemmings posits, “gives feminism its life,” such that feminist activism is based on the intertwining of intellectual output and affective interaction.43 In contrast to the surveillance reports, appended material is rarely censored, remains relatively intact, and is the most readily available to researchers. Its textual variety is evident. One atip request that we made yielded a declassified surveillance file of 208 pages on women’s liberation in Saskatoon. A total of eighty-three pages have been excised entirely, sometimes in large chunks of up to a dozen pages. Moreover, entire paragraphs, sentences, or portions of sentences from each surveillance report contained in the file are redacted; in one instance, a five-page surveillance report dated 17 April 1970 is almost completely blank, save for a few scattered remarks and this concluding comment from the investigator, which includes the last names of two surveillance targets: The formation of the Saskatoon local of the W.L.G. [women’s liberation group] would indicate that it has become firmly established in Saskatoon. Present indications are this group will continue to become involved in various activities, under the guidance of kopperud, mahood, etal [sic]. Should Headquarters be in agreement, may we have a file number, please.44 The appended material in this file consists of thirty-six pages; occasionally some were stamped “confidential” or “secret.” The material includes clippings of articles from mainstream newspapers like the

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Saskatoon Star-Phoenix and the Ottawa Citizen, but also from the alternative press, namely The Pedestal, The Sheaf, and Labor Challenge, representing the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc), the students of the University of Saskatchewan, and the Trotskyist League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso), respectively.45 The newspaper clippings in this surveillance file refer variously to topics including abortion, the Abortion Caravan, discrimination against Indigenous women, the need for contraception on campus, and a women’s liberation movement conference, and are in some way related to the surveillance reports. The author of the article from Labor Challenge, Karen Kopperud, was presumably the surveillance target identified by last name in the aforementioned surveillance report. In her article, Kopperud endorsed the Saskatchewan ndp, because it had “no commitments to the big business interests that are responsible for and profit from the oppression of women. As the party of the working class, it is responsible to those forces which can change the basis of this society that oppresses women.” She praised the ndp’s platform as conducive to women’s liberation, because it included accessibility to free birth control, abortion services, and child care; education that avoided sex-role stereotyping; and labour reforms like equal pay for work of equal value.46 Kopperud’s involvement in women’s liberation, the publication of her article in a Trotskyist newspaper, and her show of support for a provincial socialist party may have marked her as a triple threat to the rcmp security service. Also of interest are: a poster advertising a women’s liberation “First Regular Meeting of the Year 1970” and noting “All Women Welcome,” providing another indication of the openness of women’s liberation groups to all comers; a notice of women’s liberation meetings on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., with a parenthetical caveat “(Meetings are open to women only unless otherwise specified),” indicating yet again that women informants were needed to spy on single-sex assemblies; and a 1973 agenda for a Saskatchewan Conference on Abortion Law Repeal, featuring workshops on the legal and psychological aspects of abortion and an address about “ideas on dealing with anti-abortion forces,” demonstrating key preoccupations of second-wave feminist activists.47 Available too is a brief to the federal minster of health, John Munro, from the Saskatoon Women’s Liberation Movement [swlm]. Dated 17 April 1970, just three weeks before the Abortion Caravan reached Ottawa, the brief railed against Canada’s abortion laws, because they

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denied “adequate care to women who, through failure of imperfect contraceptive techniques, become pregnant against their wills. They deny women the most basic of human and personal rights – that of control over one’s own body and the choice of motherhood.” The brief called not only for the repeal of the abortion law but also for maternal and child health clinics funded by the public purse. These health services would assist a woman who wanted to carry to term or terminate her pregnancy, thereby supporting her “in the role of a responsible, choicemaking individual.”48 Another document, this time a six-page single-spaced position paper for the swlm, dated 14 October 1977, observed that, despite a “reactivation” of a women’s movement in Canada after a number of economic crises, “women remain superexploited [sic] in the workforce and subjugated in the family.” The position paper held that the swlm had to build an organization with elected leadership, established tasks, a communication network, democratic debate, voting, and majority decision-making. Taken in hindsight, these measures were intended to avoid the pitfalls of operating by consensus, which meant, according to the unnamed authors of the position paper, that: there was no clear recognition that political differences would inevitably spring up inside the women’s movement and that there had to be a mechanism for dealing with these differences without jeopardizing the movement. Consensus tended to deny the existence of these differences and to impose a superficial unity based on a rather apolitical notion of sisterhood. Arguments about the strategic direction of the movement once they did emerge, tended to have a rather destructive dynamic. They often took the form of personality conflicts and power struggles which were seen in largely personalist [sic] terms. The result, we now see, was damaging, unnecessarily so. This admission demonstrated that, some years after the heady beginnings of the women’s liberation movement, feminist activists were taking stock of their growing pains to build a more effective political organization, given the tendency of women’s liberation groups to fracture. Ironically, the position paper concluded by identifying socialist feminism as the sole political orientation of Saskatoon women’s liberation, insisting

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“women’s true liberation will occur only under socialism, and that socialism will only be established with the liberation of women.”49 Another declassified surveillance file, this time on the Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc), contains 115 pages, forty-six of which have been excised. The rcmp security service was extremely suspicious of this women’s liberation group, assessing it as “Trotskyist controlled” until April 1972, “when they [Trotskyists] were eventually purged from the organization by the non-subversive element.”50 Furthermore, the twc opposed American hostilities in Vietnam, virtually ensuring that it would remain on national-security radar. Noted in this rather lyrical passage from a surveillance report was the presence of the twc alongside the Communist Party of Canada, the Canadian Peace Congress, the Canadian Party of Labour, and the Vietnam Mobilization Committee: On 13 May 72 surveillance conducted between the hours of 1:15 pm and 4:30 pm at the United States Condulate [sic], University Avenue, Toronto, revealed a demonstration in protest against the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The demonstrators, who at the height of the demonstration numbered approximately 300, ranged in age from ten to seventy years of age. Under a cloudless sun-filled sky, which sent temperatures soaring into the seventies [Fahrenheit], dozens of curious onlookers gathered and watched the proceedings from the East side of University Avenue while the protestors, readily aware of a visible and invisible Metropolitan Police contingent, marched peacefully back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the consulate. They carried placards which denounced the escalation of the war and under the careful direction of their marshalls [sic], who carried bullhorns and other loud-speaking devices, they chanted slogans such as: Stop the Bombing-Lift the Blockade No Deals, Get Out Now U.S. Imperialism Get Out of South East Asia U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Canada U.S. Imperialism Get Out of Quebec Unite, Fight, Support the Quebec Strike Escalate People’s War.51

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The appended material in this surveillance file consists of a total of thirty-six pages, which at times were stamped “confidential.” Many one-page documents on file were related to twc recruitment drives, with slogans like “Help build women’s liberation! Sisterhood is powerful!”52 Also available is a four-page, single-spaced discussion paper by Lis Angus, which centred on the Velvet Fist, the twc’s newspaper. Angus stated that, although the newspaper had been successful in educating and mobilizing women around “feminist issues,” it should now serve as the mouthpiece for a cross-country campaign to repeal the abortion law. “We have become aware,” wrote Angus, “of the crucial role that the issue of abortion law repeal is playing; it is now apparent to us that this is the vehicles [sic] that is broadening the women’s movement out into all sectors of society, and uniting women organizationally into a cross-country campaign against one aspect of their oppression – for the first time since the suffrage struggle.”53 This may have been ideology or idealism at play; regardless, Angus later withdrew her proposal for the Velvet Fist in a two-page, single-spaced reply to those twc women who objected to making abortion the central focus of the group.54 Several items gave an indication of what twc women were reading, no doubt for consciousness-raising meetings, in order to theorize about their experiences as women. Included is an eleven-page, single-spaced essay, “Women in Evolution,” written by anthropologist Kathleen Gough Aberle. Aberle had attended the Indochinese Conference a year earlier.55 In her essay, she deemed capitalist society incompatible with gender equality and claimed that the women’s liberation movement was at home within the New Left because it was “organically related to the great movements of our time, against war, imperialism, racism, genocide and man-made poverty.” At the end of the essay, she made two special pleas. The first was for middle-class feminists to take the suffering of working-class women into greater account, and her second was for men to accept women as their equals. However, she acknowledged that women, “like Black Americans or American Indians,” had to “organize separately and struggle against radical men in certain contexts.”56 Another item, actually the preface to a well-respected book, Sex and Racism, by Calvin C. Hernton, furthered discussion of the complex interaction between race and gender. In his analysis of mixed-race heterosexual

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relationships, Hernton intoned powerfully: “what black and white people mean to each other sexually, and what we mean to ourselves sexually – both are inevitably affected by living in a racist society.”57 A folder of “Women’s Poetry,” selling for ten cents, also appeared on file. These earnest, amateurish-to-bad poems too were stamped “confidential.” The authors of some of the poems were anonymous, and most of the poetry dealt with the difficulties women faced in heterosexual relationships. One such poem insisted: “I am not in this world to love down to your expectations / your flirtations / your imitations / to abide by your decisions / to accept your derision / of my decisions / to believe your accusation / of castration.” Another poem by “Paul Dickin,” most likely a false name, that derogated heterosexual sexual intercourse, described the reaction of a man performing cunnilingus on a lover who has used a commercial vaginal deodorant: “Crude oil! I claw upwards mouth burning / Clambering over you out of bed / retching with the acrid taste on my tongue / I spit, drink, spit, drink, drink, spit / the foul chemical away.” At the bottom of the poem was added an angry comment aimed at the man in the poem: “Well tough shit. Ruined a good fuck, eh? If it [commercial vaginal deodorant] did that to your mouth, toots, just think what it did to her insides!!!”58 Sexual pleasure for women was the main topic of one article, also stamped “confidential,” and contained in the appended material. The author, Leah Fritz, lauded the clitoris as “a thing of joy,” declaring boldly that its central role in female sexuality “is a boon to women’s liberationists who have always insisted on the woman’s right to seek her own satisfaction actively, not merely as a device for satisfying men. Women now have something to demand from men in bed other than fucking, because fucking will seldom produce a clitoral orgasm.”59 A case could conceivably be made that the rcmp security service appended material to surveillance files whenever it related to surveillance targets. It is not clear, however, just why a poem about cunnilingus or an article about clitoral orgasms made the grade, unless these sexual practices were considered especially Trotskyist, or revolutionary, or lesbian, and therefore subversive. Certainly, some women’s liberation activists, particularly those of the radical persuasion, bridled at the Freudian notion that women’s clitoral orgasms were immature. In her radical feminist underground classic essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” American Anne Koedt upbraided men for upholding that myth partially out

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of the fear that they would become, as she put it, “sexually expendable” once women chose other women as sexual partners to focus on clitoral pleasure.60 Some women from the Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement refused to accept that women’s orgasms were either clitoral or vaginal, insisting instead upon a wide variety of sexual responses women would have when freed from myths of female passivity.61 It could be argued that the aforementioned appended material provided even more proof to the rcmp’s security service of the deviance of the women’s liberation movement. More prosaically, as Alex Danchev explains, “[f]iles are always hungry. Once opened, they demand to be fed.”62 Stricken with archive fever, the rcmp security service may not have understood why one document might be more pertinent than another, any more than it was able to evaluate accurately the threat to national security posed by women’s liberation groups like the twc. The obsessive amassing of a large cache of documents, presumably as evergrowing evidence of subversion on the left, may have helped to legitimize women’s liberation groups as a target for state surveillance. We had no luck with an atip request for rcmp files pertaining to the Front de libération des femmes (flf), a small-but-critical radical women’s liberation group, which supported the Front de libération du Québec (flq). We were told that no such file existed. Sethna followed up with a phone call to the lac in early 2014, requesting a double-check. The response was identical. When Sethna queried a staff member as to whether the flf file might have been “destroyed,” she was told diplomatically: “we don’t like to use that word.” We were more successful with an atip request for security service files related to Montreal Women’s Liberation (mwl). This surveillance file numbers 353 pages; of these, a total of 109 pages are excised (once in a chunk of thirty-five consecutive pages), while the appended material consists of 120 pages, including newspaper clippings from mainstream newspapers the Montreal Star and Montreal Gazette, as well as a handful of others from the alternative press. The majority of the file is in English, but a few surveillance reports and appended documents are in French. Some of these are translated into English, indicating that unilingual Anglophone rcmp inspectors were probably reading the file. Throughout, pages here and there are rendered virtually illegible due to the poor quality of reproduction. Some pages are stamped “top secret.” The flf most likely had its own surveillance file at some point, because its ghostly presence popped up every so often in this file.

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Thanks to an informant, at a 14 January 1971 meeting about feminist actions to be taken in Montreal, the surveillance report mentions the flf, with a deletion immediately after its name.63 Traditionally, this type of deletion refers to a file number that is censored once the surveillance file is declassified in preparation for release. The same or another informant learned two weeks later that mwl met on Wednesday nights, and the flf on Monday nights. The deletion after flf appears once again. The informant then allows that the mwl “is now at the point of being very close to splitting from the flf.”64 Other than appended material consisting of a few French and English newspaper articles and posters concerning the flf, the greatest amount of uncensored intelligence on this group appears in the lsa/lso internal bulletin of March 1970. This bulletin is discussed in Chapter 2. It contains a short report about lsa/lso activities around women’s liberation groups in specific cities across Canada, and appears whole or in parts in several surveillance files that Hewitt and Sethna encountered. In the lsa/lso report on women’s liberation in Montreal, the flf is described as a small group of Francophone women who might be ripe for Trotskyist intervention.65 However, when the rcmp security service officially assessed the state of the women’s liberation movement in Montreal in August of that year, the Mounties acknowledged that it was split between “French and English Sections”; it identified the French Section not as the flf but as the “Front commun des Québécoises” (fcq), supposedly “a separatist oriented group.” The rest of the rcmp assessment concentrated on the more Anglophone mwl, noting: “There are numerous political tendencies in this movement although it appears that the New Left is already well-installed in the English Group and that the Trotskyists are also making inroads with respect to the infiltration of this group.” The assessment held that, as a result of “the New Left Influence [sic], the English group has no formal structure of elected Executive” and, using terminology that was familiar in an anti-Communist framework, went on to list the first and last names of women they categorized as “Active members,” “Suspect members,” and “Sympathizers.” Another item that the assessment red-flagged was the group’s sharing of office space with the “American Deserters Committee” that assisted Vietnam War resisters from the United States. The assessment ended with a note about the need to acquire the group’s newsletters.66

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The inclusion of an article in the appended material from The Varsity, the main student newspaper for the University of Toronto, is particularly satiric in this context. It covered a teach-in sponsored in part by mwl. The topic was repression in Quebec in the wake of the War Measures Act. Gaston Therrien, an audience member, is reported as complaining that the Canadian government was not democratic, because it spied continually on Quebecers.67 Also included in the appended material was a mostly illegible Canadian passport application and censored photo for a woman born in Saskatchewan, who was most likely a member of mwl; a lengthy French-language article on socialism and women’s liberation by the lsa/lso; and a city permit for an International Women’s Day street demonstration about abortion.68 Two issues of a newsletter by mwl are included, indicating that the rcmp security service succeeded in acquiring them at some point. In an article from the first issue of the newsletter, dated March 1970, author Marie Henretta equates “male supremacy” with racism and imperialism, seeing it arise in marriage, anti-abortion legislation, and job discrimination against women. In response, she demanded a “revolution that is both feminist and socialist, in which there will be equal human beings creating a society in which all share freely.”69 Also advertised in this issue were consciousness-raising groups, with topics for discussion suggested by the New York Radical Feminists: – Discuss your relationships with men. Have you noticed any recurring patterns? – Have you ever felt that men have pressured you into sexual relationships? Have you ever lied about orgasm? – Discuss your relationships with other women. Do you compete with other women for men? Growing up as a girl, were you treated differently from your brother? – What would you most like to do in life? What has stopped you?70 The second newsletter, dated June 1970, featured line drawings of women; form poetry; notice of a recent police raid on Dr Henry Morgentaler’s abortion clinic; an advertisement for karate lessons for women’s self-defence; an update on the side-effects of the birth control pill; one article about the Abortion Caravan; and another on the importance of

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art and revolution, which configured women’s liberationists as “revolutionaries” who “have to learn to embody the principles for which we are fighting. To do this it is essential that we understand ourselves as fully as possible – understand ourselves not only in the light of our oppression, but of our full potential for being strong, effective, complete human beings.”71 This same issue of the newsletter also addressed whether or not mwl could participate in what would become the Indochinese Conference; despite its wish to unite women globally, the group recognized that, aside from time constraints, “[i]t has been raised that Quebec should not be the location for a conference of an international stature, when we in Montreal Women’s Liberation have not truly involved ourselves in the reality of the Quebec revolutionary struggle.”72 Sure enough, after the passage of the War Measures Act that October, an anonymous “Letter from Québec” that appeared in The Pedestal, the official organ of the vwc, likewise made its way into the appended material. The letter was a passionate but rather muddled attempt to link flq struggles to the women’s liberation movement in Quebec, even though the author admitted “[w]e are not sure to what extent members of the flq are aware of the oppression of women.” Still, the letter writer, who kept her identity secret, because “[t]he police are examining every aspect of every movement that is considered dangerous,” asked women to support Quebec “sisters” who champion the flq, work toward a socialist revolution, and put an end to “male chauvinism.”73 Another source of intelligence on the flf came in the form of a file on the fcq, an organization with which the group was aligned. This file consists of 1,068 pages and is divided into four parts. A total of 820 pages were excised entirely (the largest chunk at 310 pages, consisting of all of part four), or censored almost completely. It was the most heavily redacted file we received. The fcq was an alliance of women students, workers, and mothers that arose in opposition to a bylaw the city of Montreal passed in November 1969 forbidding public demonstrations. The rcmp security service soon identified some of the women involved and tracked their meeting schedule, passing the information on to the Montreal police. Leaders were suspected of being Maoists and of having ties to trade unions.74 One woman who participated in the fcq demonstration on 28 November 1969, during which over one hundred people were arrested, ended up in the Mountie viewfinder years later. Since she was suspected

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of belonging to a number of subversive organizations that were Trotskyist or Marxist or involved trade-union activity, her dossier included information about her date and place of birth, her height, weight, hair and eye colour, the number of her driver’s licence, the addresses of her former and current residences, her place of employment, the colleagues with whom she was in contact, her involvement in the Parti Québécois, and the names of the two men with whom she lived.75 Tantalizing crumbs of information about communication between the flf, mwl, and the lsa/lso in regard to a campaign for abortion access in Montreal, at times gathered through the use of informants, are sprinkled through assorted surveillance reports. Surveillance reports on the flf specifically draw a significant blank, however. For example, a one-page flf surveillance report dated 7 April 1971 is censored completely. The following five pages are excised. The sixth page is a continuation of the same flf surveillance report and is also censored, save for an rcmp officer’s name and signature. The seventh, eighth, and ninth pages are censored yet again, but this time with the header removed, so that there is no indication of what the surveillance report is about. Only the rcmp officer’s name and signature remain. The next three pages are excised.76 The appended material in this file totals just sixty-seven pages. Some clippings of articles in popular French- and English-language newspapers deal with the flf, but, if the underlining and check marks are any indication of such a practice, on occasion these items were sometimes used by the rcmp security service to troll for the names of individuals involved in the group.77 Despite the unusually small amount of appended material, two documents are worth considering, because they provide a fascinating glimpse into flf politics at a time of great political upheaval in Quebec. The first is the well-known flf Manifesto that is discussed in Chapter 3. Because the flf believed that nationalist and feminist struggles were linked, it came out in support of the revolutionary socialist movement for Quebec independence, insisting that it would never tolerate discrimination against women inside or outside that movement. The twenty-eight-page manifesto defined carefully women’s economic, socio-political, cultural, and sexual exploitation and concluded with a stirring call for women to replace their anger with courage and myths with truth.78 The second document consists of eleven pages and represents the outcome of six workshops (ideology and social conditioning; sexology; history; family; work; and politics) on the condition of women.

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The workshops were held in 1972 at the Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam) and attracted 150 participants – both women and men. Included in this document is an outline account of the flf, from its origins in 1969, to its activism around issues like daycare, abortion, and unions, to its dissolution at the end of 1971 due to a shortage of personnel and disagreements over the group’s political orientation.79 Given the quantity of surveillance files the rcmp security service generated, how should researchers treat surveillance reports and appended material? In their own research on fbi surveillance of the Farm Equipment Workers between 1941 and 1955, Steven Rosswurm and Toni Gilpin are seduced into believing that, despite many defects and deletions, fbi surveillance files can provide valuable primary sources for the study of labour history. They encourage the use of the Freedom of Information Act legislation to obtain fbi records for research purposes.80 Although such enthusiasm is welcome, their archive fever needs to be tempered. Despite the sense that the rcmp surveillance files have given us frontrow seats at the women’s liberation movement, archive fever can be tainted ecstasy. State surveillance destroyed lives, tarnished reputations, sowed distrust, and spread paranoia. Moreover, it is questionable whether or not surveillance files can be used unproblematically as primary sources for other research projects that have nothing to do with state surveillance, say in research on particular social-movement organizations. Researchers need to be especially wary when working in this field because of the human factor that is key to the nature of state surveillance against targeted groups. As shown in the previous chapters and in countless other works related to domestic surveillance, in the Cold War (and thereafter in relation to countering protest in general or counter-terrorism), one of the main tactics employed to collect intelligence, but also to influence the behaviour of targets, is the use of informants.81 Informants may be individuals already within the groups who are recruited to inform on their peers or they may have come from the outside and infiltrated in. Informants wielded undue influence, not just in the intelligence they supplied to the police but also in the activities of the organizations targeted for surveillance. In a case of “double bluff,” informants, who may also have been agents provocateurs, reported on activities that they themselves may have been directing, or at a minimum been engaged in. In fact, informants worked long hours at tasks that

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could be boring.82 Rita MacNeil indicated further that the women’s liberation meetings she attended in Toronto “must have been dull for Mounties on the hunt for Cold War subversives. ‘If you wanted to see a bunch of women sitting around talking about issues and going on demonstrations that are peaceful and non-violent, then so be it, but I don’t think there was a reason to do that. What’s radical about equal pay for equal work? And trying to empower women to reach the potential that they have?’”83 Neither the surveillance reports nor the appended material necessarily represent a reliable account of the activities of the targeted groups, because the police themselves, through informants, may have helped to construct the activities that were being reported on. The police are thus complicit in creating the very subversion that was the raison d’être for the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism. This is a model evident elsewhere when informants were simply working within targeted groups. In the United States, several student activist groups in the 1960s and 1970s remained active thanks only to the involvement of fbi informants who, because of the receipt of a salary from the bureau, had unlimited time to give to the group they infiltrated.84 More recently, it was revealed that a top-secret unit of the Metropolitan Police Service infiltrated British eco-activist protest groups in the 1980s to the point that some of the officers acquired girlfriends from these groups, fathered children with them, and participated in attacks on property. One undercover policeman even allegedly co-wrote the leaflet that led McDonald’s, the fast-food giant, to sue two members of London Greenpeace in the infamous McLibel case, which became the lengthiest civil trial in the history of the English legal system. The double aspect of this activity needs to be acknowledged and kept in mind, not just because it left lasting scars on those who discovered that their manipulation and exploitation was authorized in the interest of state surveillance; it also means that it is never possible to have a “clean” history of social movements under surveillance, because it is fundamentally impossible to separate the police from the activists and their activities, or ever to know for certain how much overlap has occurred.85 One cannot trust police records, but the same point applies to the appended material related to activist groups. This contention does not render all the files useless, but it does complicate their use by researchers.

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Our Mountie bounty of surveillance reports and appended material is neither impartial nor untainted, thanks to the influence of the secret police. Thus, all we have produced is a pastiche borne out of atip-scarred surveillance files, a patchy bricolage that best resembles a scrapbook about spying on women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities. This admission is our realistic assessment of what it means to work with such declassified surveillance files. Yet, without atip, what other recourse would we have? Although atip is certainly a double-edged sword, it remains one of the most incisive at our disposal. Given the issues we raise in this chapter, we pose a list of provocative ethics-based questions that we believe researchers using declassified records procured under atip should ask and answer: 1. Are there circumstances in which we may take informantprovided information in surveillance reports at face value? 2. Should we identify clearly the surveillance file origins of appended material when we wish to use items, such as on-the-record newspaper clippings, or harder-to-find pamphlets or posters, for research projects that are unrelated to state surveillance? 3. Should we refrain from revealing in our research projects the names of the individuals who were surveillance targets (and are possibly still living) when we come across sensitive information about them? 4. Are we obliged to locate and alert those individuals still living who were surveillance targets before we publish our research findings? Given that publications are now disseminated easily on the Internet, thus increasing the chances of broadcasting far and wide the names of surveillance targets, should we ask for their consent to reveal their names? 5. What are our obligations to the rcmp officers named in some of the surveillance reports? Is it safer to use their names in our research projects, because they were or are accorded some form of institutional protection? 6. Should we attempt to peruse the documents to try and identify or even reveal the identity of informants? What purpose would these actions serve? 7. How do we respond to individuals who may contact us once they learn they were spied upon, or communicate their suspicions about

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who the informants may have been, or who request information about themselves in the files and/or other individuals whose names appear in the surveillance reports? 8. What responsibility do we have in ensuring that the atip legislation works toward a balance between safeguarding privacy and offering greater transparency, recognizing that it can be used to threaten, intimidate, or harass organizations and individuals? 9. What do we do with the surveillance files once we have completed our research projects? Should we donate them to social-movement archives that might make use of them? Should we post them to websites that are becoming an increasingly valuable knowledge translation component of our research projects, or refrain from doing so because of privacy concerns? 10. How do we protect ourselves or any researcher who is especially vulnerable because of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or nationality, in doing this research? Do we risk coming under surveillance because we do research on state surveillance? What wider support networks might we develop to further real connection and community among those of us doing such research? In both of our experiences with atip, it has been abundantly clear that the process is often flawed, potentially biased against researchers, and its effects uncertain for the future of critical scholarship. In practice, atip legislation is riddled with inconsistencies, bureaucratic bias, and the potential to stunt rather than liberate future scholarship on policing. Despite all this, both of us are still committed to using the atip process, and we believe that, used with diligence, perseverance, and an eye toward speaking truth to power, atip still has the potential to further critical inquiry. Scholars should, therefore, work collectively to establish more formalized ethical practices and commonly recognized research protocols to deal with these documents, rather than approach them on an individual ad hoc basis.

Conclusion

The surveillance of women’s liberation groups, individuals, and activities profiled in this book had little to do with pursuing foreign subversives seeking out Canadian secrets or with stopping violent extremists from carrying out attacks against the state. Pure and simple, the counter-subversion activities of the rcmp security service in general, including its red-tinged framing of the women’s liberation movement, reflected a lack of trust in the stability of Canada’s liberal-democratic system and a desire to ensure that any change was monitored, moderated, and allowed to flow only along preferred streams; if necessary, it would be disrupted. When new social-protest movements burst into view in the 1960s, the rcmp security service searched avidly for Communist connections; later, even when it was accepted that such connections might not exist, it continued to consider surveillance targets as tinged with red, because of their real or suspected links to Trotskyists and to other organizations aligned with New Left causes. It was the profound belief on the part of a security state, allowed the freedom to carry out such work by its political masters, that small numbers of individuals could manipulate wider democratic processes and, in effect, overthrow the political system. Such an approach was not unique in a North American context: the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on and disrupted similar groups in the United States.1 And, undoubtedly, much the same pattern would be evident in other liberal-democratic states, including in the United Kingdom, if Cold War security records are ever even partially opened to non-handpicked researchers.2 Despite the abundance of surveillance files that the rcmp security service generated on the women’s liberation movement, the targeting of that movement was not the Mounties’ top priority. Men, male-dominated organizations, and male-centred protest always received more attention from the police. Still, women involved in women’s liberation were spied upon not because they were women or because they championed a fem-

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inist revolution focused on gender equality; they were targeted because they were positioned on the left of the political spectrum and participated in protest, as did left-wing men, in favour of several social-justice causes that could potentially become politically dangerous to the liberaldemocratic state. This concern gave the rcmp security service an opportunity to collect intelligence on left-wing organizations, through spying on the women’s liberation movement, and to glean information about the women’s liberation movement by conducting surveillance on left-wing organizations, such as the League for Socialist ActionLigue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso) and the Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs). Gender did, however, along with race, class, sexuality, and the relative youth of the women’s liberationists, influence police coverage. It did so in some cases by contributing toward the Mounties’ discounting of some of the activists as serious state security threats. For example, the security breaches on Parliament Hill and at the prime minister’s residence after the arrival of the Abortion Caravan in Ottawa in May 1970 occurred despite the rcmp security service’s suspicion of Trotskyist infiltration of the Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc) and the group’s own declaration of war on the government. There was inherent gendered condescension in the Mounties’ viewpoint: the accepted role for white, middle-class, heterosexual women was not to engage in protest; by doing so, many women’s liberationists appeared to transgress the very traditional gender boundaries they disputed. There was tangible continuity, then, between the targeting of the women’s liberation movement and earlier organizations of activist women, such as the Voice of Women (vow) or Women Against Soaring Prices (wasp), both of which fell afoul of the security state because of suspected links to communism. The key difference is that, unlike vow and wasp, women liberationists focused their energies on issues that directly affected the lives of women: abortion, access to daycare, discrimination in employment, and so on. They believed that these issues contributed to women’s oppression in society and sought to resolve them in order to attain gender equality with men, but they were of little political value to a security service’s red-tinged prism. By contrast, the participation of women’s liberationists like the vwc and other women’s organizations like vow at the Indochinese Conference in Vancouver and Toronto in 1971 may have been taken more seriously by the rcmp security service because the Canadian and the American security

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agencies co-operated closely in spying on anti-Vietnam War and Black Power protests. Crucially, although this book provides glimpses into certain aspects of the Canadian women’s liberation movement, namely its complex fissures and alliances, it is not by any means a history of that movement. Rather, it is in the main a history of rcmp security-service surveillance of women’s liberation groups, individuals, and activities, cobbled together using surveillance files declassified under the Access to Information Act and the accompanying Privacy Act (atip). Writing such a history poses several difficulties, given the chunks, big and small, gouged out of the surveillance reports, the troubling questions raised about the role of informants in regard to their relationship to the surveillance reports and possibly also to the appended material, and the considerable privacy concerns regarding surveillance targets who most likely are still living. In undertaking this work, we recognize that it runs counter to a treasured nationalist metanarrative generated about the rcmp, including an emphasis on a “happy history” that is becoming all too popular in official circles of power in the twenty-first century.3 The rcmp is an institution lacking in critical historical memory. Instead, through officially sanctioned publications, it offers up a mythologized and sanitized past. The problem with a happy-history approach is that, when modern scandals emerge, they appear as an anomaly, generating a wider tendency on the part of the media and politicians either to overreact because of their perceived novelty or to dismiss what has occurred as a series of one-off incidents, when they are anything but. It may be just as easy to overreact to or dismiss the state surveillance of women’s liberation groups, individuals, and activities in Canada as atypical. Yet, as we have maintained, spying on the women’s liberation movement was part and parcel of the expansion of the rcmp security service’s red-tinged prism in a Cold War era that saw the burgeoning of New Left protest. And it may be just as easy to deny the significance of the state surveillance of the women’s liberation movement because it appears that, unlike surveillance targets who were blacklisted, harassed, or fired, or even arrested and imprisoned, women’s liberationists emerged relatively unscathed. However, equating an apparent lack of state persecution with an apparent lack of significance of state surveillance represents a profound misreading of this book. Arguably, the absence of evidence of state persecution of surveillance targets is not evidence of absence. We cannot

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maintain in a definitive way that direct harm was or was not done to targets because the declassified files we accessed under atip were heavily censored by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), with the cooperation of Library and Archives Canada. The rcmp security service also destroyed files related to disruption operations carried out against targets in English Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. The details of disruption activities that have been documented, mainly in Quebec against separatist groups, are shocking, and they led to the dissolution of the rcmp security service. It is possible that this book will prompt those involved in the women’s liberation movement to come forward with individual accounts of the impact of state surveillance on their lives of the type that does not appear in the records released to us. Furthermore, freedom of thought, speech, and assembly are fundamental principles of liberal-democratic societies like Canada. All are negatively impacted by state surveillance, even the seemingly passive surveillance carried out by the rcmp security service for decades against women’s liberation. That surveillance, which involved the use of informants, raises pressing questions about its long-term influence on personal and professional relationships, and possibly even on the materials produced by groups that were infiltrated. The knowledge that women informants participated in a movement that rocked traditional understandings of gender, race, class, and sexuality, and tried to build a global sisterhood based on presumed common cause among all women, has serious implications for many women’s liberation activists. The awareness that one’s friends, colleagues, or possibly family members could have been informants, or that one may have been spied upon unknowingly on several occasions or identified and described in a derogatory manner in a state file, indicates the capacious and capricious scope of the red-tinged prism regarding the lives of women who were innocent of any crime. The negative impact of informants in relation to the fundamental principles of liberal-democratic societies is recognized by the Canadian government. This is why there are special rules governing the use of informants by csis against religious institutions and institutions of higher education.4 It must be said that we researched and wrote this book in the shadow of three meaningful developments that have taken place many years after the rcmp security service spied on the women’s liberation movement. After Indigenous leaders and grassroots activists called repeated attention to the growing list of missing and murdered Indigenous women over

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the years, the rcmp took action, releasing two reports on the matter. It is estimated that the rcmp polices over 40 per cent of the Indigenous population, versus 20 per cent of the total Canadian population. A recent report blames domestic violence for the approximately 1,181 Indigenous women missing and murdered between 1980 and 2012.5 The inference that Indigenous men bear primary responsibility for this unfortunate state of affairs is controversial for several reasons, not the least of which is the history of white settler violence against Indigenous communities, in which the rcmp remains deeply entangled, and the fact that the rates of domestic violence in Indigenous communities are lower than they are in the general population.6 In a striking example, the rcmp in British Columbia (along with the Vancouver Police Department) has apologized for bungling its investigation of Robert Pickton, a white man, who was later convicted of killing dozens of women, a number of whom were of Indigenous descent, on a pig farm outside Vancouver. Former rcmp Corporal Catherine Galliford, whose accusations of rcmp bullying galvanized other female rcmp officers and civilian employees to speak out as well, considers that the sexism she endured on the force also played a role in the mismanagement of the Pickton case. Appointed the public spokesperson for the Missing Women’s Task Force dedicated to solving the crimes, she claims that, although the officers had enough evidence to take action against Pickton much earlier, surveillance conducted against him was curtailed due to indifference, misogyny, and, we could add, racism.7 Galliford, who was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, also stated that some male rcmp officers told her they fantasized that Pickton would “escape from prison, track me down and strip me naked, string me up on a meat hook and gut me like a pig.”8 Galliford’s experience as a female Mountie is not exceptional. After nearly four hundred current and former rcmp female members and civilian employees launched a class-action lawsuit alleging mistreatment, including harassment, assault, and discrimination, going back as far as September 1974, the year in which the Mounted Police began hiring female officers for the first time, the rcmp agreed to settle before the case went to court. Furthermore, the rcmp commissioner, Bob Paulson, made a public apology, in which he acknowledged “this harassment has hurt them mentally and physically.”9 The lead plaintiff in the effort, rcmp Constable Janet Merlo, an eighteen-year veteran before her retirement, alleged that senior male officers joked publicly about her using a

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dildo, made references to premenstrual syndrome, and commented derogatorily upon the physical appearance of some female peers. One of the senior male officers apparently kept a blow-up female sex doll in his office, and made female officers stand beside it. Merlo attributes her ill health, marriage breakdown, and post-traumatic stress disorder to the sexism she encountered.10 Such allegations have yet to be proven in court. Meanwhile, a 2012 gender-based assessment by the rcmp revealed that, while the representation of female rcmp officers has increased to 27 per cent in the last decade, it is below the rate of labourmarket availability. Moreover, there are discrepancies in terms of the professional advancement of female as opposed to male rcmp officers that can be attributed in part to family and work-life balance; to attrition rates after twenty years of service; and to a lack of fairness and transparency regarding promotion processes.11 As of this writing, a federal court has approved spending $100 million to settle two class-action harassment lawsuits against the rcmp from over a thousand women, including Merlo, and a scathing report by former auditor general Sheila Fraser condemned the rcmp organizational culture as dysfunctional, arguing that the force is incapable of dealing in an unbiased manner with complaints of workplace harassment.12 Last, under the former Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, the country was cast as a militarized power on the international and domestic fronts.13 The Conservatives unrolled the Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-51); it also received the support of the Liberal Party, which went on to defeat the Conservatives in the 2015 federal election. The legislation emerged after the murder of two soldiers in Quebec and Ontario and a gunfight inside the central block of the Parliament Buildings. Both attacks were attributed to “lone wolf” terrorists, influenced by radical Islam, and the Harper government framed terrorism as the top threat to the safety of Canadians. Critics, among them former Liberal and Conservative prime ministers Jean Chrétien, Joe Clark, Paul Martin, and John Turner, as well as former Supreme Court justices and two privacy commissioners, quickly raised the prospect that the act would have a negative impact on civil liberties. It opens up the possibility that suspects could be subjected to aggressive interrogation, broad speech prohibitions, potential violations of rights guaranteed by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and a lack of a system of oversight regarding the rcmp’s heir, csis. The act allows csis to engage in disruption operations with

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few restrictions, which is doubly ironic, since csis owes its existence in the first place to a scandal involving rcmp security-service disruption operations in the 1970s.14 Because the act can be interpreted so expansively, it is feared that it will end up targeting Indigenous and Muslim communities or legal protest by social-justice groups.15 The current Liberal government, led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has proposed replacing Bill C-51 with the new Bill C-59, which, critics suggest, is all too similar to its predecessor and, in fact, gives even more power to csis.16 The type of social protest potentially targeted by such bills is similar to what the women’s liberation movement represented decades ago. This book illustrates that the rcmp security-service surveillance of women’s liberation groups, activists, and activities misapprehended Canadian women’s quest for gender equality. The tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the class-action lawsuit launched by female rcmp officers and civilian employees indicate that, even today, that quest remains elusive outside and inside the Mounties’ own ranks. For the rcmp security service of the 1960s and 1970s, the women’s liberation movement was framed as part and parcel of national-security threats; the Mounties did not grasp the movement’s goal of gender equality, along with the styles, strategies, and structures of the movement, because they were caught within a familiar red-tinged prism that bred suspicion about the possible violent overthrow of liberal-democratic governments by leftwing subversives. Hence the irony at the centre of this book: a police force charged with serving as a bulwark against radical challenges to the status quo missed the revolutionary implications of a movement that did just that. Consequently, proposed anti-terrorism bills point to the need to be skeptical about what threats to national security – or, indeed, what terrorism – looks like today, in the same way that it is important to be critical about how subversion was framed in the past. The scrapbook story that we tell of state surveillance against the women’s liberation movement raises critical ethical challenges and poses provocative ethics-based questions about researchers’ use of declassified state surveillance documents. And that same story, however fractured, should encourage reflection upon how structural violence makes women and minorities vulnerable to abuses of police power outside and inside paramilitary organizations like the rcmp. On that note, it is vital that researchers do not stop at bringing a feminist critique to surveillance studies, but push forward. Women and minorities should break through

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the state-surveillance research ceiling, bringing their own unique perspectives to the table. We conclude the writing of this book with the acknowledgment of the importance of atip, despite its flaws, to researchers. This legislation is slated for a much-needed overhaul as supported by the Information Commissioner of Canada, Suzanne Legault. The Liberal government has proposed amending the act in ways that empower the information commissioner to order the release of government information, and plans to review the entire act in 2018.17 We believe that there is a fundamental right in a free society to dissent from the norm and to carry out, in a peaceful way, protest against the prevailing status quo. State intervention through intelligence agencies negatively impacts this right. It does so directly through the actions of informants or disruption operations, but also more generally by creating a climate of fear, distrust, and suspicion in the wider society. As the previous chapters indicate, surveillance is not a neutral practice. It is a dominant power that needs to be properly regulated, authorized, and reviewed, including by researchers, such that it creates a workable balance between privacy and transparency. It must also be subjected to legal scrutiny, not just by elected politicians, but also by the courts and oversight agencies to which all governments must be accountable.

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Notes

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introduction Allan Fotheringham, quoted in Cohen, The Unfinished Canadian, 187. Knight, How the Cold War Began. For the situation in Canada, see Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada; Whitaker and Hewitt, Canada and the Cold War; Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers. For the United States, see Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; Schrecker, No Ivory Tower. For the United Kingdom, see Wilford, The CIA , the British Left, and the Cold War. For the sake of continuity, we will use security service throughout the text. Justice Laws Website: Access to Information Act [http://laws-lois. justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/a-1/FullText.html] (last accessed 5 August 2016). For the sake of simplicity, the acronym atip will be used to describe the Access process. See Ball, Haggerty, and Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, and Monaghan and Molnar, “Radicalisation Theories, Policing Practices, and ‘the Future of Terrorism’?” Lyon, Surveillance after September 11; Roach, September 11; and Rollings-Magnusson, Anti-Terrorism. Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism. See also Haggerty and Ericson, The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility; Lyon, Surveillance Studies; Magnet and Gates, The New Media of Surveillance; Hier and Greenberg, The Surveillance Studies Reader; Parenti, The Soft Cage; Ball, Haggerty, and Lyon, Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies; and Bronskill and McKie, Your Right to Privacy. Glenn Greenwald, “XKeyscore: nsa Tool Collects ‘Nearly Everything a User Does on the Internet,’” Guardian, 21 July 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-top-secret-

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9

10

11

12

13

14

program-online-data (last accessed 20 October 2013). For a reflection on the Canadian implications of the Snowden leak, see Geist, ed., Law, Privacy, and Surveillance in Canada in the Post-Snowden Era. “Glenn Greenwald’s Partner Detained at Heathrow Airport for Nine Hours,” Guardian, 19 August 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwald-guardianpartner-detained-heathrow (last accessed 20 October 2013). The detention of the partner of a journalist under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 led to a furore, although it was soon pointed out fifty-six thousand people had been detained under the same power in 2012. Alan Travis, “More than 56,000 Detained under Counter-terrorism Powers in Year,” Guardian, 12 September 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/12/56000-detained -counter-terrorism-powers (last accessed 30 June 2014). See also Harding, The Snowden Files. See Gieseke, The History of the Stasi; Ash, The File; Koehler, Stasi; Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former gdr, http://www.bstu.bund.de/EN/Home/home_ node.html;jsessionid=79349F63B336E274491F01700FB302CF.2 _cid329 (last accessed 2 July 2014). Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service; Weiner, Enemies; Andrew, The Defence of the Realm. The cumulative Canadian total from the First World War until the end of the 1970s, according to a Royal Commission, is over one million organizations and individuals alone. Whitaker, “Cold War Alchemy,” 193. For more on the Canadian Access to Information Act and its application, see Larsen and Walby, Brokering Access, and Clément, “‘Freedom’ of Information in Canada.” The best example of this trend is Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, and the media coverage of its revelations. For a challenge to the dominance of this narrative, see Schrecker, Cold War Triumphalism. Other critical accounts of the activities of domestic intelligence agencies in the West include Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression; Smith, British Writers and MI 5 Surveillance. Hillyard, Suspect Community. For another perspective on “suspect community,” see Ragazzi, “Police Multiculturalism?” For a critique of the Hillyard argument and its application to British Mus-

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24 25 26 27

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lims, see Greer, “Anti-Terrorist Laws and the United Kingdom’s ‘Suspect Muslim Community.’” Lyon, “Surveillance as Social Sorting,” 16; Lyon, “Airport Screening, Surveillance, and Social Sorting,” 404. Lewis and Evans, Undercover; and Goldman and Apuzzo, Enemies Within. Frank J. Donner, as quoted in Cunningham and Browning, “The Emergence of Worthy Targets,” 347. Cunningham and Browning, “The Emergence of Worthy Targets,” 349. Ibid. Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” van der Meulen and Heynen, Expanding the Gaze, 4–5; Dubrofsky and Magnet, “Introduction,” 7. See Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance”; Perera and Razack, At the Limits of Justice; and Browne, Dark Matters. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases; Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”; Young, “Feminist Reactions to the Contemporary Security Regime”; and Eichler, Gender and Private Security in Global Politics. Our thanks to Marie Hammond-Callaghan for some of these references. Michael J. Barrett, quoted in Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession. Wheelwright, The Fatal Lover; Proctor, Female Intelligence; Taylor, “Long-Haired Women, Short-Haired Spies.” See Lindner, The James Bond Phenomenon; and Jenkins, “James Bond’s ‘Pussy’ and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality.” Hewitt, “The Masculine Mountie.” See also Tickner, Gender in International Relations; Blanchard, “Gender, International Relations, and the Development of Feminist Security Theory”; McElhinny, “An Economy of Affect,” 7; Altman, Global Sex; Young, An Inside Job. Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers. Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows; Sawatsky, For Services Rendered; Hannant, The Infernal Machine; Hewitt, Spying 101. Starnes, Closely Guarded. Sangster, Dreams of Equality. van Seters, “The Munsinger Affair,” 78. Iacovetta, Gatekeepers; Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War

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on Queers; Guard, “Women Worth Watching”; Steedman, “The Red Petticoat Brigade”; and Hammond-Callaghan, “Bridging and Breaching Cold War Divides.” Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers; Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 107 (our thanks to Abby Lippman for this reference); and Schmidt, Silenced. Sethna, “High School Confidential”; Sethna and Hewitt, “Clandestine Operations”; and Hewitt and Sethna, “Sex Spying.” Henderson and Winter, “Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness.” We thank Maryanne Deaver for alerting us to this article. For more on surveillance in Australia, see Capp, Writers Defiled. Morgan, Saturday’s Child; Feigen, Not One of the Boys; Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace. Friedan, It Changed My Life, 96; Friedan, Life So Far, 223–4, 230. Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Laville and Wilford, The US Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War; Laville, Cold War Women. Rosen, The World Split Open, 240, 259–60. For more on the situation in the United Kingdom, see Hughes, Young Lives on the Left. See Pierson et al., Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 1, Strong Voices; Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs; Adamson, “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals”; and Luxton, “Feminism as a Class Act.” “‘Rise up!’ aims to capture the diversity, vibrancy, and radical legacy of feminist activism in Canada and Québec from the 1970s to the 1990s and make it widely available to activists, students and researchers.” See: http://riseupfeministarchive.ca For more on atip and security-related research, see Hewitt, “He Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past.” See also Kealey, Spying on Canadians. Hewitt, “He Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past,” 194–208. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Intelligence Cycle,” https://www. fbi.gov/about-us/intelligence/intelligence-cycle (last accessed 10 May 2016).

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chapter one 1 Hewitt, “Re-inventing the Mounties.” For a popular and problematic account of the Great March, see Cruise and Griffiths, The Great Adventure. 2 Macleod, The North West Mounted Police, 1873–1919, 6. The most comprehensive histories of the rcmp across the nineteenth and twentieth century, sadly, still date from the force’s supposed centennial in 1973. Horrall, The Pictorial History of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1873–1973; Kelly and Kelly, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. 3 Francis, National Dreams, 29–51, and Thompson, Forging the Prairie West, 46–7. 4 In 1993 the un Commission of Experts defined ethnic cleansing as “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory, persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogenous.” As quoted in Roger Cohen, “Ethnic Cleansing,” Crimes of War, 2011, http://www. crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/ethnic-cleansing/ (last accessed 14 February 2017). 5 See Daschuk, Clearing the Plains; Tobias, “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879–1885”; Smith, “Not-Seeing”; Hewitt, Spying 101, 156–8; Catapano, “The Rising of the Ongwehònwe,” 91–2, 283; DeVries, Conflict in Caledonia, 10; and Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare.” 6 McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals, 39–40; McKay, Reasoning Otherwise, 407–15; and Molinaro, An Exceptional Law. 7 Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 71–9. 8 Ray, “Science and Surveillance,” 223–4. 9 Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 5. 10 Hewitt, Riding to the Rescue, 50–4. 11 “Report of the Royal North West Mounted Police for the Year Ended September 30, 1919,” Sessional Papers, 14. 12 Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group (rg) 18, Records of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, volume 572, file 52-19, “Memorandum re: the constitution and organization of a Police force for General duty in Canada,” 3 December 1918. 13 Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 349–51. 14 In the Second World War, in parallel to the First World War, the rcmp found itself targeting radicals and perceived enemies of Canada because of their ethnicity. After the Japanese bombed Pearl

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Harbor in the United States, the Canadian government used the War Measures Act against Japanese-Canadians, a move the rcmp recommended against. Now considered “enemy aliens,” they had to register with and report to the rcmp on a regular basis. Mounties also impounded their fishing boats and guarded the internment camps in which they were incarcerated. Lewey, “The Treatment of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s.” For more on the early days of the post–Second World War intelligence branch, see Kealey, “After Gouzenko.” Hewitt, Spying 101, 23. Maynard, “Queer Musings on Masculinity and History,” 184–5. Connell, Masculinities, 196; Broomhall and Barrie, “Introduction,” 3–4. Hewitt, “The Masculine Mountie”; McCormack and Roberts, “Conclusion,” 194–5. Hewitt, Riding to the Rescue, 31–6. For a relevant definition of the term, see McKay, Reasoning Otherwise, 354. Smith, “You Had Better Be White by Six A.M.,” 39. Shpayer-Makov, “Shedding the Uniform and Acquiring a New Masculine Image,” 141. For more on government beauty pageants, see Gentile, “‘Government Girls’ and ‘Ottawa Men.’” Email to Steve Hewitt from rcmp Historical Section, 17 June 2005. Schmidt, Silenced, 67–8. lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00613, Annual Report for the rcmp security service, Annual Report of “E” Branch for 1968–69, 12 June 1969, 33. Schmidt, “Women on the Force,” 39, 41. See, as well, Schmidt, “‘The Greatest Man-Catcher of All’”; Schmidt, “Contesting a Canadian Icon.” Schmidt, “Contesting a Canadian Icon,” 369. Teather, Scarlet Tunic, 55–6. For more on gender and policing, see McElhinny, “An Economy of Affect.” Royal Commission Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (hereafter McDonald Commission), Second Report: Freedom and Security Under the Law, vol. 2 (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1981), 677. rcmp recruitment poster in author’s possession.

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33 Nicholas and Gentile, “Introduction,” 13; Schmidt, “Contesting a Canadian Icon,” 368–85. 34 Swearingen, FBI Secrets, 4. 35 rcmp, A Career in Scarlet, 8. 36 Ibid., 10. 37 Jack Ramsay, “My Case against the rcmp,” Maclean’s (July 1972), 19–20. 38 Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows, 235. 39 McKenzie, Troop 17. 40 Ramsay, “My Case against the rcmp”; report of the Marin Commission, otherwise known as Report of the Commission of Inquiry Relating to Public Complaints, Internal Discipline and Grievance Procedures within the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 1976. 41 Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 2:696. csis, volume 155, access request 89-A-63, Annual Report “D” Branch, 1958– 1959, 5; lac, rg 25, Records of the Department of External Affairs, volume 8562, file 50364-40, pts. 1 and 2, Supt Kenneth Hall to G.G. Crean, 5 March 1955, 26 July 1955, 31 January 1957; Hewitt, Spying 101, 27; McDonald Commission, volume 28, 4649–52; Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism. 42 For more on the early years of the cpc, see Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks; Avakumovic, The Communist Party in Canada. 43 Klehr, Haynes, and Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism, 112, 132; Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 373; Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, The Secret World of American Communism, 71; Haynes and Klehr, Venona, 79–82, 183–4; Hewitt, “‘Strangely Easy to Obtain,’” 385. 44 Molinaro, “‘A Species of Treason?’” 45 Hewitt, Spying 101, 53–4. 46 csis, access request 89-A-63, Annual Report on “D” Section, 1954–1955, 1(b); Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 2:665; csis, access request 117-99-14, “D” Branch Co-ordinator to Assistant Officer i/c “D” Branch, 23 November 1970. 47 Hewitt, Spying 101, 73–4. 48 Britton, Spy Television. 49 Dave Seglins and Rachel Houlihan, “Federal Cabinet Secretly Approved Cold War Wiretaps on Anyone Deemed ‘Subversive,’ Historian Finds,” CBC News, 15 December 2016, http://www.cbc.

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ca/news/investigates/surveillance-cold-war-picnic-1.3897071 (last accessed 20 January 2017). Hewitt, Spying 101, 32. de Vault with Johnson, The Informer. Rosen, The World Split Open, 227–60. Hewitt, Riding to the Rescue, 88. McDonald Commission, Third Report, 317. Horrall and Betke, Canada’s Security Service, 2:666–7. Whitaker, “Cold War Alchemy,” 193. Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 9. For more on the British, Canadian, and American domestic security concentration on subversion, see Whitaker, “Cold War Alchemy.” For details on the specific situation in Canada, see Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada. csis, Role, Tasks, and Methods of the rcmp Security Service, access request 117-2000-22, rcmp Annual Reports for 1982–83 and 1983–84. Hewitt, Spying 101, 37–8. csis, access request 89-A-63, Annual Report on “D” Section, 1955–1956, 3; Wright, Spycatcher, 52. csis, access request 117-99-6, “I” Directorate Manual of Filing. Horrall and Betke, Canada’s Security Service, 2:664. Annual Report on “D” Section, 1954–1955; Horrall and Betke, Canada’s Security Service, 2:664–6; csis, access request 117-9914, Report from nco in Charge, Sault Ste Marie sis, 19 September 1961. Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 2:665–6. Ibid., 2:712. Whitaker, “Cold War Alchemy.” Blackstock, The Strategy of Subversion, 56. Grace and Leys, “The Concept of Subversion and Its Implications,” 62. Fulton, as quoted in Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 2:756. Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 182–4; csis, access request 88-A-36, Security Service “D” Operations Presentation, October 1979. lac, rg 146, access request A-2012-00618, rcmp, “The Threat to Canada from Communist Espionage, Subversion, and Sabotage,” 32.

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93 94

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Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism, 263. Mills, “The End of Empire?” Tomlinson, “What Was the Third World?,” 308. Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 195–6. Ibid., 72. Westad, The Global Cold War, 110–11. See Webster, “Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and Decolonization”; Mackay and Swift, “Military Intervention and Securing the Third World”; Price, Orienting Canada, 280–321; and Madokoro, McKenzie, and Meren, Dominion of Race. Ray, “Science and Surveillance,” 219. rcmp, “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada – Countermeasures.” For more on the controversy around the Mounted Police spying at Canadian universities in the 1960s, see Hewitt, “‘Information Believed True.’” Guard, Radical Housewives. Hinther, “‘They Said the Course Would Be Wasted.’” Sangster, Dreams of Equality, 68. Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers; Iacovetta, Gatekeepers. van Seters, “The Munsinger Affair.” lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, International Women’s Day Celebrations – Canada (Volume 2), Correspondence from 1–4–59 to 28–2–63, Communist Party of Canada, National Women’s Commission, Canada, 20 June 1961, 112. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, rcmp report, Congress of Canadian Women (Lakehead Chapter), 1 April 1968, 298. Ibid., 296–8. Ibid. “fbi Spies on Feminists,” Freedom Socialist Party, Spring 1977, http://www.socialism.com/drupal-6.8/articles/fbi-spies-feminists (last accessed 15 February 2017). Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood; Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada, 229–46. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00316, Women Against Soaring Prices Toronto, rcmp report, Canadian Consumers Protest Association – Canada, 25 January 1967, 55. Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 76. For more on the failed “Key Sectors” program, see Hewitt, “Reforming the Canadian Security State.”

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95 Hewitt, Spying 101, 25. 96 csis, access request 117-98-71, Directing nco, Key Sectors Section, to [deleted under Access to Information and Privacy Act (atip): name of Mountie], 15 December 1971. 97 Ibid., S/Insp. S.H. Schultz to the Officer in Charge, “D” Branch, 11 February 1972. 98 Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain, location 1114– 1125. 99 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 165, 218–19; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, location 1147. 100 Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, 2. 101 Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, xvi. 102 O’Neill, The New Left, 1–27; Gosse, Rethinking the New Left, 1–8. 103 “Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society,” 1962, http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/huron. html (last accessed 15 March 2016). 104 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 220–1. For more on the student movement in a Canadian and international context, see Levitt, Children of Privilege; Lexier, “To Struggle Together or Fracture Apart.” 105 Roussopoulos, “Canada.” 106 csis, access request 88-A-18, Key Sectors – Canada, Memorandum of Supt Draper for D.S.I., 7 November 1967; lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00130 [deleted under atip: Mountie name] for Director, Security and Intelligence, to Divisional COs and Officers in charge S.I.B. “C,” “E” and “O,” 1 September 1970; ibid., Memorandum to divisions and officers, 17 March 1969. 107 Betke and Horrall, Canada’s Security Service, 2:670. 108 Trotsky, My Life, 280–5. 109 Nesbitt, Conversations with Trotsky, 8. 110 Hewitt, “‘Strangely Easy to Obtain,’” 385–6. 111 Hewitt, Spying 101, 130. For more on “entryism” in various forms, see Shipley, Trotskyism; Robertson, The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, 166; Stutje, “Trotskyism Emerges from Obscurity”; Thomas-Symonds, “A Reinterpretation of Michael Foot’s Handling.” For background on the international Trotskyist movement, see Tomlinson, Left-Right, and Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985, 142–59. 112 Alexander, International Trotskyism, 1929–1985, 148. See also

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113 114 115 116 117 118

119

120 121

122 123 124

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Nesbitt, Conversations with Trotsky, and Palmer, “A Tate Gallery for the New Left.” Webber, “Entryism in Theory, in Practice, and in Crisis.” Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 337. rcmp, Brief #143 – Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada, 1 February 1967, 152. Ibid. Steve Hewitt, Spying 101, 124. For details of the case, see “Ross Dowson v. RCMP ,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/dowson/rcmpvsross.html (last accessed 11 August 2016). lac, rg 146, access request A-2012-00621, Canadian Trotskyist Organization – Trotskyism – Historical and Significance Items of Interest, Memorandum from Sgt D.J.O. Johnson to S/Sgt R.E. Holloway, 25 August 1980, 18–19. Ibid., 19. See Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 311–411; Hewitt, “The Dog That Didn’t Bark”; Ross, “The Rise and Fall of Québécois Separatist Terrorism”; Churchill and Vander Wall, Agents of Repression; Jacobs, The Way the Wind Blew; Jamieson, “The Third Wave Labour Unrest”; Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom; Milligan, Rebel Youth. Hewitt, Spying 101, 159. See Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 336–9. “Founding Statements of the ys/ljs,” Socialist History Project, http://www.socialisthistory.ca/Docs/1961-/YSLJS/YSLJS-1967.htm (last accessed 14 September 2014).

chapter two 1 There have been several debates over the ongoing appropriateness of the use of the term second-wave feminism. See Laughlin et al., “Is It Time to Jump Ship?” We have adopted this term because it is still widely used in academic and popular circles to describe a heightened period of feminist activism between the 1960s and the 1980s. 2 Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood, “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen.” See also Kostash, Long Way from Home; Pierson et al., Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 1, Strong Voices; Korinek, Roughing It in the Suburbs; Adamson, “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals”; and Luxton, “Feminism as a Class Act.”

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3 Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses; Backhouse and Flaherty, Challenging Times; Prentice et al., Canadian Women; Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail, Feminist Organizing for Change; Owram, Born at the Right Time; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s; Mills, The Empire Within; and Sangster, “Radical Ruptures.” 4 Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, New Jersey: Roman and Allenheld, 1983), 10, as cited in Welding, “A Classification of Feminist Theories,” 16–17. 5 “Introduction,” in Women Unite!, 9–13. See also Luxton, “Feminism as a Class Act,” and Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. 6 “Introduction,” in Women Unite! 9. 7 Bonnie Kreps, “Radical Feminism,” in Women Unite! 71–5. See also Echols, Daring to Be Bad; Descarries-Bélanger and Roy, The Women’s Movement and Its Currents of Thought; and Crow, Radical Feminism. 8 Dumont, Feminism à la Québécoise; and Dumont and Toupin, eds., La Pensée féministe au Québec. 9 Laura Sabia, quoted in Prentice et al., Canadian Women, 347. 10 Churchill, “Exploring Feminism’s Complex Relationship with Political Violence.” 11 Third, Gender and the Political. See also Wyker, “Women in Wargasm.” 12 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto. A year later Solanas attempted to assassinate American pop artist Andy Warhol, because she feared he was stealing her work. See Fahs, Valerie Solanas. 13 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex. 14 Luxton, “Feminism as a Class Act,” 84. 15 Echols, Daring to Be Bad. Performative protests were also documented among Canadian first-wave feminists who, for example, held a mock Parliament in support of woman suffrage. See Bird, “Performing Politics.” 16 “Introduction” in Women Unite! 9. See also Pierson et al., Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 1. 17 K. Gorton, quoted in Pedwell and Whitehead, “Affecting Feminism,” 115–16. 18 Flannery, “The Passion of Conviction.” See also Third, Gender and the Political, 129. 19 Bose, “Consciousness-Raising,” 177. 20 Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge,” 166.

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21 Adamson, “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals,” 258. See also Trimble, “The Politics of Feminism”; Barbara Tomlinson, cited in Hillsburg, “Furious Females,” 6; and Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 67. 22 Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group (rg) 146, Records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request A–2007–00198, volume 2914, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus-Vancouver, bc, 1 09/08/68 11/03/69, Marcie Thom, “Women’s Caucus,” The Peak, 18 September 1968: 84. 23 McKinney and Jones, “Jim Crowed – Emancipation Betrayed,” 272; and Breines, The Trouble Between Us. 24 May, Homeward Bound. See also Strong-Boag, “Home Dreams.” 25 Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual.” See also Rooke, “Public Figure, Private Woman.” 26 See reminiscences of individual women involved in postwar Canadian feminist activism: Andersen, Feminist Journeys/Voies féministes. See also Morgan, Sisterhood Is Powerful. 27 Hughes, “Left Activism, Succour, and Selfhood.” 28 Susan Chira, “The Myth of Female Solidarity,” New York Times, 12 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/ opinion/the-myth-of-female-solidarity.html (last accessed 31 January 2017). 29 Dixon, “Ideology, Class, and Liberation.” 30 Ricks, Matheson, and Pike, “Women’s Liberation,” 38. 31 Lorde, Sister Outsider, 130. 32 Breines, “Sixties Stories’ Silences,” 112. 33 Kealey, “Books Did It,” 188. 34 Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 297–304. 35 Bernstein et al., “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 31. 36 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 221. 37 Breines, The Trouble Between Us, 27. See also Kostash, Long Way from Home, 166–9. 38 Bernstein et al., “Sisters, Brother, Lovers … Listen,” 31. 39 Mitchell, “The Longest Revolution,” 11–37. 40 Bernstein et al., “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 39. 41 Peggy Morton, interviewed by Winston Gereluk for the Alberta Labour History Institute, 13 May 2005. 42 Colaiaco, Martin Luther King, Jr. 43 Text of Stokely Carmichael’s 1966 Black Power speech is available

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

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online at http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/carmichael-blackpower-speech-text/. See also Carmichael and Hamilton, Black Power; and Joseph, “The Black Power Movement.” Chapters in Joseph, The Black Power Movement, showcase a broad range of Black Power initiatives, ranging from school curricula to community organizing to Black Studies in universities. Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line. See also Muelenbeck, Race, Ethnicity, and the Cold War, and Hathcock, “‘A Spy in the Enemy’s Country.’” See Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” and Davis, Spying on America. Davis, Spying on America, 41, 97–127. Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 417. This quotation appears in Hathcock, “‘A Spy,’” 103. Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 166. Our thanks to Abby Lippman for this reference. Also see Hewitt, Spying 101, 151. Harris, “Canadian Black Power.” See also Stamadianos, “AfroCanadian Activism in the 1960s.” Stokely Carmichael, quoted in Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 21. Walker, “Black Confrontation in Sixties Halifax,” 175. Moynagh with Forestell, Documenting First Wave Feminisms, vol. 1, Transnational Collaborations and Crosscurrents, 17–19. Webber, “Black Power in the 1960s,” 484. Ibid., 496. Haden and King, “Sex and Caste,” 21. Breines, The Trouble Between Us, 34–6. Springer, “Black Feminists Respond to Black Power Masculinism.” See Farber, The Student as Nigger, and Vallières, White Niggers of America. Rubin, “Woman as Nigger,” 231. Weisstein, “‘Woman as Nigger,’” 302. Kennedy, Nigger, 23. McIntosh, “White Privilege and Male Privilege,” and Lexier, “‘The Backdrop against Which Everything Happened.’” Morton, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” 47. Kreps, “Radical Feminism,” 74. Adamson, “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals,” 255–60. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00173, Women’s Liberation Groups Canada General, rcmp report, 13 May 1969. lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, rcmp report, 26 September 1969.

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68 Jack Batten, “After Black Power, Woman Power,” Chatelaine, September 1969; lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00177, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (witch), rcmp report, 30 September 1969, 39–43. 69 lac, rg 146, access request A-96-A-00045, vol. 2787, part 24, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, 3 March 1971. See also Freeman, “The Revolution Is Happening in Our Minds.” 70 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation Movement, Sudbury, rcmp report, 205. 71 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00173, Women’s Liberation Group – Canada, part 1, rcmp report, 29 October 1969. 72 Clément, Canada’s Rights Revolution. 73 lac, rg 146, access request 96-A-00045, vol. 3961, part 19, Young Socialists, Toronto, Ontario, “Student Activism-Metropolitan Toronto,” October 1968, 1485–1509. 74 lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00198, Simon Fraser University, rcmp report, 7 August 1969, 33. 75 Lexier, “The Backdrop,” 13–15. 76 Sangster, “Radical Ruptures,” 10. 77 Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 303. 78 Simon Fraser University Archives F-126-2-0-22 ys/la Split, Young Socialists and the League for Socialist Action 1970, Isolde Belfont et al., “The Way Forward: How to Build a Mass Movement for Women’s Liberation.” 79 Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail, Feminist Organizing for Change, 43. 80 Trotsky, Women and the Family, cited in McLeod, “‘Not Another God-Damned House Wife,’” 54–5. 81 “Mary Wood,” cited in ibid., 55. 82 Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers, 272–7. 83 McKay, “Margaret Els Russell,’” 125 and n35. 84 Joreen, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” http://www.jofreeman. com/joreen/tyranny.htm (last accessed 18 December 2014). 85 Freeman, “From Suffrage to Women’s Liberation.” 86 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon rcmp report, 29 October 1969, 138. 87 lac, rg 146, access request A-2012-00621, Canadian Trotskyist Organization – Trotskyism – Historical and Significant Items of Interest – Canada, rcmp memorandum, 25 August 1980, 18.

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88 Morton, interview, 13 May 2005. 89 Adamson, “Feminists, Libbers, Lefties, and Radicals,” 255. 90 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, Margaret Penman, “The Feminists Go Marching On,” Montreal Star, 22 May 1970, 56. 91 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 10 October 1969, 120. 92 Ibid., 121. 93 Ibid. 94 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 4 December 1969, 115. 95 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 10 October 1969, 121. 96 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 4 December 1969, 117. 97 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 10 October 1969, 121. 98 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, Margaret Penman, “The Feminists Go Marching On,” Montreal Star, 22 May 1970, 57. 99 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 22 May 1969, 145. 100 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 1 May 1969, 150. 101 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 22 May 1969, 145. 102 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00177, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (witch), rcmp report, 31. 103 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 10 October 1969, 122. 104 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 4 December 1969, 116. 105 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 22 May 1969, 146. 106 Hagan, Northern Passage. 107 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 12 May 1969, 32–5. 108 Ibid., 36. 109 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 27 May 1969, 142.

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110 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp report, 17 July 1969, 135. 111 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, rcmp memorandum, 26 September 1969, 128. 112 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, Women’s Liberation Movement – Edmonton, Alberta, and Women’s Liberation – Manitoba Generally, rcmp report, Young Socialists – National Convention-Montreal, Quebec, 11–13 October 1969, 12, and rcmp report, 12 November 1969, 210. 113 For more information about some of these groups see Dumont, Feminism à la Québécoise. See also Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses, 47–68, and Baillargeon, A Brief History of Women in Quebec. 114 Morton, interview, 13 May 2005. 115 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, volume 1, Front common des Québécoises – Montreal, rcmp report, League for Socialist Action, Toronto, Ontario, 24 March 1970, 80. 116 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, League for Socialist Action, “Cross-Country Reports on the Women’s Liberation Movement,” March 1970, 80. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid., 82. 119 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, Joan Campana, “Women’s Liberation – A contribution to the discussion,” Young Socialists Discussion Bulletin, 10 December 1969, 38. 120 lac, rg 146, access request, 98-A-00143, Toronto Women’s Caucus, Toronto, Ontario, letter to Mr. A. Butroid, Special Assistant, Office of the Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration Division, Department of Manpower and Immigration from L.R. Parent, Assistant Commissioner, Deputy Director General, Security Service, 10 January 1972, 376. 121 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement – Montreal, Que., League for Socialist Action, “Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement Report,” March 1970, 145. 122 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement – Montreal, Que., League for Socialist Action, letter to The Commissioner, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, from F.D. Collins, Chief, Admissions Section, Home Services Branch, Canada Immigration Division, 2 December 1969, 165. 123 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation

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124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131

132 133

134

135 136

137

138 139 140

141

142

NO TE S T O PA GES 6 8–7 2

Movement – Montreal, Que., League for Socialist Action, “Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement Report,” 145. Ibid., 145–6. Ibid., 146. Ibid. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 152. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, League for Socialist Action, “Report on Women’s Liberation in Edmonton,” March 1970, 190. Ibid. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, League for Socialist Action, rcmp “Organizational Assessment Form,” 1 September 1970, 219. Ibid. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, League for Socialist Action, Report on Women’s Liberation in Edmonton, March 1970, 191. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, rcmp Organizational Assessment Form, 1 September 1970, 219. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon, Sask., rcmp report, 3 October 1969, 136. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, Women’s Liberation Movement, Edmonton, Alberta, rcmp report, 13 October 1970, 163. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon, Sask., rcmp report, 26 January 1970, 117– 18. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon, Sask., rcmp report, 3 October 1969, 135. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon, Sask., rcmp report, 8 July 1970, 90–1. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation Movement of Sudbury, Sudbury, Ont., rcmp report, 13 September 1971, 8. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation Movement of Sudbury, Sudbury, Ont., rcmp report, 4 April 1971, 6. Ibid., 5.

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143 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, Women’s Liberation Movement – Edmonton, Alberta, and Women’s Liberation – Manitoba Generally, rcmp, “The Women’s Liberation Movement, Winnipeg, Manitoba,” 1 July 1970, 5. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 15. 147 Ibid., 18. 148 Ibid., 6. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 6–7. 151 Ibid., 21. 152 Ibid., 22. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid., 23. 155 Ibid., 24. 156 Ibid., 25. 157 Rosen, The World Split Open, 260.

1 2

3 4 5

6 7

chapter three Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses, 35. Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group (rg) 146, Records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request 96-A-00045, Simon Fraser University (sfu), rcmp report, 27 October 1967; lac, rg 146, access request 93-A-00019, rcmp Briefing Paper: Unrest at sfu, 1968. For more on this period and the general history of sfu, see Johnston, Radical Campus; Hewitt, Spying 101, 147–51. See Wasserlein, “‘An Arrow Aimed at the Heart,’” and Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion. Wasserlein, “‘An Arrow,’” 60; ibid., 24–53, for profiles of each core group member. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State. See also Muldoon, The Abortion Debate in the United States and Canada; and Brodie, Gavigan, and Jenson, The Politics of Abortion. McLaren, Our Own Master Race. See Sethna, “The University of Toronto Health Service”; Sethna, “The Evolution of the Birth Control Handbook”; Stote, An Act of Genocide; and Dyck and Lux, “Population Control in the ‘Global North’?”

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8 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon (wlgs), rcmp report, 29 October 1969, 138. 9 Bury, “A Physician on the Front Line of Medicare.” 10 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon (wlgs), rcmp report, 29 October 1969, 140. 11 Ibid. 12 Badgley, Caron, and Powell, Committee on the Operation of the Abortion Law. See also Sethna, “All Aboard?”; and Palmer, “‘Lonely, Tragic, but Legally Necessary Pilgrimages.’” 13 “Women Declare War,” Pedestal, March 1970, 2. 14 Simon Fraser University (sfu) Archives F–73 Item 1, “Abortion and Women’s Liberation” (booklet), 1, 11. 15 “Women Declare War,” 2. For more information on the suffragettes, see Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement. 16 sfu Archives F-166-0-0-0-6, “Women’s Caucus and the ys/lsa: A Majority View,” 1970. 17 Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 26–7, 29. 18 “Abortion and Women’s Liberation” (booklet), 18; and Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 21–30. 19 Doyle, “Staging the Revolution.” 20 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, Joan C. Johnson, “Feminism, Propaganda, and Revolution,” March 1970, 64–5. 21 “Hundreds Protest Abortion Laws,” Pedestal, March 1970, 3; Wasserlein, “‘An Arrow,’” 81–2; and Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 32–3. See also Diana Moore, “Guerrilla Theatre,” Pedestal, March 1970, 3. 22 Wasserlein, “‘An Arrow,’” 88; and Thompson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 42. See also Waiser, All Hell Can’t Stop Us. 23 Betsy Wood to Christabelle Sethna, personal interview, 20 July 2007. 24 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00318, Women’s International Strike for Peace, “Must Ask nato Lands to Take Backwards Step – Voice of Women,” Toronto Daily Star, 23 April 1964, 9. 25 sfu Archives, F-73, Item 1, Vicky Brown, Dawn Carrell, Marge Hollibaugh, and Betsy Meadley, “Abortion Strategy,” no date. 26 sfu Archives, F-73, Item 1, Letter from women’s caucus to Prime Minister Trudeau and The Ministers of Health and Justice, 19 March 1970. This letter was reprinted as “An Open Letter to the Prime Minister,” signed by Betsey Meadley and Marge Holli-

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30 31

32 33

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36

37 38

39 40

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baugh, in the Pedestal, April 1970, 8, http://web.archive.org/web/ 20070820010546/http://www.nac-cca.ca/about/his_e.htm. See also Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 35. Stettner, “‘We Are Forced to Declare War.’” Greenberg, The Dangers of Dissent, 39–40. lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00613, File 1A 10-9-9 rcmp security service Annual Report, Parts 22 and 23, Annual Report for “D” Branch, 28 May 1969, 000053. Sethna, “High School Confidential”; and Hewitt, Spying 101. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00198, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus – Vancouver, bc, Marcie Thom, “Women’s Caucus,” The Peak, 18 September 1968, 84. Ibid., rcmp report, 7 August 1969, 33. Gloria Steinem, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” New York Magazine, 4 April 1969, http://laapush.org/wp-content/ uploads/2014/01/Gloria-Steinem-on-the-Relationship-Between-theBlack-Power-and-Womens-Liberation-Movements-New-YorkMagazine.pdf (last accessed 24 September 2017). See also Freeman, “The Revolution Is Happening in Our Minds.” lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00198, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus – Vancouver, bc, rcmp report, 24 July 1969, 39. rcmp files carried a newspaper account of the hexing of Mrs Pat Nixon. See: lac, rg 146, access request A-200400177, Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, rcmp report, “‘Witches’ Put Hex on Mrs. Nixon,” Vancouver Sun, 17 June 1969, 49. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Groups Canada General (wlgcg), rcmp report, 29 August 1969, 97. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, Marcy Cohen and Jean Rands, “A Report Back to the Simon Fraser Left on Women’s Caucus Summer Organizing,” 95. Ibid., rcmp report, 29 August 1969, 99–101. For a case study of sexist and sexualized portrayals of women in one leftist university student newspaper, see Sethna, “‘Chastity Outmoded!’” lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, “Woman’s Liberation Demonstrates Here,” Georgia Straight, October 1969. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 3 November 1969, 93.

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41 lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc), rcmp report, 3 November 1969, 19. 42 Ibid. 43 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 14 November 1969, 79–83. 44 Ibid., 80, 82–6. 45 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-0437, Women’s Liberation – Toronto, Ontario, 11/22/69-03/25/70, wlm Newsletter, 22 January 1970, Toronto, Ont., 49. 46 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-0437, Women’s Liberation – Toronto, Ontario, 11/22/69-03/25/70, “abortion caravan and campaign,” 2 March 1970, 21. 47 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-0437, Women’s Liberation – Toronto, Ontario, 11/22/69-03/25/70, rcmp report, 5 March 1970, 33. 48 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-0437, Women’s Liberation – Toronto, Ontario, 11/22/69-03/25/70, rcmp report, 25 March 1970, 7. 49 lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, vwc, rcmp report, 14 April 1970, 129. For more on this period in the history of the rcmp security service, see Steve Hewitt, “Reforming the Canadian Security State: The rcmp Security Service and the ‘Key Sectors’ Program,” Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 165–84. 50 lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, vwc, rcmp report, letter from J.E.M. Barrette to D.B. Beavis, 30 April 1970, 116. 51 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, Joan Campana, “Women’s Liberation – A Contribution to the Discussion,” Young Socialists Discussion Bulletin (Ligue des jeunes socialistes), 10 December 1969, 38–40. 52 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, Internal Bulletin: Cross-Canada Reports on the Women’s Liberation Movement, 5 May 1970, 55. 53 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, Joan Newbigging, “Re: Abortion Caravan,” 29 March 1970, 117. 54 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 12 May 1970, 90. Mary Trew is identified by name and by number D937-6392 in a surveillance report dated 12 May 1970. For more on the security service’s filing system, see Hewitt, Spying 101, 36.

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231

55 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, Women’s Liberation Movement – Edmonton, Alberta, and Women’s Liberation – Manitoba Generally (wlme and wlmg), rcmp report, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Vancouver, bc, 21 April, 1970, 186. 56 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00305, New Feminist – Toronto, The New Feminist, April 1970, 52. 57 Childbirth by Choice Trust, No Choice, 131; and Jessica Valenti, “Abortion by Wire Coat Hanger Is Not a Thing of the Past in America,” Guardian, 15 December 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/15/wire-coat-hanger-abortion-stories-united-states (last accessed 11 July 2016). 58 Wasserlein, “‘An Arrow,’” 89; and Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 41–2 and 58. 59 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, wlme and wlmg, rcmp report, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Vancouver, bc, 21 April 1970, 185. 60 Margo (Dunn), quoted in Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses, 40. 61 Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 48, 58, and note 43. 62 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation Movement of Sudbury, Sudbury, Ont. (wlms), rcmp report, 19 May 1970, 97. 63 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wlms, rcmp report, 43. 64 Ibid., 46. 65 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wlms, rcmp report, 5 May 1970, 175. 66 Ibid., 176. 67 Ibid., 177, 179. 68 lac, rg 146, access request, A-2005-00440, Women’s Liberation Groups Canada (wlgc-440), rcmp report, 26 May 1970, 19. 69 Hewitt, Spying 101, 53. 70 Chesler, Woman of Valor; and Moritz and Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman. 71 Kay MacIntyre, “Cavalcade Was Surprisingly Young,” Sault Daily Star, 5 May 1970, and “Pro-Abortion Women’s Group Speaks Here on Way to Ottawa,” Sudbury Star, 6 May 1970, in lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, vwc, 89, 93. 72 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00312, wlme and wlmg, rcmp report, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Vancouver, bc, 21 April 1970, 185.

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73 Dunphy, Morgentaler, 77–87. 74 Janet Kask, “Abortion in Quebec,” in Anderson, Mother Was Not a Person, 154. 75 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement – Montreal (wlmm), rcmp, “Women’s Liberation Movement, Montreal,” 28 August 1970, 94; ibid., rcmp report, 22 October 1970, 102; ibid., rcmp report, 11 August 1970, 109– 10. 76 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00448, volume 2974, part 2, Women’s Liberation Group Canada, rcmp report, “Women’s Liberation Group – Toronto,” Ontario, 22 January 1970, 36. 77 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, Front commun des Québécoises (fcq), “flf Won’t Be Along but Backs English,” Montreal Star, 8 May 1970, 44. 78 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 10 April 1970, 60. 79 O’Leary and Toupin, Québécoises Deboutte!, vol. 1; Clio Collective, Quebec Women, 355–63; and Mills, The Empire Within, 118–37. See also Pagé, “Reinventing the Wheel or Fixing It?” 80 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 12 May 1970, 90. 81 Ibid., 91. 82 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 11 May 1970, 33. 83 Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 54; Little, “Militant Mothers Fight Poverty.” 84 Powers, “Statement to the Abortion Caravan,” 122. 85 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wlms, rcmp report, 5 April 1971, 48. 86 Doris Powers, quoted in Sethna, “All Aboard,” 100. 87 Morris, “Diary of a Feminist,” 182. 88 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 11 May 1970, 35. 89 Rosen, The World Split Open, 228–9. 90 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 11 May 1970, 35. The shootings at Kent State occurred on 2 May 1970, just days before the caravan arrived in Ottawa. They were sometimes attributed to the “leftist” influence on campus. Importantly, the response to shootings of black university students at Jackson State, Mississippi, and at Southern University,

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91 92 93 94 98 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104 105

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Louisiana, was muted. See Nora Sayre, “Kent State: Victims, Survivors, Heirs,” Ms. (September 1975), 53–7, 88–92. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 11 May 1970, 38. Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 56. Ibid., 54. Morris, “Diary of a Feminist,” 183. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, “Abortion Caravan,” 295. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 19 May 1970, 30–1. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, rcmp reports, 26–27 May 1970, 112–113; ibid., clippings, 115, 129–33. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 19 May 1970, 46. Purvis, “The Daily Life of Militant Suffragettes.” Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 58–60. See also Stettner, “‘We Are Forced to Declare War,’” 436. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, rcmp report, 19 May 1970, 46. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, Richard Jackson, “Screaming Women Halt the Commons,” Ottawa Journal, May 1970, 96. “How to Lose a Cause,” Ottawa Citizen, 25 May 1970, in lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, 87. Jackson, “Screaming Women Halt the Commons.” Claude Henault, “Tighter Commons Security Hinted,” Toronto Telegram, 22 May 1970, in lac, rg 146, access request A-200400449, wlgcg, 14. Douglas Fisher, “Demanding Women Anger mps,” Toronto Telegram, 22 May 1970, in lac, rg 146, access request A-200400449, wlgcg, 99. lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00163, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Vancouver, bc (vwc), Wayne MacDonald, “Protective Shield Urged for mps,” Vancouver Sun, 16 May 1970, 68. Fascinatingly, as Scott Rutherford has written, in the autumn of 1974 a group of Indigenous activists from the Canadian chapter of the American Indian Movement (aim), joined with Quakers and members of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist) (cpcml), some of whom were South Asians upset about racist attacks.

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108

109 110 111

112

113 114

They too embarked upon a cross-country trek from Vancouver to Ottawa to draw attention to the plight of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Fearing Maoist involvement, the Mounties spied on the caravan from the very beginning. Unlike the response to the Abortion Caravan, this time, when the caravan arrived on Parliament Hill, the rcmp was ready, beating up the protesters, including women and children, with batons. Some of the caravaners would remain in Ottawa, occupying a small island and calling it “the Native People’s Embassy.” Later it was discovered that a participant from aim in the United States, who visited the caravaners on the island and gave press conferences, was actually an fbi informant. Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 191–9. lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00163, vwc, “vancouver women’s caucus,” 5 June 1970, 137. Pages 138 to 163 have been excised. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in Canada, 286. Notes taken by Cynthia Flood and quoted in Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 63–6. Smyth, “A Few Laced Genes,” 334–5; and Smith, “An ‘Entirely Different’ Kind of Union.” See also Thomson, Winning Choice on Abortion, 63–6. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, rcmp files related to Women’s Liberation Group, Saskatoon, rcmp report, 18 December 1970, 66–70. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, wlgcg, “Calgary Women’s Liberation,” 91–2. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgs, rcmp report, 5 April 1971, 48.

chapter four 1 Press statement by the Indochinese, 31 March 1971, quoted in Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 2. See also Wu, Radicals on the Road, 193–218; and Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, 187–232. 2 “Angry U.S. Women Use Canada as Forum for Their Militant Anti-war Views,” Globe and Mail, 4 April 1971, in Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group 146, Records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request A-200700200, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada, 33.

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3 Cora Weiss, interviewed by Sarah Mackenzie, 30 November 2011. Weiss said she was unaware of rcmp surveillance of the Indochinese Conference in Vancouver and Toronto. The fbi and the cia also infiltrated Women Strike for Peace (wsp). See Ian McKay, “Margaret Els Russell,’” 125 and note 35. See also Taylor, We Made a Difference, 73–7. 4 Pierre Laporte was killed and James Cross was released. See Simard et al., Pour en finir avec Octobre. See also Clément, “The October Crisis of 1970.” 5 Brookfield, “The Fasting Granny vs. the Trudeau Government,” 187. See also Price, Orienting Canada, 280–301; and Turse, Kill Anything That Moves. 6 lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00620, Joint Intelligence Committee (jic), “Brief #308 – The Internal Threat to Canada,” 19 May 1971, 57. 7 Powers, Secrecy and Power, 464–7; Theoharis, Spying on Americans, 147–8; Donner, The Age of Surveillance, 270–1. 8 Richelson and Ball, The Ties That Bind; Horrall and Betke, Canada’s Security Service, 2:729–42; Scher, The Un-Canadians, 238–9; Hewitt, Spying 101, 160–1. 9 Hewitt, Spying 101, 161. 10 lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00620, jic, “Brief #308 – The Internal Threat to Canada,” 57. 11 University of Pittsburgh, Archives Service Center, American Left Ephemera Collection, 1894–2008, ais.2007.11, Box 6, Folder 1, Betsey Stone, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” December 1970, 3. 12 Dixon, “Ideology, Class, and Liberation,” 228. 13 Rosen, The World Split Open, 260. 14 Hammond-Callaghan, “Bridging and Breaching Cold War Divides.” 15 Thorn, From Left to Right. 16 Early, “‘A Grandly Subversive Time,’” 253–4. See also Macpherson and Sears, “The Voice of Women.” 17 Vickers, “The Intellectual Origins of the Women’s Movements in Canada,” 55; and Early, “A Grandly Subversive Time,” 253–80. 18 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00306, Marie Thérèse Forget Casgrain (Casgrain) dob: 10 July 1896, dod 3 November 1981, 107, 110–12. 19 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00306, Casgrain, 28. 20 Dean Beeby, “Thérèse Casgrain, Feminist Icon, Written out of Public History under Stephen Harper’s Government,” National Post,

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

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28 July 2014, http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/07/28/theresecasgrain-feminist-icon-written-out-of-public-history-understephen-harpers-government/ (last accessed 4 September 2014). lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00306, Casgrain, “rcmp Silence Irritates Women,” Ottawa Journal, 15 August 1962, 40. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00306, rcmp report, “Voice of Women Canada,” 16 April 1962, 81. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-000294, rcmp, “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada – Countermeasures,” 1 February 1967, 166. lac, rg 146 access request A-2010-00318, Women’s International Strike for Peace (wisp), rcmp report British Columbia Peace Council-British Columbia, 23 April 1964, 8. For more information, see pages 4–7. O’Kane, “Canadian Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam, 1954–1973.” Edwardson, “Kicking Uncle Sam out of the Peaceable Kingdom.” See also Churchill, “supa, Selma, and Stevenson.” Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 170–1. Hagan, Northern Passage, 3. Churchill, “An Ambiguous Welcome.” Levant, Quiet Complicity, 192. Macpherson, When in Doubt Do Both, 118. Squires, Building Sanctuary, 55. Early, “Canadian Women and the International Arena in the Sixties.” See also Sweet, “Purls for Peace.” lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00317, wisp, rcmp report, 29 May 1970, 6; lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00318, wisp, rcmp report 29 May 1970, 6. Macpherson, When in Doubt Do Both, 122, refers to the Vietnamese Women’s Union. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 194, refers to the Women’s Union of North Vietnam and the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam as the Vietnam Women’s Unions. We have adopted Wu’s designation. Macpherson, When in Doubt Do Both, 122. See also Nudelman, “Trip to Hanoi.” Wu, “Journeys for Peace and Liberation,” 582. See also Brookfield, Cold War Comforts, 161; and Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy. Notably, some Vietnamese women collected military

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38 39

40 41

42 43 44

45

46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53

54 55

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intelligence and were involved in espionage networks. See Taylor, “Long-Haired Women, Short-Haired Spies.” Kerans, Muriel Duckworth, 127. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00317, wisp, rcmp report, 6 June 1969, 38–48; lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00318, wisp, rcmp reports, 6 June 1969; 3 June 1969; 2 June 1969, 38– 46. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation – Sudbury (wls), rcmp report, 18 July 1969, 201–3. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Regina Women’s Liberation Group, “Public Meeting with Vietnamese Women Who Are Involved in the Struggle to Liberate Their Country,” 204–5. Campbell, “‘Women United Against the War,’” 339–46. Quoted in Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 166. Also see Hewitt, Spying 101, 151–2, 161. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00198, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus – Vancouver, bc, rcmp report, 7 August 1969, 33. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00198, Simon Fraser University Radical Women’s Caucus – Vancouver, bc, rcmp Transit Slip (handwritten note), 39. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 221. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada – 1971 (iwdc), rcmp report, 16 March 1971, 44. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, John Starnes, Director of the Security Service, to Dr R.M. Adams, Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration, Department of Manpower and Immigration, 17 March 1971, 39. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, Notice from Voice of Women/La voix des femmes, 25 February 1971, 20. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 219–43. Hagan, Northern Passage, xi. Mills, The Empire Within, 118–37. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00449, Women’s Liberation Group Canada General (wlgcg), “Letter from Quebec,” December 1970, 88. Pagé, “Reinventing the Wheel or Fixing It?,” 58–62. Simon Fraser University (sfu) Archives, F-166-0-0-0-4, memo, to

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63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71

N OT ES TO PAG E S 1 1 6–2 0

The Interim Work Committee from The Montreal International Collective, 19 December 1970, 1–2; and Wu, Radicals on the Road, 244–6 and 236–8. See also Ricci, “Searching for Zion”; Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 53–72; and Mills, The Empire Within, 95–118. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wls, “For Discussion,” 130–3. sfu Archives, F-166-0-0-0-2, Articles by Anne Roberts, 1970, “Statement,” no date. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 200. See also 202–9. Ibid., 211–12. See also Ward, “The Third World Women’s Alliance”; and Kemp et al., “The Dawn of a New Day.” lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, “Indochinese Conference,” The Pedestal, March 1971, 67. See Beal, “Double Jeopardy”; Sutherland, “The Chicana”; and Stote, An Act of Genocide. Moraga and Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back; “The Issue Is ‘Ism’: Women of Colour Speak Out,” special issue, Fireweed 16 (1983): 8; and Fitzgerald, Guberman, and Guberman, Still Ain’t Satisfied! Thompson, “Multiracial Feminism,” 337. See also Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism”; Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins”; Fellows and Razack, “The Race to Innocence”; and Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes.” lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, “Indochinese Conference,” The Pedestal, March 1971, 67. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, “Dear Sisters,” 12 March 1971, 45–6. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, rcmp report, 16 March 1971, 40–6. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00199, iwdc, “Dear Sisters,” 12 March, 1971, 45. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 3–5. Ibid., Voice of Women (vow), “Press Release,” 29 March 1971, 35. lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00200, iwdc, rcmp report, 5 April 1971, 25–6; “U.S. Govt. Blamed for My Lai Deaths,” Winnipeg Free Press, 31 March 1971, 28; and vow, “Press Release,” 31. Wu, Radicals on the Road, 226.

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72 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada – 1971, “General Information for All Third World Delegates,” 32–4. 73 Macpherson, When in Doubt, 127. 74 Margot Dunn to Christabelle Sethna, personal interview, 27 July 2007. 75 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada – 1971, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 5. 76 Wu, Radicals on the Road, 129. For the complex relationship between the Red Guards and the Black Panthers, see Maeda, “Black Panthers, Red Guards, and Chinamen.” 77 Wu, Radicals on the Road, 129. 78 Price, Threatening Anthropology, 306–25. See also Ainley, “A Woman of Integrity.” 79 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 5. See also lac, rg 146, access request A-200400175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 90. 80 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 2. 81 Ibid., 3–10. 82 Belknap, The Vietnam War on Trial. 83 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 12. 84 Ibid., 13. 85 Aptheker, The Morning Breaks. See also Davis, Women, Race, and Class. 86 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 14. 87 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 90. 88 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 6. 89 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 90. 90 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, Indochinese Women’s Delegation to Canada – 1971, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 21–2. 91 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, 13. 92 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 96.

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93 Austin, Fear of a Black Nation, 154–6. 94 lac, rg 146, access request A-2015-00286, Quebec Committee of Solidarity with the Black Panthers (Le Comité Québécois de solidarité avec Les Black Panthers), Montreal, Que., letter to “Dear Sir” from Assistant Commissioner L.R. Parent, 6 November 1970, 24. See also Bernstein et al., “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 31–9. 95 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 8. 96 Ibid., 13. 97 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 26. 98 Ibid., 21. 99 Stokely Carmichael, quoted in Hall, Peace and Freedom, 1. 100 Carter, “Alcoholism in Black Vietnam Veterans.” 101 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 17. 102 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, “Revolutionary Greetings,” 31 March 1971, 119. See also wlgc2, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 100. 103 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, 876. 104 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 26–7. 105 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 16. 106 Canadian Women’s Movement Archives (cwma), 10-001 S6 Indochinese Women’s Conference File 13, letter, “To Our Indochinese Sisters – Greetings,” 13 January 1971. See also Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 245. 107 Burris, “Fourth World Manifesto.” 108 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 23–5. 109 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver,” 13–17. 110 Robinson and Kimmel, “The Queer Career of Homosexual Security Vetting.” 111 Jenkins, “James Bond’s ‘Pussy’ and Anglo-American Cold War Sexuality.” See also May, Homeward Bound; and Adams, The Trouble with Normal. 112 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00294, rcmp, “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada – Countermeasures,” 1 February 1967, 34. See also Kinsman, “‘Character Weaknesses’ and ‘Fruit Machines’”; and Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers. 113 Anonymous, “Lesbians Belong in the Women’s Movement”; Ross,

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114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125 126

127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

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The House That Jill Built, 24–33; and Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” 37–41. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 13. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, “Lesbianism Is Revolution,” 166–8. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 16. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, “Smash Phallic Imperialism,” 169–70. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, “Woman-Identified Women,” 184. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, “Stepin Fetchit Woman,” 185–7. Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace, 230. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 13. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 16. sfu Archives, F-165-2-0-0-4, Anne Roberts and Barbara Todd, “Murmurings after the Indochinese Conference,” The Pedestal, May 1971, 6. sfu Archives, F-166-0-0-0-4, Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference Report, 6 April 1971. sfu Archives, F-166-0-0-0-3, Indochinese Women’s Conference 1/3, 1970–1971; Kathleen Gough, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver.” Wu, Radicals on the Road, 219–20. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 99. Ibid. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00309, iwdc, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 6. Ibid. cwma, 10-001 S6 Indochinese Women’s Conference File, Some Kingston Women, “Imperialism as We See It,” no date. lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 26 May 1971, 70. cwma, 10-001 S6 Indochinese Women’s Conference File, “Important Conference Information – Please Read,” no date.

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135 cwma, 10-001 S6 Indochinese Women’s Conference File, “Toronto Conference,” no date. 136 lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00200, iwdc, “Waves of Peace and Domesticity,” Toronto Telegram, 12 April 1971, 8; lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00200, iwdc, “‘End This Terrible War!’ Joint Call of Indochina, Canada, and U.S. women,” Canadian Tribune, 14 April, 1971, 2. 137 lac, rg 146, access request A-2007-00200, iwdc, “Fistfights Reported at Feminists’ Peace Meeting,” Toronto Telegram, 12 April 1971, 7. See also Lekus, “Queer and Present Dangers.” 138 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 26 May 1971, 70. 139 lac, rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, wlgcg, rcmp report, 22 April 1971, 101–2. 140 Kerans, Muriel Duckworth, 132–3. 141 Cora Weiss, interviewed by Sarah Mackenzie, 30 November 2011. 142 Adams, “There’s No Place Like Home.” See also Moi, What Is a Woman?

1

2

3 4

5

chapter five Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group (rg) 146, Records of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request 98-A-00143, Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc), Toronto, Ontario, rcmp report, 14 March 1972, 580. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, Women’s Liberation Groups (wlg), National Conference, 1972 at Winnipeg, mb, “Ontario Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition,” and “The Manitoba Abortion Action Coalition,” 126–7. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, rcmp report, 25 April 1972, 20. Nick Patch, “Rita MacNeil Dies at 68 after Surgery; Son Says She Had Been Planning Summer Concerts,” Toronto Star, 17 April 2013, http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/2013/04/17/ rita_macneil_cape_bretons_first_lady_of_song_dies_at_age_68. html (last accessed 14 December 2014). lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-00441, Women’s Liberation Canada (wlc), rcmp report, 17 April 1972, 32; and rcmp report, 25 April 1972, 20–3; Jim Bronskill, “Rita MacNeil Dumbfounded by rcmp File,” Toronto Star, 5 August 2008, http://www.thestar.

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9

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14 15 16

17

18 19

20

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com/news/canada/2008/08/05/rita_macneil_dumbfounded_by_ rcmp_file.html (last accessed 8 May 2013). lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, rcmp report, 17 April 1972, 24–37. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 20–1; lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, “Greetings to Cross-Canada Conference,” 48. See also Dunphy, Morgentaler, 89–109; and Pelrine, Morgentaler, 68. The quip is attributed originally to Martin O’Malley, a Globe and Mail reporter. See “Trudeau: ‘There’s No Place for the State in the Bedrooms of the Nation,’” CBC Digital Archives, 21 December 1967, http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/omnibus-bill-theres-noplace-for-the-state-in-the-bedrooms-of-the-nation (last accessed 13 July 2016). lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, rcmp report, 17 April 1972, 10, 20, 18. See also Pelrine, Abortion in Canada. Dunphy, Morgentaler, 100. Bobbie Spark, quoted in ibid., 101. Simon Fraser University (sfu) Archives, F-165-2-0-0-4, Anne Roberts and Barbara Todd, “Murmurings After the Indochinese Conference,” Pedestal, May 1971, 7. Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women. Newman and White, Women, Politics, and Public Policy, 82. “Timeline of Canadian Women’s History,” http://people.stfx.ca/ nforeste/308website/women’shistorytimeline.html (last accessed 10 January 2014). “Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ en/article/canadian-advisory-council-on-the-status-of-women/ (last accessed 10 January 2014). Newman and White, Women, Politics, and Public Policy, 82–5. Schmidt, Silenced, 57–75. See also Matt Ingram, “Women in rcmp Have Come a Long Way in 40 Years,” Toronto Sun, 14 September 2014, http://www.torontosun.com/2014/09/14/women-in-rcmphave-come-a-long-way-in-40-years (last accessed 23 July 2016). rg 146, access request A-2004-00175, Women’s Liberation Group Canada General (wlgcg), Young Socialists – 1971 – Cross Canada Socialist Educational Conference – Waterloo, Ontario, 20–25 August September 1971, 41–2.

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21 For more on nac, see Annee Molgat, with Joan Grant Cummings, “‘An Action That Will Not Be Allowed to Subside’: nac’s First Twenty-Five Years,” http://web.archive.org/web/20070820010546/ http://www.nac-cca.ca/about/his_e.htm (last access 18 July 2013). 22 lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00085, National Action Committee on the Status of Women (nac), rcmp report, 23 October 1973, 68. 23 See Morgan, Sisterhood Is Global; Fitzgerald, Guberman, and Guberman, Still Ain’t Satisfied!; “The Issue Is ‘Ism’: Women of Colour Speak Out,” special issue, Fireweed 16 (1983); Prentice et al., Canadian Women, 350–66; Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail, Feminist Organizing for Change; Anderson, The Unfinished Revolution, 198–224; Ross, The House That Jill Built; Pierson and Cohen, Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 2, Bold Visions. 24 Bourne was a veteran of the Canadian security scene. At one time he headed the Security Planning and Research Group (sparg ) and then in 1972 the Interdepartmental Committee on Security and Intelligence (icsi ). Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 302. 25 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, L.R. Parent to Robin Bourne, 25 April 1972, 18–19. 26 csis, access request 117-99-14, Counter-Subversion, Memo from Superintendent Murray Chisholm, 20 March 1972. 27 lac, rg 146, access request 96-A-00045, University of Toronto, rcmp composite report on the University of Toronto, 7 August 1973. 28 rcmp, “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry,” 24 January 2014, 10, http://www.desmog.ca/2015/02/17/leakedinternal-rcmp-document-names-anti-petroleum-extremists-threatgovernment-industry (last accessed 4 April 2016). 29 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, rcmp reports, 1 May 1972, 3 September 1972, 261–2, 277. 30 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, rcmp reports, 21 January 1972, 31 January 1972, 15 May 1972, 3 September 1972. 31 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, rcmp report, 27 February 1973. 32 Ibid. 33 For more on the impact of Cold War security screening, see Whitaker and Marcuse, Cold War Canada; Hannant, The Infernal Machine.

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34 Hewitt, Spying 101, 194–5; Brushett, “Guerilla Bureaucrats.” 35 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, Women’s Liberation – Sudbury and Women’s Liberation – Regina (wls-wlr), rcmp report, 4 April 1974, 4–6. See Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman, Whose National Security? 36 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wls-wlr, rcmp report, 16 February 1972, 310. 37 Ibid. 38 The Waffle was a socialist movement within the New Democratic Party from 1969 to 1972, when it was expelled for trying to push the party further leftward. “The Waffle,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/waffle/ (last accessed 11 November 2016). 39 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wls-wlr, Organizational Assessment Form, 1 February 1972, 330. 40 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, wls-wlr, Inspector D.H. Mumby to Liaison Officer, 20 August 1974, 250. 41 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-00441, wlc, rcmp report, 9 May 1972, 6. 42 lac, rg 146, access request A-2005-00441, wlc, rcmp report, 25 April 1972, 15–16. 43 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00313, Women’s Liberation Movement – Atlantic Region (wlmar), Canada, rcmp report, 5 July 1972, 2. 44 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement Montreal (wlmm), Anne Cools, Montreal, Quebec, 2 February 1972, 208. 45 lac mg 28 IV II 161, File 31, “Discussion Bulletins–Nos. 11–20 1972,” League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière, Discussion Bulletin, vol. 14, 1972, “Women’s Liberation Resolution: Draft Resolution Adopted by the Political Committee,” October 22 1972, 1. 46 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Ligue socialiste ouvrière, 12 February 1973, 180–2. 47 Ibid. 48 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00308, Communist Policy and Activity regarding: Women’s Groups Canada Generally, Communist Party of Canada – Ontario, 7 February 1975, 35. 49 For more on Buller, see Sangster, Dreams of Equality. 50 Kashtan, “Communist Action Program for Women.”

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51 de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western”; and Ghodsee, “Rethinking State Socialist Mass Women’s Organizations.” 52 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, rcmp files related to International Women’s Day (iwd), rcmp report, “International Women’s Year Committee,” 10 December 1975, 580–2. 53 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, rcmp files related to iwd, Terry Padgham, “Report on the International Women’s Year Congress for Women,” 13 January 1976, 572–3. 54 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, rcmp files related to iwd, rcmp report, “International Women’s Year Committee,” 10 December 1975, 582. 55 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00316, Women Against Soaring Prices (wasp), rcmp report, 27 August 1973, 256. 56 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00316, wasp, rcmp memorandum, 25 February 1976, 227–32. 57 Toronto Wages for Housework Committee (twhc) (Unaligned Marxist and Pressure Groups), rcmp report, 16 November 1976. A special thank you to Gary Kinsman for supplying us with this document. 58 Hewitt, Spying 101, 159–61. 59 twhc, rcmp report, 16 November 1976. 60 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00310, rcmp files related to Women’s Liberation Group, Saskatoon, rcmp report, 13 April 1978, 161, and 15 November 1977, 169–76. 61 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00315, wlg, rcmp Memorandum, 2 August 1977, 2. 62 Pierson et al., Canadian Women’s Issues, vol. 1, Strong Voices, 20–7; Cohen, “The Canadian Women’s Movement,” 215–17. 63 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 280–307. 64 Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, locations 538–41. 65 Hewitt, Spying 101, 159. 66 Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 282–7. See also Whitaker, “Apprehended Insurrection?” For more on the October Crisis, see Tetley, The October Crisis, 1970. 67 For more on Starnes, see Starnes, Closely Guarded. 68 Privy Council Office (pco), access request 173-A-003, Minutes of the 24 September 1971. Meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security and Intelligence, 28 October 1971. The assistant secretary in attendance was T.D. (Ted) Finn, later to be the first director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. John Starnes predicted in

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69 70 71 72

73

74

75 76 77 78 79

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1970 that there would be a high potential for violence in the coming decade. Royal Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (hereafter McDonald Commission), volume 170, 23374; Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), access request 117-91-102, “The Threat to Security from Violence Prone Revolutionary Elements in Canada,” 24 September 1971. McDonald Commission, Second Report, 1:270. Sallot, Nobody Said No; Sawatsky, Men in the Shadows; McLoughlin, Last Stop, Paris. McDonald Commission, Testimony of Murray Chisholm, volume 169, 23216, 23212. Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 337–8; McDonald Commission, Testimony of Warren Allmand, volume 117, 18270; McDonald Commission, Second Report, 1:480. lac, rg 146, access request 96-A-0048, Young Socialists 1971 Cross Canada Socialist – Educational Conferences, Waterloo Ontario, “Press Release,” n.d., 4401–02. Weiner, Enemies, locations 5075–5089. For more on the history of cointelpro, see Blackstock, Cointelpro; Vander Wall and Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers. Forty-three years after the break-in, some of those involved finally revealed their identities and the story behind their actions. Mark Mazzetti, “Burglars Who Took on fbi Abandon Shadows,” New York Times, 7 January 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-tookon-fbi-abandon-shadows.html (last accessed 31 January 2014). Hewitt, Spying 101, 199. Hewitt, “Reforming the Canadian Security State,” 174. Ibid., 173–4. Burns and van der Will, Protest and Democracy in West Germany; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, location 4852. lac, rg 146, access request A-2012-00263, Security Service Operational Conference (ssco) epo, rcmp report, 13 November 1975, 44. Ibid., “D” Ops hq to Montreal and Ottawa, 22 October 1975, 79. For more on the targeting of gays and lesbians by the rcmp, see Kinsman and Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers. George Monbiot, “Otter-Spotting and Birdwatching: The Dark Heart of the Eco-terrorist Peril,” Guardian, 23 December 2008, http://www. theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/activists-conservation-

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85 86

87 88

89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

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police (last accessed 4 February 2014); Edwards, “Reordering the Priorities of the fbi .” ssco, rcmp report, 13 November 1975, 44–5. lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00164, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Barrette to Beavis, 30 April 1970, 116. Rosen, The World Split Open, 240, 259. For more on the use and impact of informants, see Hewitt, Snitch. Hewitt, Spying 101, 173–202; lac, rg 146, access request A2013-00551, Subsidization of Subversion by Government Departments, 13 February 1971 to 2 July 1977; Brushett, “Guerilla Bureaucrats.” lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Starnes to Goyer, 11 June 1971. lac, rg 146, access request A-2006-00162, Vancouver Women’s Caucus, Assistant Commissioner L.R. Parent to Art Butroid, Special Assistant, Office of the Assistant Deputy Minister, Immigration Division, Dept. of Manpower and Immigration, 24 December 1971. lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Parent to Butroid, 10 January 1972, 376. lac, rg 146, volume 2987, rcmp files related to the Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc), Department of Manpower and Immigration to the rcmp, 17 March 1972. lac, rg 146, volume 2987, twc, rcmp report, 25 April 1972. lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00085, nac, rcmp report, 26 November 1982, 18–19. See also lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00085, nac, rcmp report, 18 July 1983, 10–11. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00316, wasp, rcmp report, 10 October 1980, 10. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, iwd, rcmp report, 9 February 1981, 539. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00314, iwd, rcmp report, 23 February 1981, 543. Andrew, The Defence of the Realm, locations 7505, 10141; Wright, Spycatcher, 54. lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00085, nac, Report of Cst. T.G. Birkett, 18 July 1983, 10–11. For two journalistic accounts of csis, see Cleroux, Official Secrets; Mitrovica, Covert Entry. Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 394–6.

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98 csis Act, 1985, Justice Laws Website, http://laws-lois.justice.gc. ca/eng/acts/c-23/page-1.html#h-2 (last accessed 4 July 2013); Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby, Secret Service, 395–6. 99 Security Intelligence Review Committee (sirc), “Annual Report for 1987–88,” http://www.sirc-csars.gc.ca/pdfs/ar_1987-1988eng.pdf, 13 (last accessed 4 July 2013). 100 lac, rg 146, access request A-2013-00222, csis Counter-Subversion Weekly Meetings, Counter Subversion Management Minutes, 20 December 1984, 120; ibid., 21 February 1985, 78. 101 Mulgrew, Unholy Terror; Jiwa and Hauka, Margin of Terror. 102 Senate of Canada, “Terrorism,” 9. 103 Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here, 12; Cunningham, “The Patterning of Repression”; Cunningham and Browning, “The Emergence of Worthy Targets.” 104 Hewitt, Riding to the Rescue, 100–1. 105 sirc, “Annual Report, 1984–1985,” 19, http://www.sirc-csars.gc. ca/pdfs/ar_1984-1985-eng.pdf (last accessed 27 February 2017). 106 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00020, Canadian Women’s Coalition to Repeal the Abortion Laws – Can. Gen, Toronto to Ottawa, 3 February 1988, 396. 107 Ibid., 394–5. 108 A csis analyst would later label such violence as “single-issue terrorism.” Smith, “Single Issue Terrorism.”

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

chapter six We would like to thank Frank Zelko for coining this term. Henderson and Winter, “Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness,” 350–1. Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction. Funder, Stasiland, 11–12. See also Vismann, “Out of File, Out of Mind.” Gentile, “Resisted Access?” and a response to Gentile’s concerns by Daniel German, “Letter to the Editor.” See also Dennis Molinaro, “Canada’s Secret Archives,” ActiveHistory.ca, 25 May 2017, http://activehistory.ca/2017/05/canadas-secret-archives/ (last accessed 20 June 2017). Kealey, “Filing and Defiling,” 89. Hewitt, “He Who Controls the Present, Controls the Past.” Joan Bryden, “Spy File on Tommy Douglas Is Old, but Not Old Enough for Release: csis,” Globe and Mail, 23 August 2012, http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/spy-file-on-tommy-

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9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26

27

douglas-is-old-but-not-old-enough-for-release-csis/article1496592 /?service=mobile&page=0 (last accessed 30 June 2017). See Geist, Law, Privacy, and Surveillance in Canada; and Etzioni, The Limits of Privacy. Ash, The File, 108. See also Roy, “File-Based Autobiographies after 1989,” 81–5; and Hewitt, “Forgotten Surveillance,” 45–6. Miller, “Settling Accounts with a Secret Police.” See also Epstein, “The Stasi.” Blanton, “From the White House Email to the Stasi Files,” 36. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. See also Cobain, The History Thieves, 101–35. Merewether, “Questions of Legacy,” 156. Beattie, “The Poisoned Madeleine,” 5. Jim Bronskill, “Rita MacNeil Dumbfounded by rcmp File,” Toronto Star, 5 August 2008, http://www.thestar.com/news/canada /2008/08/05/rita_macneil_dumbfounded_by_rcmp_file.html (last accessed 10 January 2012). See Sethna and Doull, “Spatial Disparities and Travel.” Wisser and Blanco-Rivera, “Surveillance, Documentation, and Privacy,” 126. King, Tread Softly for You Tread on My Life, 9–17. Our thanks to Kerry Taylor for this reference. Marchessault, “The Women’s Liberation Front of Quebec,” 38. Hewitt, Spying 101, 36. Library and Archives Canada (lac), Record Group (rg) 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec file. lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec, rcmp report, 4. lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec, rcmp report, “Communist Party of Canada Policy and Activity,” 10 October 1975, 82. lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec, rcmp report, 17 April 1973, 65. lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec, rcmp report, 18 May 1973, 41. The numbers after the individual names are rcmp file numbers. These are normally excised under atip. lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

251

des femmes du Quebec, rcmp report, 19 March 1973, 114. See also lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-2096, uncensored La Ligue des femmes du Quebec, rcmp reports, 17 April 1973, 65, and 6 December 1974, 45. Prentice et al., Canadian Women, 358. See Harker and Farr, This Book Is an Action. A similar point is made by Rebick, Ten Thousand Roses, 19–20. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive, 4; and Burton, “Introduction,” 3. Biber and Luker, “Evidence and the Archive,” 5. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language; and Derrida, Archive Fever. Featherstone, “Archive.” Maynard, “Police/Archive”; Schwartz and Cook, “Archives, Records, and Power”; Cook, “The Archive(s) Is a Foreign Country”; and Perreault and Thifault, eds., Récits inachevés. Maynard, “Police/Archive,” 165–6. See also Steedman, Dust. Sachs, “Archives, Truth, and Reconciliation,” 3. See also O’Brien, The South African Intelligence Services. Morra, Unarrested, 8–11. Eichorn, The Archival Turn in Feminism; and Hildenbrand, Women’s Collections. See also Bartlett, Dever, and Henderson, “Notes Towards an Archive of Australian Feminist Activism”; and Chenier, “Hidden from Historians.” The University of Ottawa houses the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives Collection. See http://uottawa.ca.libguides.com/content.php?pid=194014&sid=16 26252. Cora Weiss, interviewed by Sarah Mackenzie, 30 November 2011. Koevoets and de Jong, “Introduction.” Our thanks to Anna Bogic for this reference. Dever, Newman, and Vickery, The Intimate Archive. Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, 7. Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity,” 150. lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, Women’s Liberation Group – Hamilton Peoples Movement Faction, Hamilton, Ont., and Women’s Liberation Group – Saskatoon, Sask. (wlgh-wlgs), rcmp report, “Women’s Liberation Groups – Canada,” 17 April, 1970, 105–9. For example, see lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgh-wlgs, rcmp reports, 66, 193, 34.

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46 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgh-wlgs, Karen Kopperud, “Women’s Liberation Backed by Sask. ndp Program,” [Labor] Challenge, 7 June 1971, 34. 47 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgh-wlgs, Saskatchewan Conference on Abortion Law Repeal, 110, 143, 203. 48 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgh-wlgs, “A Brief,” 17 April 1970, 111–12. 49 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00319, wlgh-wlgs, “Position Paper for Saskatoon Women’s Liberation,” 14 October 1977, 171–6. 50 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc), Toronto, Ontario, “Organizational Assessment Form,” 27 February 1973, 608. 51 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, rcmp report, 15 May 1972, 516. 52 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, “women unite!” 548. 53 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Lis Angus, “The Next Step in the Evolution of the Velvet Fist,” 549–52. 54 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Lis Angus, “A Reply to the 12-Point Paper,” 563–4. 55 Aberle, “An Indochinese Conference in Vancouver.” 56 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Kathleen Gough, “Women in Evolution,” 27 March 1972, 536–47. 57 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, “Preface to Sex and Racism by Calvin C. Hernton,” 553–5. 58 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, “my frustration,” 562; and Paul Dickin, “crude oil,” 560. 59 lac, rg 146, access request 98-A-00143, twc, Leah Fritz, “Liberated Orgasms,” 565–6. 60 Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” 41. 61 Gill et al., “Sexual Myths,” 162–9. 62 Danchev, “Keeping an Eye on Auden.” 63 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, Women’s Liberation Movement – Montreal (wlmm), rcmp report, 19 January 1971, 14. 64 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, rcmp report, 10 February 1971, 335. 65 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, “Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement Report,” March 1970, 141–2.

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66 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, “Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement Report,” 28 August 1970, 92–5. 67 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Philinda Masters and Bob Gauthier, “Burkers Disrupt Teach-in; Woman Taken to Hospital,” The Varsity, 7 December 1970, 21. 68 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, “Copy of passport application particulars and photograph,” 29–34; “Socialisme et libération de la femme,” Cahiers socialistes, 263–75; “Permis special/Special Permit,” 302–3. 69 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Marie Henretta, “The Oppression of Women in Canada,” Montreal Women’s Liberation Newsletter 1 (March 1970): 119–20. 70 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Marie Henretta, “The Small Groups,” Montreal Women’s Liberation Newsletter 1 (March 1970): 121. 71 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Marie Henretta, “Through art through Revolution,” Montreal Women’s Liberation Newsletter 1 (March 1970): 289. 72 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Marie Henretta, “Conference?” Montreal Women’s Liberation Newsletter 2 (June 1970): 286. 73 lac, rg 146, access request A-2010-00311, wlmm, Marie Hentretta, “Letter from Québec,” Pedestal, 22 December 1970, 20. 74 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, Front commun des Québécoises (fcq), rcmp report, 27 November 1969, 152; rcmp report, 3 December 1969, 142; and rcmp report, 16 December 1969, 139. 75 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, fcq, “X6200,” 18 February 1981, 519–23. 76 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, fcq, rcmp report, see 619–31. 77 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, fcq, Betty Palik, “Women March against ‘Back Door’ Abortion Policy,” Montreal Gazette, 10 March 1971, 643. 78 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, fcq, Manifeste des femmes Québécoises, 548–76. 79 lac, rg 146, access request A-2011-00302, fcq, “uqam: Bilan des cours sur la condition de la femme,” Agence de Presse Libre du Québec, 14 December 1972, 527–38. 80 Rosswurm and Gilpin, “The fbi and the Farm Equipment Workers.”

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81 See Marx, Undercover; Hewitt, Snitch; Aaronson, Terror Factory; Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category”; Miller, Narratives of Guilt and Compliance; Åkerström, Betrayal and Betrayers; Blackstock, Cointelpro; Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here; Grathwohl and Reagan, Bringing Down America. 82 McKay, “Margaret Els Russell,” 125. 83 Rita MacNeil quoted in Bronskill, “Rita MacNeil Dumbfounded by rcmp File.” 84 Marx, “Thoughts on a Neglected Category,” 406. 85 Evans and Lewis, Undercover. See also Rob Evans and Paul Lewis, “McLibel Leaflet Was Co-written by Undercover Police Officer Bob Lambert,” Guardian, 21 June 2013, https://www.theguardian. com/uk/2013/jun/21/mclibel-leaflet-police-bob-lambert-mcdonalds (last accessed 27 February 2017). conclusion 1 Rosen, The World Split Open. 2 In the United Kingdom, the Security Service (mi5) is exempt from freedom-of-information laws. Researchers are dependent on crumbs occasionally released to the National Archives by mi5, without a wider picture of the true extent of the surveillance. Although not without its merits, Christopher Andrew’s authorized history of mi5 relies on source materials not available, and potentially never available, to independent researchers. Richard NortonTaylor, “mi5 Spied on Leading British Historians for Decades, Secret Files Reveal,” Guardian, 24 October 2014, http://www.the guardian.com/world/2014/oct/24/mi5-spied-historians-eric-hobs bawm-christopher-hill-secret-files (last accessed 9 November 2014). Andrew, The Defence of the Realm. For the politics of secrecy in the uk, see Cobain, The History Thieves. 3 For more on the mythologizing of the Mounted Police, see Francis, National Dreams, 29–51. 4 Kelly Holloway, “University Faculty Worried over csis Activity,” Rabble, 20 November 2001, http://rabble.ca/news/universityfaculty-worried-over-csis-activity (last accessed 27 February 2017); “Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis): What Do You Need to Know?” Canadian Civil Liberties Union, 2015, https://ccla.org/ cclanewsite/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/CSIS-BackgroundInformation-CCLA.pdf (last accessed 27 February 2017).

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5 Nancy Macdonald and Charlie Gillis, “Inside the rcmp’s Biggest Crisis,” Maclean’s, 27 February 2015, http://www.macleans.ca/ society/inside-the-rcmps-biggest-crisis/ (last accessed 2 July 2015). 6 Craig Benjamin and Jackie Hansen, “The Need for Accurate and Comprehensive Statistics on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,” Human Rights Now: Amnesty Canada blog, 15 April 2015, http://www.amnesty.ca/blog/the-need-for-accurateand-comprehensive-statistics-on-missing-and-murdered-indigenous -women-and (last accessed 17 July 2015). 7 See Razack, Dying from Improvement. 8 Susan Lazaruk, “rcmp Apologize to Victims of Robert Pickton for Not Doing More,” Ottawa Citizen, 26 January 2012, http://www. ottawacitizen.com/news/RCMP+apologize+victims+Robert+Pick ton+doing+more/6062816/story.html (last accessed 7 July 2015); Ken MacQueen, “The rcmp: A Royal Canadian Disgrace,” Maclean’s, 18 November 2011, http://www.macleans.ca/news/ canada/a-royal-canadian-disgrace/ (last accessed 7 July 2015); and Suzanne Fournier, “Cops Watched Porn, Skipped Work instead of Investigating Missing Women: Officer,” Province, 23 November 2011, http://www.theprovince.com/news/Cops+watched+porn+ skipped+work+instead+investigating+missing+women+Officer/ 5757752/story.html (last accessed 7 July 2015). 9 Jim Bronskill, “rcmp Earmarks $100 Million in Compensation for Sexual Harassment against Female Mounties,” Global News, 6 October 2016, http://globalnews.ca/news/2986688/rcmp-to-settlein-class-action-harassment-claims-from-former-mounties/ (last accessed 23 February 2017). 10 Merlo, No One to Tell. See also Brian Hutchinson, “rcmp Seem Incapable of Policing Themselves as Hundreds of Harassment Complaints Emerge,” National Post, 1 June 2015, http://news. nationalpost.com/full-comment/brian-hutchinson-rcmp-seemincapable-of-policing-themselves-as-hundreds-of-harassment-com plaints-emerge (last accessed 2 July 2015); and Natalie Clancy, “More Women Alleging Harassment Want to Join Lawsuit against rcmp,” CBC News, 31 May 2015, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada /british-columbia/more-women-alleging-harassment-want-to-joinlawsuit-against-rcmp-1.3089534 (last accessed 7 July 2015). 11 rcmp Gender-Based Assessment, 12 November 2012, http://www. rcmp-grc.gc.ca/aud-ver/reports-rapports/gba-eces/gba-eces-eng.htm #a8 (last accessed 7 July 2015).

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Index

1960s, 4, 5, 11, 16, 18, 25, 27–8, 36, 39, 42–4, 47, 75, 76, 78–9, 106, 112–13, 152, 154, 157, 159, 167, 178, 197, 200, 203, 206 1968 protests, 46, 76 1970s, 10, 17, 20, 22, 25–8, 33, 43–4, 75, 106, 125, 113, 137, 148–9, 152, 154, 156–7, 160, 162, 165, 178, 197, 203, 206 1980s, 4, 17–18, 137, 143, 149, 157, 164–5, 197 24 Sussex Drive (residence of the prime minister of Canada), 98 Aberle, Kathleen Gough, 121–2, 125, 127, 189 abortion, 50, 58, 73, 76–104, 105, 117, 127, 129, 132, 137–50, 168, 176–7, 186, 193, 195–6; abortion law, 16, 60, 76, 79–82, 88, 93–6, 98, 100, 102–4, 138–41, 144, 149, 169, 186, 189; anti-abortion, 95, 144, 150, 167–9, 186, 193; Therapeutic Abortion Committees (tacs), 77, 79– 80, 93; violence against abortion providers, 168–9 Abortion Caravan, 16, 76, 81–2, 87– 104, 105, 106, 133, 137, 139–40, 147, 150, 186, 193, 201; disruption of House of Commons, 100–1; occupation of lawn at 24 Sussex Drive, 97–8; stops on journey to Ottawa, 89–91, 96, 133 Abortion Information Service (ais), 80, 83 Access to Information Act and Privacy

Act (atip), 4, 7, 13, 91, 156, 170–3, 175–9, 191, 198–9, 202–3, 207; access request, 23; deletions under atip, 16–17, 64–5, 95, 101, 119, 123, 129–30, 152–3, 155, 162–4, 171–3, 192, 196; section 13(1), 14, 172; section 15(1), 15, 172, 173; section 19(1), 15, 173 Africville, 55 Air India bombing, 167 Algoma College, 72 American draft resisters, 100, 106, 111–14 Anderson, Doris, 48, 65 Angus, Lis, 189 Anh, Trinh Van, 115 anti-communism, 4, 5, 11, 33, 38, 84, 192 Anti-Terrorism Act (Bill C-51), 205–6 anti–Vietnam War movement, 71, 202 Anzaldua, Gloria, 118; This Bridge Called My Back, 118 Argentina, 124 Ash, Timothy Garton, 174, 176; The File, 174 Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, 39 Austin, David, 11, 125; Fear of a Black Nation, 11 Australia, 12, 170 Australian Secret Intelligence Service, 12 baby boomers, 157 Backhouse, Constance, 51 Baker, Ella Josephine, 51 Batten, Jack, 58

290 Beattie, Rachel, 175 Beauvoir, Simone de, 48 Beavis, D.B. (Don), 87–8 Bebel, Auguste, 54 Bennett, R.B., 82, 96 Benston, Margaret, 52 Bernstein, Judy, 53–4, 56; “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 53, 57, 125 Bill C-51. See Anti-Terrorism Act Birney, Earle, 44 birth control, 73, 78, 82, 92, 109, 117, 186, 193 Black Panther Party, 46 Black Power movement, 46 Black Women’s Caucus, 56 Blanco-Rivera, Joel A., 176 Bolshevik Revolution, 27 Bolshevism. See communism Bond, James, 10, 28 Born at the Right Time (Owram), 157 Bose, Anuradha, 50 Boupha, Khampheng, 115, 122 Bourne, Robin, 144 Brecht, Bertold, 81 Breines, Wini, 52 Brenton, Dora, 180–1 British Columbia, 24, 82, 84, 90, 204 British Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, 80 British Columbia Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition, 149 British North America Act, 142 Britton, Wesley Allan, 28 Bronzatti, Vitorina, 180 Brown, Helen Gurley, 65 Brown, Vicky, 82 Browne, Simone, 9 Browning, Barb, 8 Brownlie, Robin Jarvis, 9 Buller, Annie, 152 Burton, Antoinette, 181–2; Dwelling in the Archive, 181–2 Bury, John, 78–9 Calgary Women’s Liberation, 103 Calley, William, Jr, 122 Cambodia, 107, 115

I ND E X Campbell, Kim, 102 Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 141 Canadian Aid for Vietnam Civilians (cavc), 112, 119, 120 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 33 Canadian Congress of Women (ccw), 153, 154, 166 Canadian Criminal Code, 76 Canadian Human Rights Act, 141–2 Canadian Labour Code, 141 Canadian Party of Labour, 188 Canadian Peace Congress, 188 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis), 13, 15, 23, 166–9, 172–4, 177–9, 203, 205–6 Canadian Tribune, 134 Canadian Trotskyist movement, 44, 138 Canadian Union of Public Employees, 152 Canadian Union of Rabid Senseless Extremists (curse), 132 Canadian Union of Students (cus), 63 Canadian War on Queers, The (Kinsman and Gentile), 11 Canadian Women’s Coalition to Repeal Abortion Laws (cwcral), 139 Carleton University, 40 Carmichael, Stokely, 53–6, 83, 114, 126 Carrell, Dawn, 82 Casgrain, Pierre, 110 Casgrain, Thérèse, 109–11 Central Intelligence Agency (cia), 7, 30, 107, 172 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 142, 168, 205 Chatelaine, 48, 58, 65 checkmate, 158 Chicago police, 46, 83 Chile, 72, 124 China, 37 Chinese Revolution, 37 Chrétien, Jean, 205 civil rights, 5, 49, 72 civil rights movement, 43, 46, 48, 55, 89, 157

I N D EX Clark, Joe, 205 Clark, Mark, 83 Cohen, Marcy, 85 Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cucnd), 42, 43 Commission d’enquête sur des opérations policières en territoire Québécois (Keable Commission), 159 Commission of Inquiry into Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (McDonald Commission), 159, 166 Committee for Socialist Movement (csm), 71 Committee on Equality for Women, 48, 49 Communications Security Establishment Canada (csec), 7 communism, 5–7, 10–11, 18, 27, 34–9, 51, 59, 66, 102, 111, 112, 146, 156, 164, 166, 167, 201; Communist bloc, 7, 37. See also anti-communism Communist Party of Canada (cpc), 5, 10, 14, 27, 31, 33, 39–40, 44, 67, 72, 74, 109, 110, 119, 134, 152, 154, 160, 165, 166; Central Women’s Commission, 152 Communist Party of Canada (MarxistLeninist), 148 Communist Party of Great Britain, 165 Communist Party of the United States of America, 43, 55 Communist Viewpoint, 152 Congress of Black Writers, 55 Congress of Canadian Women, 39 Cook, Terry, 182 Cook, Tim, 182 Cools, Anne, 150 Corbin, Jeanne, 39 Cross, James, 106, 157 Cuba, 40, 125 Cuban Missile Crisis, 121 Cuban Revolution, 37, 43 Culhane, Clare, 106 Cunningham, David, 8, 167; There’s Something Happening Here, 167 Cvetkovich, Ann, 184–5

291 Danchev, Alex, 191 Davis, Angela, 124, 126 Dawson College, 151 de Vault, Carole, 30 decolonization, 5, 37, 38, 55, 94 Derrida, Jacques, 182–3; “archive fever,” 182 Dever, Maryanne, 184 Dickin, Paul, 190 Dixon, Marlene, 52–3, 68, 108, 116 Dohrn, Bernardine, 83 Dominion Police, 21 Donner, Frank, 8, 40 Douglas, Tommy, 173 Dowson, Ross, 44–5 Duckworth, Jack, 120 Duckworth, Muriel, 113, 120, 135 Dumont, Gabriel, 173 Dunn, Margot, 98 Dunphy, Catherine, 140 Dwelling in the Archive (Burton), 181–2 East Berlin, 153, 180 Eastern Europe, 37, 106, 175 Edmonton, Alberta, 39, 66, 69–71, 148 Edmonton Women’s Liberation Movement (ewlm), 69–70 Edmonton ys/ljs, 71 Elkins, Carolyn, 175 Engels, Friedrich, 53 Estevan Coal Miners’ Strike, 149 External Affairs, Department of, 106 Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (epo), 160 extremism, 6, 146, 160, 167 “Famous Five,” 110 Fanon, Frantz, 37 Farber, Jerry, 56–7; The Student as Nigger, 57 Fear of a Black Nation (Austin), 11 Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI), 7, 8–9, 15, 18, 25–6, 61, 120, 124, 173, 197; break-in at the fbi office in Media, Pennsylvania, 159; Counter Intelligence Program (cointelpro), 55, 83, 159, 167; infiltration and

292 surveillance of women’s movement in the United States, 12, 30, 75, 105, 108, 121, 162; rcmp relationship with the fbi, 107, 111, 136, 139, 150, 155, 161; surveillance of Farm Equipment Workers, 196 Fédération des femmes du Québec, 66, 110 Federation of Russian Canadians, 39 Feigen, Brenda, 12 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 72 feminism, 6, 12, 48–51, 84, 94, 118, 141, 144, 162, 184–5, 187 Feminist Action League (fal), 77 feminist surveillance studies, 9 Ferneyhough, Beatrice, 180–1 File, The (Ash), 174 files: ethical implications of surveillance material, 197–9; “Mountie Bounty,” 198; privacy, 176–7 Finnish Organization of Canada, 39 Firestone, Shulamith, 49 Fireweed, 118 First World, 37, 78, 117 First World War, 20, 29, 30, 35, 106 Fleming, Ian, 10 Fotheringham, Allan, 3 Foucault, Michel, 182–4 Fournier, Charles, 53 Fourth International, 44, 61 “Fourth World Manifesto,” 127–130, 132 Fraser, Sheila, 205 Freedom of Information Act (uk), 7 Freedom of Information Act (US), 7, 196 Freeman, Jo, 61 Friedan, Betty, 12, 30, 48, 72; The Feminine Mystique, 72 Fritz, Leah, 190 Front commun des Québécoises (fcq), 192, 194 Front de libération des femmes du Québec (flf), 66, 94, 115–16, 191–2, 194–6 Front de libération du Québec (flq), 30, 46, 57, 94, 106, 116, 157, 158, 191, 194 Fulton, Davie, 35

I ND E X Gandhi, Mohandas K., 54 gay liberation, 129–31, 151 gays and lesbians, 4, 11, 39, 129–31, 134, 142. See also lesbians and lesbianism Gentile, Patrizia, 11; The Canadian War on Queers, 11 Georgia Straight, 85, 89 German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 7, 28, 174 Germany and West Germany, 6, 39, 44, 106, 160 Get Smart, 28 Gibson, Gordon, 98 Gilpin, Toni, 196 Goldman, Emma, 53, 92 Gosse, Van, 42–3 Gouzenko, Igor, 3, 33 Government Communications Headquarters (gchq), 7 Goyer, Jean-Pierre, 162 Grace, Elizabeth, 35 Grant, Lorna, 140 Greenwald, Glenn, 7 Guard, Julie, 11 guerrilla theatre, 50, 59, 81–2, 89–90, 101 Guevera, Che, 81 Gupta, Nila, 118 Halifax, Nova Scotia, 44, 55, 83, 148, 150 Hamilton, Ontario, 138, 148 Hammond-Callaghan, Marie, 11 Hampton, Fred, 83 Hannant, Larry, 10 Hari, Mata, 10 Harper, Stephen, government of, 110, 205 Hart, J., 69 Hartman, Grace, 152 Hayden, Casey, 56 Hefner, Hugh, 65 Hemmings, Claire, 185 Henderson, Margaret, 170 Henretta, Marie, 193 Hernton, Calvin C., 189–90; Sex and Racism, 189

I N D EX heteronormativity, 10 Hewitt, Steve, 10, 11–12, 15, 27, 171–2, 174, 175, 177, 178, 192 Hien, Phan Minh, 115, 122 Hillyard, Paddy, 8 Hollibaugh, Marge, 82 Housewives Consumer Association, 11 Hungarian Revolution, 42 Hunt, R.N. Carew, 36–7 Huong, Dinh Thi, 115 Iacovetta, Franca, 11 immigration, 11, 20, 38, 86 Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, 110 Income Tax Act, 141 India, 154 Indian Act, 106 Indigenous peoples, 9, 11, 37–8, 46, 48, 57, 78, 103, 106, 126, 144, 203– 4, 206; and 1885 rebellion, 26, 173; ethnic cleansing of, 19; Métis, 124, 173; surveillance against, 19, 20 Indochinese Women’s Conference, 105, 115, 128–9, 136, 184, 189; coverage by informants, 121–2, 124–7, 128, 129–31; delegation members, 14, 16– 17, 105, 115, 126; divisions within, 107–8, 116–121, 123, 127, 131–3, 134–5; failure of Front de libération des femmes du Québec (flf) to participate, 116, 194; rcmp efforts against, 106, 107, 108, 115, 120, 121, 127, 133–4, 135, 136, 201–2; “Toronto Pledge,” 134 Indochinese Women’s Delegation: in Toronto, 133–4; in Vancouver, 115– 33; in Winnipeg, 119–20 informants, 10, 13, 83, 110, 167, 171, 174–5, 197, 202; agents provocateurs, 108, 196, 207; female, 30, 62, 63, 65, 86, 138, 151, 186, 203; in Halifax, 150; from Hamilton, 138; identities, 15, 173–5, 179–81; impact of, 89–90, 108, 162, 177, 196, 198, 203; in Montreal, 94, 150, 151, 178– 80, 192, 195; number active in Montreal in 1973, 179–80; racial attitudes

293 of, 125; rcmp employed, 15, 17, 20– 1, 28–34, 40, 65–6, 72, 78, 85–6, 90–3, 96, 99, 102–3, 111–13, 123, 128–31, 134, 139, 148, 165, 175, 178, 184; in Regina, 113, 148; reports by, 40, 61–3, 65–6, 71–2, 78–9, 86–7, 90–2, 94, 96, 103, 111, 113, 120–5, 129–31, 139–40, 142, 155, 165, 192; in Toronto, 93, 133, 180; types of, 32; in Vancouver, 103, 119–24, 126, 129–30; in Winnipeg, 138–40 Inglis, Alan, 120–1 Inglis, Kay, 120–1, 132 International Women’s Day (iwd), 39 International Women’s Year, 142 Isserman, Maurice, 43 Jaggar, Alison, 50 Jay, Karla, 12 Jim Crow laws, 51 Johnson, Joan C., 81 Johnson administration, 107, 123 Joint Intelligence Committee, 106 Just Society Movement (jsm), 96 Kashtan, William, 119, 152 Kealey, Gregory, 10, 172; Secret Service, 10 Kealey, Linda, 54 Kennedy, John F., 46 Kennedy, Robert F., 46 Kent State University: National Guard shooting at, 98 Kenya, 175 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 46, 54, 55 King, Mary, 56 King, Michael, 176–7 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 3 Kingston, Ontario, 63, 64, 132–3 Kinsman, Gary, 11; The Canadian War on Queers, 11 Koedt, Anne, 190–1; “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” 190–1 Kopperud, Karen, 185–6 Kreps, Bonnie, 64 Ku Klux Klan, 167

294 Labour Challenge, 60 Lakehead University, 93 Lang, Otto, 114 Laos, 107, 115 Laotian Patriotic Women’s Association, 115 Laporte, Pierre, 106, 157 Laville, Helen, 12 Layton, Jack, 166 League for Socialist Action/Ligue socialiste ouvrière (lsa/lso), 45, 46, 59, 158, 186; and abortion issue, 80, 102, 195; entryism, 88; rcmp reports on and surveillance against, 61, 66, 69–71, 87–8, 99, 128, 150, 158, 201; relationship with women’s liberation, 60, 67–9, 102, 129, 192, 193 Legault, Suzanne, 207 Lenin, Vladimir, 44 Lennon, John, 172 “Lesbianism Is Revolution” (Radicalesbians), 130 lesbians and lesbianism, 4, 11, 39, 50, 52, 127, 129–32, 134, 142, 144, 151, 155, 184 Lévesque, René, 159 Leys, Colin, 35 Liberal Party, 41, 205 Library and Archives Canada (lac): Record Group (rg) 146, 13, 172, 203 Ligue des femmes du Québec (lfq), 178–80 Lloydminster, Alberta, 72 London Greenpeace McLibel case, 197 Lorde, Audre, 52 Los Angeles, 120 Lyon, David, 8 MacIntyre, Kay, 91–2 Maclean’s, 27, 64, 65 MacNeil, Rita, 138, 176, 197 Macpherson, Kay, 111–12, 114–15 Makaroff, Robert, 80, 82 Malcolm X, 55 Manitoba, 66, 91, 120 Manitoba Abortion Action Coalition, 138

I ND E X Manpower and Immigration, Department of: funding of Project 51107, Vancouver Women’s Centre, 162 Maoism, 121 Maoists, 74, 114, 119, 148, 194 Marcuse, Herbert, 53 Martin, Paul, 205 Marxism, 35, 46, 121, 127 Marxist-Christian dialogue, 74 masculinity, 6, 9–10, 130; “hegemonic masculinity,” 22; rcmp masculinity, 26 Mau Mau Uprising, 175 May, Elaine Tyler, 51 Maynard, Steven, 182 McCarthy, Joseph, 4, 33 McDonald, Nancy (Nan), 165 McGill University, 55, 68, 108, 150; Gay at McGill, 151 McKay, Ian, 61 Mead, Margaret, 53 Meadley, Betsy. See Wood, Betsy Medicare, 79 Merewether, Charles, 175 Mine Mill women’s auxiliaries, 11 Miss Teen rcmp Pageant, 24 Mitchell, Juliet, 54, 93 Mitchell, Margaret, 86 Moncton, New Brunswick, 148 Montreal, 37–9, 50, 52, 63, 66, 72, 83, 92–4, 99, 103, 195; black activists in, 125; and Indochinese conference, 115–16; rcmp in, 70, 125, 161, 179; women’s liberation in, 64, 68, 92–3, 151, 192 Montreal chapter of cucnd, 42; Our Generation against Nuclear War, 42 Montreal City Police, 30, 139, 178–9, 194 Montreal Gazette, 191 Montreal International Collective, 116 Montreal Olympics, 161 Montreal Star, 62, 191 Montreal Women’s Liberation (mwl), 14, 48, 191, 194 Moraga, Cherrie, 118; This Bridge Called My Back, 118 Morgan, Robin, 12

I N D EX Morgentaler, Henry, 92–3, 96, 139, 140, 149, 165, 193 Morgentaler Defence Committee, 93 Morra, Linda, 184 Morris, Cerise, 96–7 Morton, Peggy, 53–4, 56, 57, 62–3, 66, 125; “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 53, 57, 125 Munich Olympics, 161 Munro, John, 82, 92, 186 Munsinger, Gerda, 11, 39; and scandal, 39 My Lai massacre, 122 “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (Koedt), 190–1 National Action Committee on the Status of Women (nac), 143–4, 152, 165 National Intelligence Service, 183 National Organization for Women (now), 12 National Security Agency (nsa), 7 Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White Niggers of America) (Vallières), 57 Netherlands Domestic Security Service, 111 New Brunswick, 150, 160 New Democratic Party (ndp), 45, 65, 67, 86, 96, 100, 109, 146, 148, 173, 186 New Democratic Youth, 91 New Feminist, 81 New Feminists (nf), 14, 63–8, 129 New Left, 11, 42–4, 46–7, 48–9, 52, 59–60, 65, 113, 114, 129, 131, 152, 157, 161, 189, 192, 200, 202; American New Left, 42–3, 55, 167; British New Left, 42; and race, 56; rcmp surveillance of, 52; and women, 52– 4, 58, 76, 84, 163 New Left Review, 53 New York City, 44, 49, 130, 150, 181 New York Police Department, 8 New York Radical Feminists, 193 New York Radical Women, 58–9 Newman, Sally, 184 Niagara Falls, Ontario, 148, 150

295 Nixon, Patricia, 84 Nixon, Richard, 107, 114, 122–4 Norman Bethune Club, 74 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), 38, 111 North West Mounted Police (nwmp), 19–20 Nova Scotia, 22, 44 nuclear disarmament, 42, 109, 111 oddball, 158 Old Left, 5, 6, 42, 53 On to Ottawa Trek, 76, 96 Ontario Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 141 Ontario Department of Trade and Development, 65 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (oise), 133 Ontario Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition, 138 Ontario Working Women’s Coalition, 154 open source intelligence (osint), 13– 14, 28 Opportunities for Youth Program, 162 Orientalism, 112 Orr, Thomas, 90 Osbaldeston, Gordon, 166 Osbaldeston Report, 168 Ottawa Citizen, 186 Our Generation against Nuclear War (cucnd), 42 Owram, Douglas, 157; Born at the Right Time, 157 Padgham, Terry, 153 Palmer, Bryan, 157 Parnaby, Andrew, 10; Secret Service, 10 Parti Québécois, 158, 159, 195 “Peace Train” of 1962, 109 Peak, The, 77 Pedestal, The, 77 Pelrine, Eleanor Wright, 139–40 Perera, Suvendrini, 9 Perreault, Isabelle, 182 “Persons Case,” 110 Philippines, 124

296 Pholsena, Khemphet, 115 Pickton, Robert: murder case, 204 picnic, 29 Pointe-Claire, Quebec, 151 Port Huron Statement, 43 Portland, Oregon, 84 post office, 29, 105 Powers, Doris, 96–7, 98–9 Progressive Workers Movement, 163 Puerto Rico, 124 Quebec, 16, 37, 93–4, 99, 106, 109– 10, 115, 131, 151, 157, 188, 193, 194, 205; abortions in, 93; rcmp activities in, 14, 150, 158, 160, 166, 203; women’s movement in, 12, 49, 66, 116, 133, 150, 154, 166, 178, 192, 194 Quebec City, 110, 148 Quebec Communist Party, 178, 180 Quebec nationalism, 4, 11, 42, 57, 116, 146, 158–9, 161, 195 Quebec Women’s League. See Ligue des femmes du Québec queer(s), 10, 129; queerness, 182; queer cultures, 185 Quiet Revolution, 48 Radicalesbians, 130–1; “Lesbianism Is Revolution,” 130 Rands, Jean, 85 Rathwell, Helen, 141 Ray, Gerda, 11, 20 Razack, Sherene, 9 Red Guard Party, usa, 121 Red Power movement, 42, 43, 46 Red Scare, 43 red-tinged prism, 4–5, 8, 11, 18, 20, 27, 40, 43, 45, 57–8, 62, 75–6, 79, 94, 102–3, 106, 113–14, 125, 135, 147, 149–50, 152, 164, 166, 178, 197, 200–3, 206 Regina, Saskatchewan, 26–7, 43, 82, 89–91, 142, 148 Regina City Police, 82 Regina Women’s Liberation Group, 59, 113, 148; Organization of Working

I ND E X Women, 149; Working Women’s Calendar Group, 149 Reiner, Robert, 20 Revolutionary Worker’s Party, 44–5 Roberts, Anne, 141 Rosen, Ruth, 12, 30, 75, 108, 162; The World Split Open, 12 Rosswurm, Steve, 196 Rouble, Margaret, 40 Roussopoulos, Dimitrios, 42 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp): “C” Division, 161; “Criminal Threats to the Canadian Petroleum Industry,” 146; “E” Division, 24; educational levels, 25; female members, 11, 24–5, 204–5; Identification Branch, 95; masculinity, 26; militarization, 26–7; Missing Women’s Task Force, 204; “O” Division, 180; racism, 22, 125, 204; sexism, 24–5; training, 26–7 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) members: Assistant Commissioner J.E.M. Barrette, 87–8; Superintendent Murray Chisholm, 145, 158; Corporal Catherine Galliford, 204; Sergeant D.J.O. Johnson, 45; Deputy Commissioner William Kelly, 107; Superintendent C.A. Lougheed, 99; Constable Janet Merlo, 204–5; Inspector D.H. Mumby, 149; Assistant Commissioner L.R. Parent, 144–5; Commissioner Bob Paulson, 204; Commissioner Aylesworth Bowen (A.B.) Perry, 21, 30; Director General John Starnes, 10, 157–8, 162; SubInspector E.H. Trefy, 95–8 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) security service: “A” Branch, 70; attitudes toward Americans in Canada, 107, 111, 192; attitudes toward Trotskyists, 138, 140, 144–5, 147, 150–1, 161–3, 188, 192, 200; attitudes toward women’s liberation, 6, 57–8, 61, 62, 72–5, 88, 155, 156; barn burning, 158; civilian members, 10, 23, 24, 157; counter-subversion

I N D EX branch, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40–1, 146, 156; “dirty tricks,” 158, 159, 161; disruption operations (including checkmate and oddball), 45, 158, 161, 162, 203; “D” Ops, 41, 160; files, 33–4, 156, 166; homophobia, 155; impact of gender, 24, 25, 31, 74, 90, 101–2, 104, 201–2; interference with awarding of government grants, 162–4; “Key Sectors” program, 40–2, 159–60; mc 222, 180–1; “Organizational Assessment Form,” 69, 147, 148; sa 212A, 180; sources of information, 13, 29, 62–3, 179–80; Special Operations Group, 158; “subversive indices,” 34; Undercover, 13, 24, 28–9, 33 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) security service documents and reports: “Evolution of the Internal Threat to Canada,” 23, 38; “The Threat to Security from Violence Prone Revolutionary Elements in Canada,” 157–8; “Unaligned Marxist and Pressure Groups,” 154–6, 160 Royal Commission on the Status of Women (rcsw), 24, 48–9, 102, 141–2 Royal Commission to Investigate the Facts Relating to and the Circumstances Surrounding the Communication, by Public Officials and Other Persons in Positions of Trust, of Secret and Confidential Information to Agents of a Foreign Power (KellockTaschereau Commission), 3 Royal Irish Constabulary, 27 Royal North West Mounted Police (rnwmp), 20–1 Rubin, Gayle, 57 Rubin, Jerry, 114 Rudd, Mark, 114 Russian Revolution, 27 Sabia, Laura, 49, 141 Sachs, Albie, 183 Sanger, Margaret, 92

297 Sangster, Joan, 10, 60 Saskatchewan Conference on Abortion Law Repeal, 186 Saskatchewan New Democratic Women, 156 Saskatoon, 88, 90, 96, 103, 148; Community Clinic, 78; Federal Advisory Council – Status of Women, 156; Planned Parenthood Saskatchewan, 156; Rape Crisis Centre, 156; Women in Society Today, 156 Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, 90 Saskatoon women’s liberation (Saskatoon Women’s Liberation Movement), 59, 61, 71, 78 156, 185–7 Sault Daily Star, 91 Sault Ste Marie, Ontario, 33, 72, 91, 148 Sauvy, Alfred, 37 Sawatsky, John, 10 Schmidt, Bonnie Reilly, 11, 25; Silenced, 11 Schwartz, Joan, 182 second-wave feminism, 6, 12, 14, 16, 48, 118, 138, 141, 149, 170, 184, 186 Second World War, 22, 31, 106, 109, 172 Secret Service (Whitaker, Kealey, and Parnaby), 10 Security Intelligence Review Committee, 166 Security Service (mi5), 7, 15, 33, 44, 165 Seese, Linda, 53–4, 56; “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 53, 57, 125 Sethna, Christabelle, 11, 12, 15, 171, 175–6, 178, 191, 192 Sex and Racism (Hernton), 189 Sheaf, The, 186 Silenced (Schmidt), 11 Silvera, Makeda, 118 Simon Fraser University, 76, 163; Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology (psa) Department, 121 Simon Fraser University (sfu) Women’s Caucus, 77, 84

298 Sir George Williams University, 125 “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen” (Bernstein, Morton, Seese, and Wood), 53, 57, 125 Sisters of Sappho, 155 Sloan, Edward, 181 Sloan, Laurette Chrétien, 154, 180–1 Smith, Andrea, 19 Snowden, Edward, 181 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (sshrc), 176 Solanas, Valerie, 49 Solicitor General Canada, 144, 162 South Africa, 183 Soviet Union, 3, 27, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 55 Spark, Bobbie, 140–1 Srithirath, Souban, 115 Stalin, Josef, 44 Stalinism, 42 Stasi, 7, 28, 174, 175; “puzzle women,” 171 Steedman, Mercedes, 11, 148 Stettner, Shannon, 83 St-Laurent, Louis, 29 Student as Nigger, The (Farber), 57 Student Co-operative Housing Association of Manitoba, 91 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc), 51, 53, 54, 56 Student Union for Peace Action, 43, 48, 53, 62 Students for a Democratic Society (sds), 43, 46, 63 Students for a Democratic University (sdu), 69–70 subversion: Communist subversion, 36; definitions of, 34–5 Sudbury, Ontario, 72, 91–2, 148 Sudbury Star, 92 Sudbury Women’s Liberation Movement, 72 suffragettes, 80 Supreme Court of Canada, 93, 141, 149, 173, 205; R. v. Morgentaler, 167–8 Sûreté du Québec, 178

I ND E X Teather, Robert Gordon, 25 telephone company, 29, 179 terrorism, 6, 146, 160, 167, 168, 205, 206; anti-terrorism legislation, 7, 205–6; counter-terrorism, 161, 172, 196 The, Vo Thi, 115 There’s Something Happening Here (Cunningham), 167 Therrien, Gaston, 193 Thifault, Marie-Claude, 182 Third World, 37–8, 42, 53, 56–7, 78, 116–19, 141, 160 Third World Books, 55 Third World Women’s Alliance (twwa), 56, 114–16, 119–25, 127, 129–34 This Bridge Called My Back (Moraga and Anzaldua), 118 Thom, Marcie, 84 Thomson, Ann, 81 Thunder Bay, Ontario, 93 Tiger, Lionel, 64 Todd, Barbara, 141 Toronto, 64, 87, 92, 96; Afro-American Progressive Association, 55; Communist Party of Canada headquarters, 165; Indochinese Conference at, 16, 105, 108, 115, 119, 133–4, 201; rcmp at, 59, 66, 70, 146, 179; Third World Books, 55; US Consulate in, 147, 188 Toronto Student Movement, 125 Toronto Sun, 166 Toronto Telegram, 133 Toronto Wages for Housework Committee (twhc), 154–5, 160 Toronto Women’s Caucus (twc), 11– 12, 14, 68, 129, 138, 146–8, 163–4, 188–9, 191 Toronto Women’s Liberation Group (twlg), 62–3, 86–7, 93 Toronto Women’s Liberation Movement (twlm), 48, 62–3, 66–7, 86, 125, 129, 191 Trew, Mary, 88, 90 Tri, Nguyen, 115 Trotsky, Leon, 44

I N D EX Trotskyism, 44, 45, 60 Trotskyists, 6, 44–5, 74, 75, 83, 113– 14, 152; and abortion issue, 141–2, 148; entryism, 45, 61, 66–7, 73; rcmp attitudes toward and surveillance against, 43, 45–6, 59–61, 68, 70, 87–8, 104, 128, 140, 144–5, 147, 158, 161–4, 188, 192, 194–5, 201; relationship with Communists, 45, 119; relationship with women’s liberation, 59, 60–1, 66–7, 73, 88, 95, 102, 137–8, 147, 150–1, 188; violence, 45–6 Trudeau, Justin, 206 Trudeau, Pierre, 16, 82–3, 87, 92, 96– 8, 140, 157 Trudeau government, 46, 106, 141, 144, 157, 159; 1969 Omnibus Bill, 76 Tucker, Helen, 110–11 Turner, John, 82–3, 92, 205 Underground Railroad, 106 United Jewish People’s Order, 39 United Kingdom (Great Britain), 4, 6, 7, 15, 33, 42, 44, 160, 165, 172, 200 United Nations, 19, 38, 142 United States, 37–8, 58, 63, 77, 83, 85, 92, 115, 124, 135, 139, 188, 200; and anti-war movement, 106–7, 111, 121, 126, 192; civil liberties in, 4, 6; civil rights movement, 48, 54, 55; Communists in, 3, 43, 49, 51, 59–60; relationship to Canada, 93, 107, 112, 113, 132–3; state surveillance within, 7, 75, 108, 160, 162, 197; violence, 46, 49, 54–5, 65, 105, 125–6, 157–8, 168; women’s movement, 12, 49, 51, 58, 68, 108, 118–19, 123, 131–2, 155 Université du Québec à Montréal (uqam), 196 Université Laval, 151; “Information Center for Women,” 151 University of Alberta, 69–71 University of British Columbia (ubc), 77, 81, 85, 120–1 University of Chicago, 57

299 University of Hanoi, 115, 131 University of Michigan, 57 University of Regina (University of Saskatchewan Regina Campus), 91 University of Saskatchewan, 71, 78, 80, 103, 186 University of Saskatchewan (Regina Campus), 91, 113 University of Toronto, 62–3, 67, 86, 93, 145–6, 193 University of Winnipeg, 138 Vallières, Pierre: Nègres blancs d’Amérique (White Niggers of America), 57 van Seters, Deborah, 10 Vancouver, 16, 52, 59–60, 64, 66, 71, 84, 86, 102–3, 130, 149, 162–4, 204; and Abortion Caravan, 76, 81–2, 87, 89, 91, 95, 101, 105; Indochinese conference, 105, 108, 114–15, 118– 24, 126, 131–3, 135–6, 141, 201; rcmp security service, 70; women’s liberation movement, 69 Vancouver City Police, 120 Vancouver Liberation Front, 102 Vancouver Women’s Caucus (vwc), 12, 14, 16, 48, 51, 69, 76–7, 79–81, 83, 89–90, 94–6, 98, 102–5, 186; Indochinese conference, 117, 119–20, 201; rcmp analysis of, 84–9, 92, 101–2, 162–3; support of flq, 115– 16; Western Regional Conference, 81, 85 Varsity, The, 193 Velvet Fist, 189 Vickery, Anne, 184 Vietnam, 188, 192, 202 Vietnam Mobilization Committee, 188 Vietnam War, 123, 128, 133–5, 146, 192, 202; American Deserters Committee, 192 Vietnamese women, 112–14, 116, 122, 134 Vietnamese Women’s Union (vwu), 112, 114 Voice of Women (vow), 5, 39, 59, 66, 74, 82, 105, 115, 150, 201; allegations of Communist infiltration, 5,

300 39, 59, 74; “peace train” of 1962, 109 Voice of Women (Quebec), 66 Voix des femmes, 109 Walia, Harsha, 6 War Measures Act, 16, 20, 106, 115– 16, 157–8, 193–4 Wasserlein, Frances, 81 Weather Underground Organization (wuo), 46, 83 Weber, Shirley N., 56 Weiss, Cora, 105, 135, 184 Weisstein, Naomi, 57 Whitaker, Reg, 10; Secret Service, 10 whiteness, 22 Wilford, Hugh, 12 Windsor, Ontario, 64, 109, 115 Winnipeg, 74, 138, 148; Indochinese women at, 120 Winnipeg Committee for Peace in Vietnam, 74 Winnipeg Free Press, 73 Winnipeg General Strike, 21 Winnipeg Progressive Social Science Study Group, 74 Winnipeg Women’s Liberation Movement, 72 Winter, Alexandra, 170 Wisser, Katherine M., 176 “Women Identified Women,” 130 Women Against Soaring Prices (wasp), 154, 165, 201 Women Strike for Peace (wsp), 105, 107, 109, 113–14 Women’s Abortion Law Repeal Coalition, 138, 149–50 Women’s Advisory Council, 65 Women’s Federation of Russian Canadians, 39 Women’s International Democratic Federation (widf), 152–3 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (wilpf), 105, 107, 109, 113–14, 119 Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (witch), 59, 64, 84

I ND E X Women’s Involvement Program, 163 Women’s Liberation Association, 68 women’s liberation movement, 12, 48, 50, 58, 60, 68–9, 72, 96, 143, 152, 187, 189; 1970 national conference, 103; 1972 national conference in Winnipeg, 138–40, 144–6; abortion issue, 77, 103; divisions within, 57, 103, 129, 133, 141, 157–9, 202; global “sisterhood,” 51, 107; groups, 48; in Quebec, 94, 194; in the United States, 12, 30, 61, 108, 162; rcmp disruption tactics against, 159; rcmp surveillance against, 4–6, 14, 29–30, 47, 57–8, 61, 64, 66–7, 69–72, 74–6, 88, 123, 125, 137, 144–5, 148–51, 154, 156–7, 161–3, 167, 170–1, 181, 191–2, 196, 200–1, 203, 206 Women’s Social and Political Union, 80 Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam, 112 Wood, Betsy, 81 Wood, Myrna, 53; “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers … Listen,” 53, 57, 125 World Congress of Women, 153–4, 180 World Split Open, The (Rosen), 12 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, 112 Xiem, Nguyen Thi, 115, 122 York University, 67 Young Communist League, 39 Young Socialists/Ligue des jeunes socialistes (ys/ljs), 46, 59–61, 66, 69– 71, 73–4, 80, 88, 91, 102, 142–3, 201; and 1971 conference in Waterloo, 142 Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca), 151