Spying on Canadians

Award-winning author Gregory S. Kealey’s study of Canada’s security and intelligence community from the 1860s to World War II depicts a nation tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States, and a state focused on the political repression of the labour movement and the political left.

Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty-five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada, centring on three themes: the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth century in response to the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defence of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever-increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of counter-subversion and counter-terrorism.

Gregory S. Kealey is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. He is the editor of University of Toronto Press’s Canadian Social History Series and former president of the Canadian Historical Association and the Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences.