Far-right newcomers were welcomed for decades while militant leftists were rejected, repressed and imprisoned.
One day in 1974 my pursuits as a historical researcher led me to a document from 1932 with names, addresses and profiles of about 900 alleged Communists in north Winnipeg — a tally prepared by the RCMP. There it was among papers related to former prime minister R.B. Bennett, whose term coincided with the first half of the Great Depression.
The list fascinated me because it included almost every home on the street where I had lived with my parents in the 1950s. Some whom the Mounties assessed were kindly grandmothers and grandfathers on my street or nearby. Yet here was the RCMP informant claiming one of them was a “free-love-advocating loudmouth who thinks she’s the reincarnation of Rosa Luxemburg” while her lover and future husband was a shit-disturbing union organizer.
Such RCMP documents are plentiful because the RCMP spied on and infiltrated the Communist Party of Canada and sympathetic organizations after it was founded in 1921. While there were likely more members in Nazi and fascist organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan enrolled 15,000 members in Saskatchewan alone, the RCMP and the government saw no need to spy on members of the far right.
It wasn’t until the Second World War was declared that Prime Minister Mackenzie King ordered the RCMP to arrest leading Nazis and Fascists in Canada, and the force scrambled to determine what organizations and which people comprised the Canadian far right.
But it was much earlier that government targeted Communists and other members of the left who dared challenge the capitalist order through militant labour organizing and other means.
In fact, it can be argued that the original Cold War in the West — including spying and crackdowns on perceived “red menaces” within Canada — began in 1917 with the Russian Revolution. (more...)
Canada’s ‘Red Scare’ Immigration Tactics Reverberate Today
No comments:
Post a Comment