In his recent book ‘Spying 101’, historian Steve Hewitt documents eight decades of secret RCMP activities undertaken at universities across Canada. Their espionage efforts were aimed to flush out communists, or any perceived threat to the Canadian government, in post-secondary institutions – venues where students and teachers should exchange ideas freely.
From the RCMP’s humble beginning in 1917 to keep an eye on the Bolshevik uprising in Russia, right up through the 1997 APEC debacle, various divisions of the RCMP (most particularly, the counter subversion branch of its Security Service) surreptitiously collected information on tens of thousands of Canadians, including prominent individuals such as Pierre Berton, Peter Gzowski, Lotta Hitschmanova, and R