A poll commissioned by Canada’s largest spy agency found most Canadians oppose expanding its surveillance powers—after years of scandal.
According to The Globe and Mail, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) hired EKOS to survey the public’s attitude towards surveillance for a March 2021 poll.
The pollsters asked more than 1,000 people if they thought police and intelligence agencies should have more power to carry out “security operations,” potentially at the expense of privacy. Of those polled 52 per cent disagreed with the idea, 13 per cent neither agreed nor disagreed and only 32 per cent agreed. That’s up to 65 per cent who are not in favour of expanding police and intelligence powers.
Reviewing the recent history of CSIS and its complicity in torture, crackdowns on Indigenous and anti-racist protest and other scandals, it isn’t hard to see why.
Cracking down on Indigenous protest
During the Harper years, the Government Operations Centre (GOC)—a division of Public Safety Canada uniting all federal spy agencies—was ordered explicitly to monitor all political demonstrations taking place around the country. From 2014-15, the Toronto Star reported, GOC used its powers to monitor unions, refugee advocacy groups, anti-racist organizers, the Sierra Club and even veterans. All were labeled “potential” threats.
But the agency has spent far more time monitoring and working to undermine Indigenous groups.
During the 2013 struggle against fracking in the Siknuktuk district of Mi’kma’ki, CSIS labeled the movement a “National Tactical Intelligence Priority”, labelling 89 people “threats.”
A 2015 GOC report, further, labeled the Unist’ot’en blockade camp “the ideological and physical focal point of Aboriginal resistance to resource extraction projects.”
More recently, in 2021, APTN obtained a heavily-redacted CSIS document titled: ‘1492 Land Back Lane’ Camp: Caledonia Land Dispute and the Potential for Violence. In it, CSIS listed Six Nations land defenders as national security threats. Noting the land defenders have “broader support” within the community, the document warned: “The potential disruption to services have implications not only for Caledonia, but southern Ontario as a whole.”
Having already deployed tactical units against the land defenders, police further stalked and harassed their identified supporters—including a 26 year-old mother, arrested in front of her children while grocery shopping.
Spying on Black Lives Matter
In 2015, the Toronto Star obtained documents showing federal police set up fake social media accounts to monitor pro-Palestine and Black Lives Matter activists in Toronto.
In 2020, during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests, federal military intelligence collected organizers’ social media posts. The spies also took particular care to prepare a list of the major “anti-capitalist” groups involved in the protests.
Colluding with business
While monitoring protests against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, CSIS met regularly with the National Energy Board, Enbridge and others from the petroleum industry to discuss “national security matters” in CSIS’s head office.
Following a 2019 document dump, the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association alleged CSIS prepared lists of planned environmental and anti-pipeline protest dates and a full list of the major groups involved “as part of a threat assessment.”
‘Infiltrating’ unions
Back in 1987, the CBC reported that CSIS had agents tasked with spying on the B.C. Federation of Labour, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canadian Autoworkers and other unions, for years.
Former Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) president Denis Lemlin recalled:
“We know that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) spied on CUPW and CUPW activists for many years. The Vancouver Local of CUPW was under constant surveillance by the RCMP from 1965-1984. In 1987, CSIS bugged the telephone system at the CUPW National Office. There is documented evidence that CSIS agent John Farrell looked into the banking records of union activists, illegally broke into cars of CUPW activists in Toronto and was authorized to intercept every piece of mail delivered to the homes of targeted union leaders.”
Helping found Canada’s largest neo-Nazi organization
After years of monitoring entirely benign organizations like the Sierra Club, in 2019, CSIS claimed it would increase its “posture” on the far right.
Public Safety Canada lists Blood & Honour and Heritage Front among the far-right groups it monitors. Both groups have a long history of violence. Left unmentioned, however, is the fact that Heritage Front—likely Canada’s largest neo-Nazi organization at the time, with a plot to “unite” the whole far right—was co-founded by CSIS agent Grant Bristow.
According to a 1994 report to the Solicitor General, after Bristow allegedly infiltrated CUPW for a separate assignment, he was tasked with linking up with white supremacists for a “look-see.”
After meeting German-born Nazi Wolfgang Droege and planning to travel with him to Libya, Bristow became a paid-up, founding member of Droege’s new organization—Heritage Front.
In between attending neo-Nazi concerts (where Bristow swore he chanted “white powder” instead of “white power”), Bristow joined the HF leadership on a trip to a 1991 Holocaust denier conference in Munich.
Along the way, they stopped at Dachau to berate school children and joke about how the concentration camp was like “an amusement park.” All this happened while Bristow was an employee of CSIS. “Dachau was one of those moments where (I felt), ‘I don’t know how much more of this I can do,’” Bristow told the Star over a decade later.
Reviewing the case, the federal government concluded that Bristow—active as a leading neo-Nazi for nearly five years—“tested the limits” of what was acceptable.
Torture scandals
In 2017, the National Observer reviewed the cases of at least six Canadian citizens who were imprisoned, “interrogated” and, in nearly all cases, beaten and tortured by foreign governments—with the help of CSIS.
According to the National Observer, this “rendition program” allows CSIS to feed questions to secret police abroad. And it appears to remain in place.
Asked about the program, Public Safety Canada clarified that the federal cabinet was “revising the Ministerial Directions with regard to the use of information derived from, and sharing of information that contribute to, mistreatment, including torture.”
Stability for what?
CSIS has shown itself to be far more concerned about protecting profits from unions, from community groups and left-wing organizations than in keeping people safe. Worse, the agency’s efforts have helped put ordinary people’s safety at greater risk.
CSIS’s mandate is not to protect regular people. Its mandate is to maintain “stability” and protect Canada’s “national interests.” For CSIS, national interest equals profits for the capitalists.
Past federal “public safety” reports have been even more explicit, listing “anti-capitalism” as an “extremist” cause to monitor.
Stability, under capitalism, means stable exploitation, oppression and inequality. And, as a result, intelligence agencies like CSIS will spend more of their time infiltrating and working to undermine the broad left, labour and community organizations than keeping anyone safe. With the system in crisis, the working class, the poor and the oppressed are being forced to pay for it. It is all but inevitable that expanded police powers will only be used to help keep people down. Thankfully, more and more people understand the threat and are opposing increased state powers.
