GRUENDING: RCMP Spied on Tommy Douglas

[Oscar]

GRUENDING: A single allegation of a Communist connection kept RCMP dogging Douglas from 1939 until he died.

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by Dennis Gruending April 8, 2013

The RCMP security service spied on Tommy Douglas, the former Saskatchewan premier and federal NDP leader, from the 1930s until shortly before his death the 1980s. We know this only because Jim Bronskill, an Ottawa-based Canadian Press journalist, has battled with the federal government and its agencies since 2005 to make public Library and Archives Canada's files on Douglas.

Bronskill used Access to Information requests and subsequent court cases to pry loose about 700 pages of the 1,147 page file that the RCMP accumulated. A good portion of the material in those 700 pages has been blacked out; as well, it has also come to light that some material was destroyed. The federal government and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which inherited the files from the RCMP, have fought Bronskill every step of the way. They have argued that the files must remain secret to protect the names of sources and the RCMP’s methods of spying. This seems rather odd because Douglas died in 1986. The police last spied on him about 30 years ago and much of the material in the files goes back as far as 80 years.

The spying on Douglas occurred within a context of the RCMP’s fear and obsession with communism. To have the state label someone a communist in those years was equivalent to describing an individual as a terrorist today.

Bronskill may now have reached the end of the line. Federal Court Justice Simon Noel ruled in 2011 that Library and Archives had failed in its responsibility to make historical documents available in the case of the Douglas material. He reviewed those files and provided a precise list of additional pages that he believed should be made public. He was later overruled by the Federal Court of Appeal so Bronskill appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, which decided in March 2013 that it would not hear the appeal.

I have read the approximately 400 pages on Douglas released by Library and Archives Canada in 2006 and want to share some of the highlights. The police scrutiny that began in the 1930s continued throughout the time Douglas spent as premier of Saskatchewan between 1944 and 1961. The spying continued throughout his period as federal NDP leader between 1961 and 1971, into his remaining time as an MP until 1979 and even into his retirement.

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