Canada in The Cold War - Fears of Communist Subversion

Fears of Communist Subversion

Igor Gouzenko's revelations of systematic Soviet espionage in the West shocked both the public and world governments. The King government, however lagged in its response, and initially refused to give Gouzenko an audience, leaving the initiative to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Member of Parliament Fred Rose and fellow Communist Sam Carr were imprisoned for their espionage activities as a result of Gouzenko's information. The RCMP, meanwhile, had found a peacetime niche for its political division, the RCMP Security Service. (Prior to the war, the RCMP conducted political surveillance on labour and the left through its Criminal Investigation Department).

PROFUNC was a Government of Canada top secret plan to identify and detain communist sympathizers during the height of the Cold War.

The United States wished the Canadian government would go further, asking for a purging of trade unions, but Canada saw this as American hysteria, and left the purge of trade unions to the AFL-CIO. The American officials were especially concerned about the sailors on Great Lakes freight vessels, and, in 1951, Canada added them to those already screened by its secret anti-communist screening program. The Communist Party of Canada had not been outlawed since Section 98 was repealed in 1935, unlike in the United States.

Nonetheless, Canada was not immune to the anti-Communist hysteria that had afflicted the United States. On April 4, 1957, Canadian Ambassador to Egypt, E. Herbert Norman, leaped to his death from a Cairo building after the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security re-opened his case and publicly questioned his loyalty to Canada and to the United States, despite his having been cleared several years earlier, first by the RCMP in 1950, then again by the Canadian minister of external affairs, Lester B. Pearson, in 1952. Pearson, backed by outrage across the country, sent a note to the US Government, threatening to offer no more security information on Canadian citizens until it was guaranteed that this information would not slip beyond the Executive branch of the government.

The possibility of a security breach was raised again, this time in the House of Commons, with Munsinger Affair in the 1960s.

Despite its comparatively moderate stance towards Communism, the Canadian state continued intensive surveillance of Communists and sharing of intelligence with the US. It played a middle power role in international affairs, and pursued diplomatic relations with Communist countries that the US had severed ties with, such as Cuba and China after their respective revolutions. Canada argued that rather than being soft on Communism, it was pursuing a strategy of "constructive engagement" whereby it sought to influence Communism through the course of its international relationships.