bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, p. 21
University of Toronto Press, 1998,
258 p. $35.
With the permission of University of Toronto Press, we publish below an excerpt from John Starnes’s recently published memoir. He joined the Canadian foreign service in 1944. From 1962 to 1966, John Starnes was Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany. He later served as Ambassador to the United Arab Republic and to Sudan before concluding his returning to Ottawa as Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs. The extract which follows focuses on his subsequent work as Director General of the RCMP. A member of the editorial board of bout de papier, John Starnes is the author of five works of fiction.
When I first entered public service, the concepts of national interest and national security were largely unarticulated. Without exception, threats to the internal security of Canada were externally based or driven. The RCMP — the agency responsible for internal security – investigated such threats according to policies and procedures that remained little changed from the period of the First World War. The force carried out those responsibilities in a tough-minded way, with virtually no direct involvement from the government, well beyond the end of the Second World War. Essentially these were the same operational approaches and the same investigative policies and procedures on which the RCMP found itself relying in dealing with outbreaks of politically inspired violence in Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s.
During the time I was the first civilian director-general of the RCMP Security Service, there were many politically motivated acts of violence. The violence that took place was criminal and wrong. Use of the unselective instruments of containment then available to the RCMP also was wrong. The whole point of the McDonald Commission that followed was not that effective internal security arrangements were unnecessary, but quite the opposite.
The commission said two very important things. First, it was wrong to have used the unchanged and unacceptable procedure then in place. And second, Canada needed new procedures, within an agreed legal framework, to be able to tackle the potential for politically motivated violence not just in Quebec, but also in the other provinces and regions of Canada and as problems endemic to one area or segment of the population might arise.
As I see it, there is, in security and intelligence terms, no ’Quebec problem’ but rather a ’Canada problem.’ In the context of the societal and constitutional framework to which I have referred above, I do not believe that there is a ’root source’ for subversion in Canada. Rather the multicultural and multiracial, ’mosaic’ approach to nation-building creates the potential for tensions (domestic as well as imported), which require modern arrangements for internal security. Such arrangements we now have in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the act on which it is based.
The legacy of the McDonald Commission was the creation of new legislation defining for citizens and governments the extent of tolerance for political expression and of intervention by the state. The CSIS act gives the solicitor-general the power in extreme and well-defined situations to authorize use of the most intrusive investigative methods available to the CSIS — in effect, to suspend the constitutional protections and guarantees otherwise provided for in the Constitution Act and other statutes. That is quite an improvement over the arrangements in place at the time of the so-called October Crisis of 1970.
It is clear to me that Canadian history as it relates to the events that occurred in the 1970s would have been quite different had the current internal security laws been in place at that time. I wish that they had been, but they were not, and as Canadians we can be reassured by the fact that we face the future with these new arrangements in place.
There are additional points I would like to make about the historical legacy of the internal security crises in Canada in the 1960s and thereafter. I was personally affected by some aspects of the McDonald Commission’s deliberations and by the conclusions that some observers reached on what, it now is quite clear, was an incomplete public record. I regard it not as a matter of ascribing blame, but simply as a statement of fact, that all those who needed to know of what were in effect insensitive, inappropriate, and in come cases unlawful investigative practices and procedures did in fact know. No one took comfort from these facts, but Canadians can be confident in the knowledge that those who did know subsequently designed and built a modern, effective, contemporary, internal security system.
Last, but not least, recognition and credit must be given to the democratic nature of the process by which Canada developed its modern internal security infrastructure, with its careful checks and balances, including the involvement of the Federal Court. The process was intensely debated in public. To my knowledge, only one other country, Australia, has followed a similar process. We should understand just how unique our experience is in this regard. To have defined ’threats to the security of Canada’ for statutory purposes also has been to define the extent of political tolerance, and the limits on deviance, in Canadian society. In the never-ending attempt to define and redefine ourselves, such statutory definitions are bound to fail in the absence of a complementary, fully accountable process of wise and sensitive interpretation. I believe that this is in fact happening and that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has been supporting, and is being required to support to the fullest extent possible, the levels of political tolerance envisaged in the constitution, even as the service carries on its duty to ensure Canada’s internal security in the future.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1998-1999) — Winter 1998/99 // Hiver 1998/99, p. 21. Read the rest of this issue →
