Front Burner - How RCMP spies infiltrated Indigenous groups

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Newly declassified documents reveal the extraordinary depth and reach the Canadian government took to spy on Indigenous leaders in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This new reporting is the result of a years-long effort by CBC Indigenous and CBC Investigates.Today we hear how the RCMP infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political Indigenous organizations, in an extensive program of covert surveillance, informants and countersubversion.Brett Forester with CBC Indigenous is our guest.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey everyone, I'm Jamie Poisson. My colleague Brett Forrester, with CBC Indigenous, is with me today, and we're going to talk about this new joint investigation by CBC Indigenous and CBC Investigates that shows the extraordinary depth and reach the Canadian government took to spy on Indigenous leaders in the 60s and 70s, people doing completely legitimate

and important work that did not pose a security threat. It's seen as yet another black market, and a long legacy of government injustice inflicted upon indigenous people in the country. Today, how the RCMP infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political indigenous organizations in an extensive program of covert surveillance, informants, and counter-subversion.

Brett, hey, it is great to have you with us. Thanks for having me. So I want to start with the 6,000 pages you obtained as part of this investigation. These are newly declassified and I'll quote, racial intelligence files. What overall picture emerged from these files kind of broadly? Generally speaking, the overall picture that emerged is one where this program of surveillance began as an almost casual monitoring for perceived outside influence on the Indigenous Rights Movement in the late 1960s.

By late 1970s, it had evolved into a much broader sweeping program of surveillance that was most most. Mostly targeting legitimate indigenous leaders. So these were self-styled racial intelligence files, and they look exactly like you think they would look. These are manila file folders, each one stuffed with intelligence reports, newspaper clippings, radio transcripts, all of these sorts of things. What we learned is that the racial intelligence section was a little known part of the RCMP Security Service. Canada's now disbanded domestic intelligence agency that was active during the Cold War. If you Google racial intelligence section, you won't get anything about the RCMP. What you will get is a reference to the FBI's racial intelligence section.

This was created to spy on the civil rights movement in the United States, and it was responsible for surveilling and trying to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. So it appears the Mounties created a identical unit to spy on black and indigenous leaders in Canada, and that's where this quote-unquote native extremism program started. Yeah, it's really interesting when I was reading your initial piece. I just immediately thought about the U.S. Cointel program, which I want to come back to you with. But just first, like when we're talking about spying, what are we talking about here? How deep did it go?

What kind of stuff are we talking about? There are levels to spying, right? There are less intrusive methods and there are more intrusive methods. The less intrusive stuff would be like monitoring social media today. In the 1970s, it was listening to the radio and reading the newspapers. That happened. What we also saw is the Mounties using their most intrusive methods. We learned they were actually paying informers and recruiting informers to infiltrate legitimate organizations like the National Indian Brotherhood or the Dene Nation.

The former is known today as the Assembly of First Nations. It was actually penetrated with informers in 1975. who were circulating this information back to the Mounties almost daily. I did an analysis of some of these documents, and I found that there were more than 150 intelligence reports produced in one year alone. That was 1975. So they were producing these reports once almost every other day. So not only were these informers, there was electronic surveillance.

We confirmed for the first time the National Indian Brotherhood's phones were tapped in the mid-1970s. It's leaders were followed. They were kept under physical surveillance. Their homes were monitored sometimes. They were followed when they were driving throughout the city. People watched them at the airport. Sometimes their members had their credit card numbers pulled. There were people passing license plate numbers.

Their home addresses, their phone numbers. In one particularly intrusive case, the Mounties actually went to the government department that holds passport material, and they pulled the passport documents that somebody, used that belonged to somebody at the National Indian Brotherhood. So there were record checks. They would obtain documents held by Bell Canada. They would obtain phone records. They would go to airline companies and get passenger manifest. They had this massive network of information that was put in place, usually to catch spies from places like the Soviet Union. This is the sort of thing you would do

to disrupt hostile states or disrupt terrorist activity. What we saw here were these tactics being used against legitimate organizations. Yeah, just the breadth is sounding, just the scope of it. Was this legal? Believe it or not, this was totally legal. There was no statute, no mandate, no written guidelines governing the RCMP's intelligence agency until 1975. That's when the Pierre Trudeau government realized that they needed to put something in writing

to direct these sorts of intelligence operations. So there was no guardrails. There was no explicit legislation blocking the RCMP security service from spying on legitimate groups. So with that being said, we spoke to several academics and researchers who argued it may have been legal, but it was not ethical and it certainly was not democratic. It was described as a violation of indigenous rights, privacy rights, and human rights. Canada did not have its charter of rights and freedoms at this time, but it still held itself. out to be a democracy where people had the right to assemble, the right to express themselves, but it's also worth remembering that indigenous peoples had just gotten the right to vote.

So these rights weren't always extended to First Nations, Inuit and Métis. So there was that double standard there being applied as well. And then one thing to bear in mind is that it might not have been legal if there were violations of the criminal code. We can't say whether or not that actually happened. But if the Mounties had to break into an office and plant a bug, if they couldn't get someone to let them in the building, that was illegal. It was illegal for anyone to break into premises. So that became a major scandal later on, and that's what leads to the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Right, right. And of course, in the United States, information has emerged that they were doing few things that were illegal there, including the FBI being involved in the assassination of Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton.

That's so, I mean, I guess more information could come out, right? Is that far for me to say? About what was happening here? It's possible that more information could come out. One of the things we found was that there was also effectively a cover-up of some of these operations in Canada. So the RCMP did get caught engaging in illegal dirty tricks in the 1970s. It was a massive scandal. There was a Royal Commission, the McDonald Commission that was called to probe these things.

And the Commission found the Mounties had actually created a dirty tricks department that was responsible for intimidating sources. They burned a barn where the FLQ was suspected of meeting with the Black Panther Party. They stole dynamite. They even conducted robberies and break-ins. So this is sort of well-trodden ground. But when I read the McDonald Commission report, I found that fewer than three pages out of a thousand dealt with the surveillance of the Indigenous Rights Movement. And when you read that report, it makes it seem like it was just newspaper clippings. and casual monitoring. There was no mention of the infiltration of the National Indian Brotherhood

and that sort of thing. But one thing that came out in that commission was that the RCMP Security Service had destroyed files associated with something called Operation Checkmate. We understand Operation Checkmate to have been a national disruption program, targeting groups like, possibly, the American Indian Movement, and the Dene Nation, the National Indian Brotherhood. when the RCMP decided to destroy those files, it was obviously senior officers who made that decision,

those same officers were ultimately in charge of this racial intelligence program, and when they handed down the task of actually shredding the files, they handed it down to a junior officer who was also stationed in Yellowknife investigating the Denny. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough.

Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairro.cairro.com. Tayari Jones used to call herself a committed contemporary novelist with no time for historical fiction. But then two young women from the 1950s appeared in her mind, and she had no choice but to write a historical novel that ended up on Oprah's list. She told me all about it on the podcast, Bookends. I'm not the kind of writer.

I'm not one of those people's like, oh, I'm just a vessel. The story came through me. I'm not that person. And now look at me, I'm over here being that person. Check out that conversation on bookends with me, Matea Roach, wherever you get your podcasts. You know, but we've talked about how inspiration was taken from the U.S. for a program like this, but I also want to talk about some of what was happening here at the time.

You mentioned the FLQ, and of course there was the October crisis where a British diplomat was kidnapped and a Quebec minister murdered by the FLQ in 1970, and how might that have kind of ramped up surveillance of groups in Canada, including indigenous groups. This was an important event, and it's subject to some debate among historians. The RCMP Security Service was at the time accused of dropping the ball, of failing to give the government proper intelligence about what was brewing with the FLQ. Now, that's where the debate comes in.

Who was really caught flat-footed? Were they caught flat-footed? Was the intelligence they were giving good enough? The point is, coming out of the FLQ crisis, researchers say the Mounties were encouraged by the Trudeau government to take a more aggressive and offensive stance. There's a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go on and bleed. It's more important to keep law and order in this society.

How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that? Just watch me. Some would argue that the Trudeau government even looked the other way while the Mounties embarked on these campaigns of dirty tricks and intimidation and so on. So that's the context in which this native extremism program was created when indigenous activists started organizing in 1970, 1971. And finally, in 1973, when this movement really made itself known, it landed squarely in the crosshairs of a far more offense-oriented intelligence agency that was, to some extent, stung by the FLQ crisis and was very much motivated to make sure nothing like that happened again. And this is the red power movement, right? And how does the occupation of Ottawa's Department of Indian Affairs by 200 activists impact all of this we're talking about? For the RCMP Security Service, that's where this really started. So there were 200 youth activists who stormed and occupied Ottawa's Department of Indian Affairs. That caught the security service, in its own words, quote, unprepared and unable to respond to government requests for intelligence.

That's from a secret internal history of this program that was written in 1978. That history goes on to say that this event convinced the security service to, quote, embark on an extensive program of human source development. In other words, recruiting informers. So they were shocked, they were stunned, and they were caught flat-footed by this occupation of the Indian Affairs building in 1973. They proceeded to launch a program where they were recruiting, human sources across the country so that it wouldn't happen again and they could provide the government more timely intelligence. But as I said earlier, it largely evolved into a dragnet

that was focused mainly on legitimate organizations. Yeah. And just one of those legitimate organizations is the National Indian Brotherhood that you have mentioned. Today they are known as the Assembly of First Nations. Back then, what was the group doing and just tell me more about how they found themselves in the crosshairs of the RCMP. The National Indian Brotherhood was led by George Manuel between 1971 and 1976, and it is hard to understate his impact on the modern Indigenous rights movement. When you find 90% of our Indian people in Canada who are in welfare, people who are starving in a very rich country in Canada,

is to me is a form of subtle genocide. He was leading the resistance at the time to the Trudeau government's quote-unquote white paper. This was their plan to assimilate indigenous peoples into mainstream society.

It would have done away with the Indian Act, abolished treaties, gotten rid of reserves, and basically created this totally different system. Indigenous people opposed that because it would have removed

the only recognition that they have as distinct peoples. So there was nothing violent and the interesting thing is that in 1975 the National Indian Brotherhood had a joint committee with the Trudeau Liberal Cabinet. So they were meeting at a very high level to discuss issues of mutual concern, social and political issues. We have learned at that same time the RCMP was tapping the NIB phones in Ottawa. So why were they allowed to get close to the cabinet if they were violent security threats or threats to national security? Well, they weren't threats to national security.

They were threats to national unity. They were demanding self-determination. They were asking for control over their own programs. They were asking for self-government. In 1971, those were radical suggestions. Today, they're part of the constitutional fabric of the country. But back then, it was perceived as threatening. Remember, this was the period of Indian residential schools, Indian day schools, where kids were scooped from their families in place in foster care.

So the overarching idea in Canadian society was that indigenous peoples cannot manage their own affairs. Everything George Manuel was saying flew directly in the face of that. And we have seen in these documents for the very first time that he was extensively spied on. It was him who they spied on at the airport. It was his organization that was infiltrated. It was his staff who had their passport documents pulled, their addresses profiled, all of these things. It was arguably political. You know, in your investigation, it's pretty clear that the indigenous people who were being targeted knew something was going on,

that they had suspicions about being watched and photographed and worries about informants within their organizations, right? And just can you tell me more about that and what you think the impact of that would have been on someone like George Manuel? Well, we spoke to George Manuel's daughter, Doreen Manuel, and showed her some of these documents at her house in North Vancouver. He was doing something to help the people who were so colonized and so oppressed. And everybody should have been trying to help that situation. And to find out that there was a whole army of people working against. him. It's really upsetting to find out. She said she was heartbroken to see the massive effort that the Canadian government put in to evidently trying to disrupt the political work he can do.

Researchers say planting informers or recruiting informers can be devastating and disruptive to legitimate movements because it creates paranoia. It creates suspicion. And according to some, it will then encourage groups to eat them. themselves from the inside. They start pointing the finger. No one knows who they can trust anymore. There was some evidence of this happening throughout the documents. There was one incident that was particularly interesting. So this happened in Yellowknife during the investigation of the Dene Nation. This was a political advocacy organization set up in the early 70s to advocate for Dene Aboriginal title in land rights. It still exists today. It was led by George Erasmus in

the mid-1970s and he became a major target. They were like park right in front of our offices. Other times they would stop me at the airport and they'd be searching all my bags all the time. It was very invasive. They were spying on him extensively. There were paid informers in his office who were tracking his movements. They too were demanding self-determination just like George Manuel was.

There was an incident where he was on the phone with somebody. Somebody else had gotten a call from the RCMP security service that was looking. for an interview. So this person called Erasmus and they're talking and Erasmus said to the person, we better not talk on the phone because it may be tapped. And that ends up in the document. So he goes out and he tells someone in the office about that conversation. What he didn't know was the person he was talking to was an RCMP security service informer who then turned around and fed that information back to their handler. So the phone wasn't tapped. It was a human source.

You just think, too, the paranoia that you mentioned, but also just like this infiltration and spying what it might have stopped when it comes to doing work that would have helped people in their own communities, too, to create this kind of environment. You know, I know that you've spoken to several people who are spied on. I'm thinking of Tony Belcourt, who was the founding president of the Native Council of Canada in 1971, You want to just tell me more about what they've told you now about this program. Tony Belcourt called this RCMP program disturbing.

Where was there any regard for our rights as to citizens, to privacy, to be able to speak freely? Well, supposed to have freedom of expression. Where were those rights being recognized and honored by the crown? The interesting thing about Tony Belcourt is that he was a well-known moderate at the time. And there was this series of reports where the Mounties had undercover operatives or informers inside Native Council of Canada meetings. And the informer, the source, was then discussing the result of a Native Council of Canada election. It was Tony Belcourt against Jim Sinclair. And the informer was telling the Mounties Tony had won.

Tony Belcourt had won. And the source was explaining that Belcourt was considered, quote, unquote, less militant. So that's a good thing, according to the Mounties. But the source also warned that Belcourt was a good communicator, a good organizer, and therefore, quite capable of doing a lot of damage should he decide to undertake a more, quote unquote, radical line. So they had evidence that he was moderate, had no indication that he was going to be violent, but based purely on speculation that he could at some point in the future become more militant, that's how they justified the surveillance.

And researchers, we spoke to explain that as being a false racial stereotype. This notion that indigenous people might become violent, might become volatile at any given moment, at any given time. And so, therefore, the government needs to monitor everything that's going on emerges from this really pernicious stereotype that was common at the time. You actually interviewed retired Mounties, right? Who worked on this file. What did they say to you about what they did during this time? And how did they defend it? It was difficult to get in touch with former Mounties.

We placed dozens of calls and few would speak to us. Some referred us back to the RCMP. We did end up connecting with ex-security service member Greg Savicchio. At that time, the Commerce Party of Canada was quite big. And they were trying to get in with the native. influence and to their way of thinking. They were trying to grow and they were trying to attract more members to their organization to further their cause.

There was this other idea that indigenous people were being subject to constant influence and infiltration by outside forces, communists, and therefore needed protecting. And that was largely the justification for this program. And I mean, what do we know about what the Canadian government was monitoring? vis-a-vis these other groups at the time, leftist or communist, black activism, environmentalists. We know a little bit more about that, mostly because of the work of the McDonald Commission.

Some of their work informing on black activist communities has been documented. There was an informer by the name of Warren Hart, who was loaned to the security service from the FBI, and his job was to get close to a prominent black activist by the name of Roosevelt Douglas. And they actually went on a cross-country tour at one point in the mid-1970s where they met with numerous indigenous people, numerous First Nations communities. And Warren Hart was posing as a demolitions expert.

He was posing as someone known as the general, this imposing militant person who could instruct people on how to build bombs. And according to some of these documents, he may have offered to do that for, some of the First Nations communities. That became a major flashpoint during this time. And it also led indigenous communities to believe that they had not just been subjected to surveillance, but provocation, that the Mounties were actually inserting provocateurs who were encouraging them to engage in more extreme action. And we also repeatedly heard other stories like that.

They felt that these security service investigators, people in their midst they became suspicious of were encouraging them, quietly urging them to become a little bit more extreme. And that goes back to this point of paranoia. People who would do this sorts of thing immediately became targets of suspicion. Yeah. You know, I know you mentioned George Manuel's daughter, right, Doreen Manuel, who you talked to. And she would like to see the people who were informants here come forward, right? And she talked about how she thinks she knows who they might be. And just how likely do you think it is? We might hear from some of those people. This is an interesting question. The RCMP Security Service guarded the identities of its informers very jealously. We learned

through reviewing the documents that they didn't put the names of their sources or their informers inside any of the documents. They were given code numbers. And this was part of their filing system where then they could see which information came from which. informers. The Library and Archives Canada, which owns and released these documents, actually redacted all of those code numbers. There were just a couple that were missed, and that's how I was able to find this out. So it's possible that 50 years later somebody will see this and come forward, but it may be on them. It's very difficult to tell who the informers might have been. we also found that First Nations leaders were somewhat circumspect when it came to discussing who the informers were. They may know. There were some suggestions that they may know. But we were also told that these people may still have descendants living in the communities. So they may not necessarily want to have informers identified unless they come forward. So to some extent, they were really taking the moral high ground.

Yeah, yeah, and not wanting to subject their families to something like that. That makes a lot of sense. You know, this, the critique of this program, that it was this gross overreach of powers, targeting nonviolent groups that were operating legally. Like, has the government properly apologized and taken accountability for this? To some extent, there has been accountability because the RCMP security service doesn't exist anymore. and the RC&P Security Service doesn't exist precisely because it was caught engaging in this sort of activity, targeting communists, Quebec sovereignists, the far left, unions, black activists, and so on. So this activity isn't in and of itself surprising. What's surprising is that it's remained covered up for 50 years, that we're only seeing the proof of it today, that we're only now learning the scope and intensity of these investigations into indigenous political movements. our team had been going back and forth with the RCMP for four months, exactly four months, dating back to November 2025, trying to get their perspective on this, trying to get someone who could illuminate what the Mounties were thinking. Ultimately, the RCMP made a decision officially not to comment on these historical operations.

However, Minister of Public Safety, Gary and Andes Sangry, on his way into caucus, just. just said that he intends to communicate with the RCMP to ensure that there is a proper response. So we may be hearing something in the near future. And Annandis Angry also said that he wants to ensure the people feel heard and get some closure for this. So there may be more to watch for about that in the coming days and weeks. No, Brett, I know this program was disbanded. But, you know, do you hear people talk about echoes of it today? Every interview we did with an indigenous leader or researcher,

somebody at some point said they feel this is still going on. The RC&P security service was disbanded, but it was replaced with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. CIS, I have previously found, revived the quote-unquote Native extremism program in 1988 and operated it in some way, shape, or form until at least 1999. So there was another decade of this surveillance where we know even less about that, and we know certainly far less about what is happening today. As far as the RCMP goes, it's no longer in charge of intelligence gathering function,

but it still has a criminal side. It's still in charge of criminal policing, and activists pointed to some of the more recent conflicts, like the, coastal gasling pipeline dispute in British Columbia, where the Mounties came under a lot of criticism for the way they handled that. They are defending the way they handled that. And we did speak to a spokesperson who insisted that the force today is very different from how it was 50 years ago that today it takes indigenous communities and repairing relationships far more seriously. But there is still this suspicion. There is still this legacy of

mistrust. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service actually allowed us into their building with a camera to speak to a senior official, which is rare. And we asked them point blank whether CIS still engages in this sort of activity. And we were pointed essentially back to the CIS mandate, which is that they do not investigate lawful activity or democratic dissent. But investigate is still a very specific word within their mandate. People still wonder, even if they're not under direct investigation, is there still this casual monitoring? Is there still this watching that this whole thing started with?

And we heard repeatedly that they think it's still going on. And just a final question for you today, as you articulated earlier, you put this in context with other injustices, inflicted upon indigenous people in this country, the 60 scoop, residential schools, children and care. And just what do you think that the impact of this will be on the relationship between indigenous people in Canada and the Crown? One legal scholar we interviewed David Milward said bluntly that this makes it worse, that this is another black mark on this already strained relationship between indigenous peoples and the Crown. how much worse does it make it? We can't even say that yet because we don't know how far this program went.

There's still all these dossiers that remain blocked away within the National Archives. I said previously we obtained 6,000 pages. We actually only obtained four intelligence dossiers. We obtained one on the National Union Brotherhood, one on the Dene Nation, one on the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and one that was just labeled protests and demonstration. According to Library and Archives Canada, there are 300 to 400 potentially relevant files, either about the racial intelligence section, the Native Extremism Program,

or the surveillance of indigenous organizations. There were at least 30 indigenous organizations with dossiers on them. So we've only scratched the surface. There's a lot more there to uncover. So we can't even say precisely how far this went, and how it just might impact this relationship, arguably, until we know more about this program. However, even today we're seeing a reaction.

There's been calls for an apology. There's been calls for the government to release those documents and come clean about all this. And we heard from the minister saying that he intends to take some action. Okay. Brett, this was great. Thank you so much. I hope you get those additional files.

And I hope to talk to you again soon. Thanks for all your great work here. Thank you. All right, that's all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.