The Current - How the Mounties spied on Indigenous activists

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

A CBC investigation reveals how RCMP spies surveilled, infiltrated and wiretapped legitimate political Indigenous organizations in the 1970s. "It just never leaves you," says Dene leader and former NWT premier Stephen Kakfwi. CBC reporter Brett Forester walks us through the story.

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Ladies in a free uniform, you look like Lepragan. A bunch of electronic puppets. In the late 1960s and early 70s, indigenous rights movements across this country were growing louder, more organized, and harder to ignore. On Parliament Hill and government offices and on the streets, indigenous groups like the National Indian Brotherhood, the precursor to today's Assembly of First Nations, and the Dene Nation were demanding change. Through protests,

occupations, and cross-country political organizing, they were shaking up the political establishment and forcing their way onto the national agenda. But behind the scenes, there were rumors of informants, of meetings being watched, of phones being tapped. For decades, those suspicions were impossible to prove, but now thousands of newly released documents show that those Those suspicions were well-founded and widespread. The documents obtained by CBC Indigenous reveal a sweeping surveillance program run by the RCMP targeting indigenous leaders and political organizations

across this country. That included one of the most prominent voices of the time, George Manuel. 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. CBC Indigenous reporter Brett Forster joins me now in studio to walk us through what these files show,

how deep the surveillance went, and what it meant for the people who were living through it. Brett, good morning. Good morning. This is some investigation. Thank you. Start by what you got. Lay out this trove of documents and what's in it. So these are dossiers.

These are intelligence files like you would see in a movie compiled by the RCMP Security Service, which was Canada's now disbanded domestic intelligence agency during the Cold War. It was similar to the FBI's counterintelligence wing or Britain's MI5, in that it focused on internal security. We obtained 6,000 pages of these files after years of fighting under access to information law that actually just scratches the surface of what may be locked away in the archives. And each dossier is marked as racial intelligence. Those words are actually written on the outside of the...

Racial intelligence. And so that's a reference to something called the Racial Intelligence Section, which was a unit established by the RCMP in the late 60s to monitor black and indigenous activists. Now, if you type in Racial Intelligence section, RCMP, into Google, you won't really get anything. What you will get is a reference to the FBI's racial intelligence section, which is much better known for conducting the investigation. into Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the United States.

So it appears the RCMP just set up its own identical unit to do exactly the same thing. And the papers reveal an extensive program of infiltration and even disruption. Targeting mostly legitimate indigenous leaders between 1968 and 1983. They called it the quote unquote native extremism program. Who was the security service targeting? And what did the security service want to get out of the program like this? Target number one was the American Indian movement, which was a controversial and somewhat militant group. It was known for taking up arms, most notably at wounded knee in South Dakota in 1973.

That was a violent incident. There was a shootout. And the RCMP Security Service was deeply concerned about AIM moving into Canada, establishing chapters here. and they went to remarkable lengths to try to disrupt AIM's presence here. However, Target number two was the National Indian Brotherhood, a prominent and moderate advocacy group. We know it today as the Assembly of First Nations, one of the most influential organizations and respected organizations in the country.

The National Chief at the time was George Manuel. It is hard to understate his influence on the modern indigenous rights movement. He's a famous, widely respected leader. He died in 1989, but we showed his daughter, Doreen Manuel, the documents at her home in North Vancouver. This was her reaction. 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 that didn't want the things that he was working towards to happen. It just, I mean, it was upsetting to know there was a few people out there that didn't want what he wanted. It's really upsetting to find out there was a massive number of people. You can hear in her voice just how upsetting it was to see the level of intrusion into his private affairs in these documents. After that, in order, the targets were the Dene Nation and Yellowknife,

the Federation of Sovereign, Indigenous Nations in Saskatchewan, the forerunners of the Métis National Council, the Manitoba, Métis Federation, the Métis Nation of Saskatchewan, and Inuit Tapparit Kanatami, which is the National Inuit Organization. The program's policies actually permitted monitoring of legitimate organizations in 1975. Before that, they didn't even have a written policy for this program. They appear to have been operating without any sort of guardrail, any sort of written guidelines, and just basing it off more or less hunches. So what were they doing? It was intrusive.

This was more than just reading the newspapers or listening to the radio, though those things were going on. The documents reveal, and perhaps this is the biggest thing, they confirmed the Mounties were actually paying informers to infiltrate groups like George Manuel's

National Indian Brotherhood. He himself was under direct physical surveillance. There's a report here from a surveillance mission where he was meeting a dignitary at the airport. And it's like something out of a movie. There's Mounties there peeking under the newspaper to watch what he's doing. It's like a spy novel. It is like a spy novel. And so it wasn't, though. It was real. This was really happening. And we're seeing the evidence now for the first time 50 years later. They even had a secret red power photo album where they kept profiles of suspected dissidents. You may wonder why. And I wondered why as well.

I placed dozens of calls to former RCMP security service members, named in the documents. All of their names were released. Very few would speak, but I did reach ex-security service member Greg Savicky. Back at that time, the Marxist Linus and Troscus were quite big in Ontario, and the Communist Party of Canada were quite big, and they were trying to get in with the natives to influence into their way of thinking. They were trying to grow, and they were trying to attract. more members to their organization.

I think they saw the native area, but an area they could get in to further their cause and to allow them to be seen with their flags. So the official justification was fighting communists. This was the Cold War. It was the 1970s,

and there was a flavor of McCarthyism to some of this. There was this idea that what indigenous people were doing, demanding self-determination, organizing new movements across the country was fueled by outsiders, as if indigenous people couldn't think for themselves. The second justification was stopping the American Indian movement and radicals who might be

infiltrating indigenous groups, but soon the dragnet was cast much wider. Moderates were being targeted under the pretext that they might become radical, they might turn violent at any moment at any time, therefore the RCMP needs to keep comprehensive tabs on them. The document also confirmed for the first time that the Pierre Trudeau liberal government approved wiretaps at the Indian Brotherhood office in Ottawa. So they were listening into the phones of the AFN's precursor organization, which is significant. In 1975, there was a cabinet committee where National Indian Brotherhood leaders were meeting with the Trudeau cabinet to discuss issues of mutual concern, shared priorities. We're now learning. Meanwhile, the government was listening to their phones and infiltrating their office. not because they were violent, not because they were a security threat, but because they posed a threat to national unity instead.

Infiltrating is an interesting word because I said in the introduction, there were also rumors of informants, right? What do we know from those documents about the RCMP's use of informants? What we learned in these documents is that informers were the bread and butter of the RCMP security service and its intelligence work. Researchers explained to us that placing a bug in an office was risky. it was dangerous and it actually might have been illegal. If you couldn't get someone to bring you into that building, you had to break in. And there was no law authorizing the Mounties

to just break into another private structure at that time. To plant a bug, they would have been violating the criminal code. Tapping a phone needed the ministers sign off. So you couldn't just institute a wiretap without political approval, but a good infiltrator, a good informer, someone who would agree to pass you whatever information you wanted from the inside, that was invaluable.

A human source. A human source. It was invaluable. And what we're learning that now is that it was actually a myth that everybody was being kept under electronic surveillance. Some of them were. We are seeing that. But what we're seeing is that eight times out of 10, the source was a person. Do the documents reveal who those humans were?

No, they do not. The Mounties and now CIS protect sources as vigorously as you and I do, as journalists. and why it was so difficult to get these documents largely hinged on this discussion or debate about protecting the identity of informers. Because they're going to be considerable fallout. They could. They knew the names of who was the informant. And so with that said, when we read the documents, we do learn that the Mounties don't put the names of their informers in the documents. They give them a code number.

So it'll be one of them that we found was A-8-8-8-8-a signifies the division. A was Ottawa. So that tells us this was an informer based in Ottawa. This was someone who was spying on the National Indian Brotherhood. It was effectively a secret agent, a reliable source as it was described. So we don't know who these informers were. And some indigenous leaders were a little bit circumspect. They might know they just don't necessarily want to comment in case these people have descendants that are still living in the communities. However, Doreen Manuel does have a powerful message to those informers who were spying on her father. To the right thing. If you were an informant back then, for whatever reason, do the right thing today.

That was then. This is today. Today, do the right thing. And report. How is the government going to hurt you today? Report and talk and tell everybody and make the government accountable for the behavior that they have carried on against indigenous people, make them accountable so that today maybe we can start getting some more fair treatment. Because the things that we fight for, it's for everybody. Clean air, clean water, prosperity for the people that are so poverty-stricken. What do we know about what sort of stirred up in people? Because, because of that surveillance and how that surveillance impacted them. It was invasive.

It was described to us as invasive and disruptive. It created division in paranoia within movements. Stephen Kakwi is a dene leader. He was active in the 1970s. He later became premier of the Northwest Territories. He described it to us like this. Sometimes you end up alone. You know, and you start checking under the bed and behind your nightstand and behind the pictures.

I was still doing that when I was a minute. It just never leaves you because you know what people are capable of, you know. When you're talking about a multi-million, you know, billion-dollar capital project, it is not beyond reason to think they could probably, you know, take a run at destabilizing us and putting us under surveillance, which we knew they were doing. Kakwe was in the Denay Nation political organization, which actually still exists under that name today. Up until 1975, the program was building up.

That's when they were writing these policies. That's when they were spying on George Manuel. By 1976, all the disruptive actions the Red Power movement had mostly ceased. And you know the saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. By 1975, this program was a hammer in search of a nail, and the Dene Nation presented that nail. They were demanding self-determination,

and we heard about a half dozen stories of seriously intrusive tactics being used against the Dene in the 1970. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, and I host the Daily News podcast, Front Burner, and lately I'll see a story about, I don't know, political corruption or something and think during a normal time, We'd be talking about this for weeks. But then it's almost immediately overwhelmed by something else. On Front Burner, we are trying to pull lots of story threads together so that you don't lose the plot.

So you can learn how all these threads fit together. Follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. How aware were they that this might be going on? They knew some of it was happening. So there was a method known as overt surveillance. It was a simple disruption tactic. You're less likely to do anything subversive. if you know you're being washed.

That was used in Yellowknife. George Erasmus was a top target under this program. This was his take on that tactic. Because it's been happening for so long, it's just become second nature. I've always one way or another have known that they were there. Sometimes they were very obvious. They were like park right in front of our offices, right?

And other times they would stop me at the airport in Edmonton, And when I flew out of here, as if I had landed in another country, it's like I was going, you know, through customs, and they'd be searching all my bags all the time. It was very invasive. You know, no one should have to live with that. I developed an internal tolerance to it. In some ways, I kind of laughed at it, that why I would be picked out to. to be a threat. But even George Erasmus, Matt,

had no idea there were covert operatives informing on his activities within his organization. He described himself as astounded to learn that. Even 50 years later, he was shocked. You mentioned paranoia and division. What impact did all of this have on trust within these movements? Planting informers is something you do in counterinsurgency. It's something you do encounter insurgency.

terrorism, it's something states do when they're at war with each other. Researchers say doing this to legitimate movements can be a dirty trick. Consider this analysis from Yellow Knives Denny political theorist Glenn Kolthard. Through interviews and research, I had a lot of stories of activists who had known that this was a program that was in play. Like the U.S. version of this was the counterintelligence program or Cointel Pro. And it was also used to disrupt and destroy these types of organizations. So if you had rumors of infiltrators or rats or whatever, you would corrode the solidarity and the trust between activists

so they would eat themselves from the inside. So pretty serious stuff there. Here's one more scholarly analysis from criminologist Shiri Pasternak. I think this is a massive violation of indigenous. political rights, human rights, and privacy. This is a morally reprehensible program that sought to criminalize legitimate political organizing and justify it by calling this kind of, you know, agitation for inherent rights, some kind of subversive activity.

To me, this didn't look like just monitoring for potential violent threat. This was a counterinsurgency program that was designed to pick up any nuanced disagreements between groups, any divisions between organizations, any factionalism between Métis and First Nations organizing. They were collecting intelligence clearly in order to disrupt and create turmoil within these movements. This is the kind of information that you gather in order to engage in divide and conquer tactics. And it was all legal. There was actually nothing preventing the Mounties from doing this to legitimate organization. But researchers like Pasternak and Colthard say, even though it was legal, it was still undemocratic and even unethical.

Do we know whether the surveillance changed how people acted politically or organized in those movements? It certainly did change how people acted. Young activists like Doreen Manuel at the time were taught counter surveillance. They knew how to hide their faces from the press during a press. protest to avoid getting IDed by the Mounties. They knew the Mounties were reading the paper and you might end up in that book on very, very flimsy premises. They grew suspicious of new people.

They were nervous about informers. Ultimately, though, and this is perhaps the most important point, this disruptive program failed. The targets became nationally and internationally respected leaders. George Manuel founded the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. George Erasmus became national chief and led the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People. So they went on to do big things. This program, meanwhile, was tucked away and remained hidden in the shadows.

Until you arrived. How did you get your hands on all of this? This is a long story. The short version is that it started in 2022. There had always been these rumors, but never any proof. So I began filing access to information requests, and I was told that I would have to wait several years to see these documents. And so I complained to the Information Commissioner in Ottawa who issued four orders to release these documents.

The government responded by filing three different court applications, trying to delay the release of these documents by years. Eventually, we litigated it and the government decided to abandon its case and release the files. In the end, it took me approximately from 2022 till today to get it. this story, so almost four years anyway. The pushback from government is fascinating, just in terms of what you did or didn't get. My first request just disappeared. I filed the same one in 2023, and that's when I was told I'd have to wait 1,400 days, 1,400 days to get access to the dossier on the National Indian Brotherhood, so almost four more years after waiting for a year already. And so it took all together,

as I was saying, three years. And after that, CBC Indigenous partnered with CBC Investigates and a team of reporters spent months reviewing, reviewing these files starting late last year. We interviewed indigenous leaders, leading researchers, and we deciphered the documents to piece all this together. And there was a lot of coded language in these documents, so they weren't necessarily easy to understand. So the documents cover a specific period. What happens after that period ends?

The security service was disbanded in 1984 after similar surveillance of left-wing radicals and Quebec separatists came to light. The Mounties actually burned a barn. They created a dirty tricks department that was responsible for doing this sorts of thing. It was a scandal. And they called a Royal Commission, the McDonald Commission, to investigate it. That led to the creation of CIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, today's intelligence agency. And CIS was actually given a legal mandate, which the Mounties didn't have back then.

And they put a little caveat in there that forbids CES from investigating lawful advocacy, precisely because of what I'm describing to you now. And yet, there are still concerns today about surveillance, right? All across Canada, we heard the same thing from virtually every indigenous leader. They weren't surprised and they think this is still happening. CIS actually allowed us into their headquarters for an interview with a senior official. That's an extremely rare thing for the secretive spy agency. So I asked the CIS deputy director, Nicole Giles, directly.

Does her organization still pay people to spy? spy on groups like the Assembly of First Nations, and this was her answer. When we talk about how we don't investigate lawful protest advocacy or dissent, and we talk about that threshold of having the reasonable grounds to suspect a threat of serious violence, we don't investigate organizations or groups or communities. We investigate threats. And so at its most fundamental basis, we need to myth-bust, little bit in terms of us having an approach that is based on this idea that we would investigate

a community that's not how our investigations work, that's not how our legislation is laid out. So they don't investigate, but is there still kind of casual monitoring of those groups and individuals? Indigenous leaders tend to think so, Matt. When you step back from all of this, having looked through these documents but also knowing what you know. What are the documents do you think change in our understanding of the relationship between indigenous people and the government in this country? One researcher said to me quite bluntly that it makes it worse. How much worse? We don't know because we haven't seen all these papers. Virtually every indigenous leader we spoke with said this program was based on pernicious but pervasive

stereotypes. Remember, in the 1970s, the Indian residential school system was in full swing. The 60s scoop where indigenous kids were systematically removed from their families and placed in foster care was just beginning and it would continue till 1991. These practices emerged out of this paternalistic idea that indigenous people couldn't think for themselves and needed the state to step in and manage their affairs. So these schooling programs targeted culture. These racial intelligence and native extremism programs targeted political organizing. We were repeatedly told they were basically told they were based.

on these same false stereotypes. So in other words, we know the Canadian government worked hard to suppress indigenous languages and culture at the time. We now know the state worked equally hard, if in secret, to counter indigenous political organizing. Tony Belcourt was monitored in the 1970s. He was the founding president of the Native Council of Canada.

Here's what he had to say about how all of this has left him. I'm not entirely proud to be Canadian. to see the way our people have been treated historically, and I believe are still being treated. Where was there any regard for our rights, our rights as just citizens, to privacy, to be able to speak freely? Well, supposed to have freedom of expression. Where were those rights being recognized and on? honored by the crown. They just went. Brett, this is some investigation. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Brett Forrester is a reporter with CBC Indigenous. You can read more on this investigation online. Go to cbcnews.ca.ca. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.