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Another Canadian history lesson

By Kevin Steel ⋅ May 4, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

You may have seen this story in the Globe and Mail: Canada urged to build foreign spying agency.

"Canada has always been dependent on the free intelligence handouts that it receives from its close allies, notably the U.S. and the U.K.," Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, recently told a University of Toronto audience.

Huh? "always been dependent"? Okay, maybe the government proper has been dependent, but certainly not everybody in Canada. A couple of weeks ago, I was going over Elaine Dewar’s excellent 1995 book Cloak of Green looking for background material on Maurice Strong, the subject of the cover story in the May 8 issue. As I read over the above-mentioned G&M piece, I recalled the following passage from Dewar’s book, in the chapter "The Honourable Poor Boy":

By the time Strong got to the part in his story about how he used SNC as a private front for federal government skullduggery in Africa and Quebec it was Saturday afternoon. He had invited me over to his rented house in Aniers, a village outside of Geneva. His house was a plain modern box with French doors opening onto a nice rolling lawn. We sat in his living room. His second wife, Hanne Marstrand, drifted around. She showed little interest in this conversation about SNC and CIDA, as if she’d heard it all before, but it was news to me. I found myself sitting bolt upright. His meaning was quite clear. He had helped create a federally funded but semi-private intelligence/influence network that could have impacts both in Canada and abroad. He later confirmed this interpretation, although he said he had never described it that way before. I was shocked. It had never been acknowledged that Canada had a foreign intelligence or influence capacity outside its embassies. Yet Strong was telling me that he had created one out of virtually nothing. There was no reason to suppose that this network wasn’t still running through CIDA and its cousin IDRC: I had reason to believe it was.

So there you go, Sir Dearlove. Canadian foreign spying agency? We already got that covered, at least somebody does, or did, or might have. Uh… actually, maybe we’ll try to get back to you on this.