It was no secret to Forsey that police were interested in his socialist views and activities as a young academic at McGill University, with the surveillance becoming obvious at a League for Social Reconstruction meeting in Montreal.
That was when one informant for then-Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, out of what Forsey presumed was “professional jealousy,” confessed his own duplicitous motivation for being there while denouncing other plain-clothes representatives from three different police forces.
“It would be interesting to know what the police made of our deliberations,” Forsey wrote in his 1990 autobiography A Life on the Fringe, published a few months before he died.
The secret files kept on Forsey by the RCMP Security Service — the predecessor to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — are now public for the first time after the Star obtained them through an access-to-information request to Library and Archives Canada.
The collection of more than 400 pages reveals the Mounties followed Forsey for four decades throughout his career as an economics professor, research director for the Canadian Congress of Labour (now called the Canadian Labour Congress), a two-time Ottawa-area candidate for the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation and then his 1970 appointment as a Liberal senator.
“Well, I’m hardly surprised,” laughed Helen Forsey, 66, the younger of his two daughters, when the Star contacted her at home in Ompah, Ont., to let her know her father was one of the many prominent Canadians the government watched during the paranoid Cold War era.
“Now Communist is spelled T-E-R-R-O-R-I-S-T, isn’t it? Plus ça change,” said Helen Forsey, an activist and one-time NDP candidate who is finishing a book about her father and his vision for Canada called Eugene Forsey: Canada’s Maverick Sage.
The Mounties attended his lectures, infiltrated meetings of organizations in which he took part and received reports of his activities from informants in the academic milieu.
They read his letters and intercepted at least one telegram, collected his essays, newspaper articles about him and his many famous letters to the editor and at one point tracked addresses he had visited during a three-week trip to Ottawa. One was the home of his mother.
Many pages are still censored, if not missing altogether, with Library and Archives Canada — in consultation with CSIS — claiming their relation to “the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities” in order to exempt them from release.
The RCMP first became interested in Forsey in 1932, when the 28-year-old assistant professor of economics at McGill University travelled to the Soviet Union and “reported favourably upon his return.”
“It seems quite evident that Professor Forsey can be counted upon to lose no opportunity of furthering Communist interests in this country,” one unidentified officer added to a report of a speech on the Russian education system that Forsey gave that year at a Montreal meeting of the Friends of the Soviet Union.
It appears that Sir Arthur Currie, a World War I general who served as principal at McGill and had a run-in with Forsey during his student days as a young Conservative, at one point helped the RCMP in their assessment of the level of threat that Forsey posed.
“He has no experience, no knowledge of the world, and could have no possible influence over anyone who knew him, least of all over the students, who regard him as a young idiot,” says the report from an unidentified informant at the university, who notes the information was given at the suggestion of “Sir Arthur.”
One entry from 1948 even notes that his name and number was written on the desk telephone pad — photographed using microfilm — of someone the RCMP suspected to be a Russian agent and possibly a recruiter. There was nothing in the records to suggest anything came of it.
The acerbic wit for which Forsey was known also shines through in the documents, which became declassified 20 years after he died in February 1991 at the age of 86.
One hilarious example was when the RCMP, frantic to find out where Forsey was going after leaving McGill in 1941 — it was to Harvard University on a fellowship — sent an officer knocking on the door of his father-in-law in Saint John, N.B.
That got back to Forsey, who wrote a strongly worded letter to the RCMP asking what business they had bothering his wife’s relatives if he was neither missing nor a fugitive from justice.
The RCMP made up a story about wanting to interview him about someone he might have known while in Montreal.
“Dear Sir,” Forsey replied in a terse, handwritten letter to the RCMP commissioner mailed from Cambridge, Mass. “Thank you for your letter. Next time the Force wishes to interview me, it might be simpler to use the services of His Majesty’s Post Office.”
There was another time when Forsey found a less direct way of telling the police he knew what they were up to, as an intelligence report from the 1940 national convention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Union in Montreal makes clear.
“To the members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who may be present, I am definitely not a Communist,” Forsey noted at the end of a speech defending freedom of expression, the report says.
The Mounties believed him eventually.
They watched with interest as he developed into what they described as an “anti-Communist and active labour leader,” even repudiating an endorsement from the Communist Party of Canada when he ran unsuccessfully for the CCF (forerunner to the NDP) in a 1948 byelection.
Still, in 1966 when Helen Forsey needed security clearance for a government job she has since forgotten about, the RCMP described something her father had written 30 years earlier — about Christians not being able to enter Heaven until they embraced Marxism — as “probably the most damaging of all” and noted that his 1948 admission that he had changed his mind meant “at least previously he was in sympathy to communism.”
They kept collecting newspaper clippings and other notes until about a year after he became a senator, before declaring it a “dead file” to be kept for “historical reasons.”
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Joanna Smith
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