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.