Gregory S. Kealey – författare

Award winning author Gregory S. Kealey’s study of Canada’s security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States.

Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through itse use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defence of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism.

Award winning author Gregory S. Kealey’s study of Canada’s security and intelligence community before the end of World War II depicts a nation caught up in the Red Scare in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution and tangled up with the imperial interests of first the United Kingdom and then the United States.

Spying on Canadians brings together over twenty five years of research and writing about political policing in Canada. Through itse use of the Dominion Police and later the RCMP, Canada repressed the labour movement and the political left in defense of capital. The collection focuses on three themes; the nineteenth-century roots of political policing in Canada, the development of a national security system in the twentieth-century, and the ongoing challenges associated with research in this area owing to state secrecy and the inadequacies of access to information legislation. This timely collection alerts all Canadians to the need for the vigilant defence of civil liberties and human rights in the face of the ever increasing intrusion of the state into our private lives in the name of countersubversion and counterterrorism.

In the 1880s Canadians began to cope with the meaning of their emerging industrial society. During that decade the federal government first investigated industrial conditions and provincial governments passed Canada''s first factory legislation. The same period saw the resurgence of an articulate and angry labor movement protesting against the excesses of modern industry.

Through the Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital we can perhaps gain our best insight into the everyday world of workers and capitalists in late nineteenth-century Canada. The commission gathered evidence in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and talked to thousands of workers, businessmen, and other concerned citizens. This edited version of its investigation includes much of the best testimony; it describes working class living conditions, the emergence of organized labor, and the attitudes of businessmen to industrial capitalism.

The testimony takes us with the commissioners on their tour of New Brunswick cotton mills, Capre Breton coal pits, Ontario shops and foundries, and Quebec City wharves; it explores as well the darkest corners of Montreal cigar factories. Industrialists discuss profits, markets, sources of raw material, and problems with labor.

But what is perhaps more important, the working people themselves are also heard, men and women who in most historical records appear as little more than cold statistics. The warmth and humanity of these Canadians reflecting on their lives and on the society around them bring the commission documents to life. Aging craftsmen, ten-year-old saw-mill hands, girls from the spindles and looms, describe their workplaces, wages, hours, and aspects of their lives away from the job. These almost unique interviews allow us to enter their intellectual and cultural world – to learn of their past and present and of some of their hopes and aspirations. The Labor Commission reports and testimony are essential for an understanding of the Canadian working class as it was being transformed by the new techniques of industrial production.