David Pugliese
Winnipeg Free Press
Friday, November 10, 2006

THE federal government had detailed lists of political activists and subversives it planned to arrest in the aftermath of a nuclear war or other national emergency, keeping such plans on the books until at least the early 1980s, according to new records obtained by an Ottawa historian.

Anywhere from 700 to 2,500 people, including babies, would have been held in internment camps before being shipped off to more permanent detention facilities.

Under the 1969 version of the plan, the majority of people were to be picked up in Ontario with the second-largest group coming from British Columbia. Manitoba had the third-largest number of subversives to be arrested. In the Maritimes, only two people were targeted.

Cold War historian John Clearwater obtained the records through the Access to Information Act while researching his new book, Just Dummies: Cruise Missile Testing in Canada, which is being released Monday.

Clearwater said when it came to cruise missile testing in the 1980s, the Liberal government spent much of its time trying to mislead the public over the true extent of the country's involvement. But there was no way that Canada could have refused to test the weapon, he added.

"The U.S. saw this as a test of our resolve to be its defence partner," Clearwater noted. "We simply couldn't refuse."
His book details Canada's decision to allow the Pentagon to test cruise missiles over the country in the 1980s and the widespread protests against that. The book also reveals how an undercover RCMP officer infiltrated a peace camp set up on Parliament Hill and that the Canadian government allowed the U.S. to test its controversial neutron bomb in Quebec. No actual bomb was detonated during those tests which were designed to see how the weapon's components functioned in cold weather.

In addition, the book details how the Liberal government feared the U.S. would hit Canada with crippling trade sanctions in the 1990s if B.C. followed through with its threat to shut down the Nanoose training range on Vancouver Island. The range was seen as a key facility for the Pentagon's testing of various underwater weapons.

Clearwater, the author of two other books on nuclear weapons in Canada, said the federal government was shaken by the widespread opposition to cruise missile testing.

Although he knew the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service kept close tabs on peace groups during that period, Clearwater said he was surprised by the extent of the government's plans during the Cold War to round up Canadian citizens it saw as subversive.

"It's really about the fear," he said in an interview. "The government feared people who disagreed with it during a time of a national emergency."

Government plans to detain individuals were developed in the late 1940s and updated annually until the early 1980s, Clearwater noted. The first discussion of such a plan appears in 1948 when, on Dec. 15 of that year, the cabinet's defence committee discussed the detainment of 2,500 people.