CBC News reports: “Prime Minister Mark Carney says there should be a public apology for a spying operation targeting hundreds of Indigenous people that had the support of the federal government. ‘Yes, there should be an apology,’ Carney said during a news conference in Halifax on Thursday [March 26]. ‘It’s a reprehensible practice. Never should’ve happened.’”
The article adds: “CBC Indigenous obtained nearly 6,000 newly declassified documents that show the Mounties [the Royal Canadian Mounted Police/RCMP] infiltrated legitimate political Indigenous organizations engaged in legal and democratic advocacy, and sought to disrupt their activities in an operation called the ‘Native extremism program’. The files corroborate for the first time that the Liberal government in the mid ’70s approved RCMP wiretaps to monitor the telephones of the National Indian Brotherhood, known today as the AFN [Assembly of First Nations], in Ottawa.”
The article also notes: “RCMP Commissioner Mike Duheme issued a written statement of regret a day after the CBC Indigenous investigation broke, and pledged to meet with Indigenous leaders and elders.”
The Commissioner writes: “The RCMP acknowledges the recent reporting concerning surveillance activities involving Indigenous groups during the 1960s and 1970s. …The RCMP today is not the same organization it was decades ago, but I acknowledge that more must be done.”
We note that the Chiefs of Ontario is now demanding “federal action on widespread spying on First Nations by police and security forces in Canada.”
1995
Last year, CBC News also reported that declassified internal documents indicate that the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) — formed in 1984 to take on the security intelligence work of the RCMP — conducted a secret investigation into “Native extremism” in 1995 and appear to have falsely claimed that Indigenous land defenders in Ipperwash, Ontario were armed just days prior to an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer fatally shooting land defender Dudley George on September 6, 1995, during a re-occupation of the Ipperwash Provincial Park.
2010
The Narwhal has also previously reported: “Recent revelations that the RCMP spied on Indigenous environmental rights activist Clayton Thomas-Muller should not be dismissed as routine monitoring. They reveal a long-term, national energy strategy that is coming increasingly into conflict with Indigenous rights and assertions of Indigenous jurisdiction over lands and resources. A ‘Critical Infrastructure Suspicious Incident’ report was triggered by Thomas-Muller’s trip in 2010 to the Unist’ot’en camp of Wet’suwet’en land defenders, where a protect camp was being built on the coordinates of a proposed Pacific Trails pipeline.”
2014-15
APTN News has reported that Miles Howe of Queen’s University told APTN News in a phone interview that checklists developed by RCMP Director of Research and Analysis Dr. Eli Sopow as part of the National Intelligence Coordination Centre’s 2014-2015 Project SITKA reveal “it’s not criminality the RCMP are focused on, it’s the ability of that group to create and craft a counter narrative to the one that suggests whatever the police do is across the board legitimate.”
That article adds: “His collaboration with [Jeffrey] Monaghan, an assistant professor of criminology [Carleton University in Ottawa], builds on a body of work developed by Monaghan and Andrew Crosby, a coordinator with the Ontario Public Interest Group at Carleton University. Monaghan and Crosby used access to information laws to uncover thousands of pages of documents from the RCMP, CSIS and government agencies [that paints] a picture of how government departments, police, intelligence agencies and private sector interests work together to compile intelligence on activists—including Indigenous land defenders…”
2021 and 2022
CBC News has reported: “An RCMP national security unit monitored First Nations-led anti-pipeline activism for ‘potential threats’ to the energy, transportation and banking sectors between 2021 and 2022, internal police documents show. Records obtained by CBC Indigenous reveal Ottawa-based federal policing groups tracked and analyzed protests against TC Energy and Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), citing concerns about ‘anarchist groups’ or ‘fringe environmentalists’ sabotaging infrastructure or targeting executives in solidarity with Wet’suwe’ten hereditary chiefs.”
2022 and 2023
And Amnesty International has documented: “RCMP and CRU [Critical Response Unit, the rebranded Community-Industry Response Group] officers, and Forsythe Security employees, follow members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation travelling through their territory along the Morice FSR, as well as in nearby cities. They also photograph and record members of the Nation. Amnesty International observed these tactics during its visits to Wet’suwet’en territory in July 2022 and May-June 2023. Members of the organization’s research team were also followed, photographed and filmed by the RCMP and Forsythe Security on multiple occasions.”
We continue to follow this.
