The Mounties called it the “Native extremism program.” Today, it sounds like a spy novel.
Intelligence dossiers stuffed with documents. Wiretaps. Paid informants. Covert operatives with code numbers like “A-828.” A Red Power dissident photo album. Surreptitious surveillance at homes, offices, airports and bars.
But it wasn’t fiction.
In fact, newly declassified RCMP Security Service files confirm Canada’s Cold War-era domestic intelligence agency infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political Indigenous organizations in the 1970s, in an extensive program of covert surveillance, informants and countersubversion.
The files also corroborate for the first time that the Liberal government in the mid-1970s approved covert RCMP wiretaps to monitor the telephones of the National Indian Brotherhood, known today as the Assembly of First Nations, in Ottawa.
That’s no surprise to First Nations leaders like Georges Erasmus, former Dene Nation president and Assembly of First Nations national chief. He always knew the state was watching. Now he has the proof.
“Because it’s been happening for so long, it’s just become second nature,” Erasmus said.
“I’ve always one way or another known that they were there.”
Nearly 6,000 pages of documents reveal the Security Service was casually monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968, amid concerns about outside influences from radicals and communists. Its posture changed in 1973, after 200 non-violent youth activists occupied the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa for 24 hours and made off with duffel bags full of documents.
The Mounties never saw it coming. “The Security Service was unprepared,” says a 1978 secret internal history, describing the agency as “unable to respond to government requests for intelligence.”
“This, combined with a realization that continued unrest would generate more of these incidents, convinced the Security Service to embark on an extensive program of human source development in the Native area,” the paper says.
A CBC Indigenous investigation has found the program evolved into a widespread and intrusive countrywide surveillance operation targeting far more than suspected radicals. Hundreds of Indigenous people and at least 30 legitimate political organizations were monitored.
The documents were released in 2025 after four access to information requests. The federal government fought the requests in court, delaying the release for years.
The files comprise hundreds of surveillance reports contained in more than two dozen manila file folders marked “racial intelligence.” They name 150 RCMP members and confirm methods like paying informants, physical surveillance, filming, photographing, monitoring and meeting with media, liaising with Indian Affairs and the FBI, and checking sensitive government and privately held records.
Erasmus appears in reports from 1971 to 1981, a period during which agents would park outside the Dene Nation offices in Yellowknife and snap pictures with a telephoto lens. He’d be stopped and hassled at the airport when flying into Edmonton.
“It was very invasive, and no one should have to live with that,” said Erasmus, who later led the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and Aboriginal Healing Foundation.
“I developed an internal tolerance to it. In some ways I kind of laughed at it, at why I would be picked out to be a threat.”
The Mounties’ stated goal was “broad penetration of extremist groups” to predict activity and counter it. However, most of these “extremists” were engaged in legal, democratic dissent. Along with the Assembly of First Nations and Dene Nation, they included the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, Métis National Council and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, known then by different names.
The Security Service justified this by pointing to “intensity of anti-government feeling” and “radical elements” within, though it acknowledged these investigations “encompassed land claims, factional disputes within the Native community and social and economic development.”
That turned the Security Service into a tool of political espionage — or, in its own words, “a repository of general information on Natives, much of it not directly related to the Security Service function,” for the broader federal government.
Dene leader reacts to declassified files labelled ‘racial intelligence’
Even academics who specialize in this subject were shocked by the depth of intrusion.
“This is a massive violation of Indigenous political rights, human rights and privacy,” said Shiri Pasternak, a criminology professor at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“This is a morally reprehensible program that sought to criminalize legitimate political organizing.”
Pasternak was disturbed to see the intense focus on sensitive political plans and internal division. She was particularly troubled by RCMP policies permitting measures to “neutralize or control” the targets.
“This didn’t look like just monitoring for potential violent threats. This was a counterinsurgency program that was designed to pick up any nuanced disagreements between groups, any divisions between organizations,” she said.
“They were collecting intelligence clearly in order to disrupt and create turmoil within these movements. This is the kind of information that you gather in order to engage in divide and conquer tactics.”
Confirmed disruption methods included the Security Service calling in a drug raid to disrupt political activity, urging senior government officials to pull funding for perceived dissident groups, and trying to block international activists’ entry into Canada.
The secret RCMP program to spy on Indigenous organizations
Legal scholar David Milward said the program represents a significant breach of Canada’s democratic principles, even as they existed before the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He described it as racist, exhibiting the same ideas underpinning Indian residential and day schools.
“Frankly, it’s appalling,” said Milward, a member of Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation in Saskatchewan.
“I mean, there’s already enough in the history of Canadian-Indigenous relations that it’s already an awful black mark as it is on Canada as a colonial state and this just adds a whole new layer onto it. Makes it worse.”
Prominent individual subjects later became respected leaders: from AFN National Chief George Manuel and his executive director Marie Marule to future national chiefs Noel Starblanket, Dave Ahenakew, Erasmus and Phil Fontaine. Prominent Inuit like John Amagoalik and Métis leaders like Jim Sinclair and Tony Belcourt were also caught in the net.
“It just reveals in spades the attitude of the government towards us, the colonial attitude towards Indigenous people,” said Belcourt, founding president of the Native Council of Canada in 1971 representing Métis and non-status First Nations people.
Belcourt had a dossier on him opened by 1972, despite being known as moderate. An informer even called him “less militant” but still “quite capable of following more militant lines,” hence the need to watch him.
“I’m not surprised,” he said.
“We were agitating, and we were saying all kinds of things that were, not subversive, but we wanted to get attention.”
Which they did.
The spying actually started earlier, with what Mounties called in their internal history document the “radical ferment of the late 1960s,” when the RCMP created a “racial intelligence section” to monitor Black and Indigenous activists.
Amid resistance to the Liberal government’s contentious White Paper plan to assimilate Indigenous peoples into mainstream society, Mounties were snooping around the National Indian Brotherhood by April 1969, canvassing sources for “influence from radical groups.”
“The Indian situation is being kept in mind,” a Security Service member reported amid these early inquiries.
This period also saw the Security Service, encouraged by the Pierre Trudeau government, take a more aggressive posture after the FLQ ignited the October Crisis of 1970, researchers say. Thus, when the youth activists seized the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa in 1973, they landed in the crosshairs of a more offence-oriented intelligence agency.
“At present we do not have suitable sources who could enlighten us as to the success/failure of the Ottawa demonstration and the local Indian populace reaction to it,” the Security Service explained in an intelligence report.
“However we hope to alleviate this problem through casual source development.”
The Mounties employed both casual and full-time informers, or “human sources.” The latter were effectively secret agents, given code numbers and direction on how to penetrate.
Their targets were groups like the American Indian Movement (AIM) as it tried to move into Canada. AIM was behind the 71-day armed occupation of Wounded Knee village on Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D., in February 1973.
Mounties had a “delicately placed” informer who spent “considerable time moving throughout the Native community in Toronto,” where local activists were building an AIM-Canada chapter, by spring 1974. Earlier, in January 1974, the Security Service asked the FBI to “alert their sources and pass any details to us” about possible AIM movements in Canada.
Boasting later of its “extremely effective” new capabilities, the Security Service was able to penetrate a series of AIM-inspired protests later that year.
In July 1974, about 150 activists took up arms and seized Ancinabe Park in Kenora, Ont. A month later, there was an armed highway blockade near Cache Creek, B.C. In September, a convoy of cars dubbed the Native People’s Caravan rolled across the country to Ottawa.
It culminated in a violent clash with an RCMP riot squad on Parliament Hill. Caravaners later said it was the RCMP that rioted, but the Mounties shifted blame to the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninists).
“At that time the Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists were quite big in Ontario and the Communist Party of Canada were quite big, and they were trying to get in with the Natives,” said former Security Service member Greg Savicky.
Savicky worked on investigations into communist activities in Ottawa in the early 1970s and worked on the Native extremism desk in Sudbury later that decade. He said he was then a low-ranking member, unaware of more intrusive methods being used. (Just eight reports out of hundreds released have Savicky’s name on them.)
“We weren’t looking at them per se,” he said, meaning Indigenous organizations.
“It was the outside influences, and we wanted to make sure that they realized that there were outside influences that were trying to get in there.”
Indigenous leaders and scholars argue the Security Service’s justification for this program — that Indigenous people needed protection from outsiders or could turn violent at a moment’s notice — was based on paternalistic stereotypes.
“It’s a very racist concept and it was present in the ’70s, 50-plus years ago, and it’s still around today,” Erasmus said.
By 1975, the program peaked. The American Indian Movement was listed as target number 1, with National Indian Brotherhood as number 2 (soon to be replaced by the Dene Nation.) Provincial associations like the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations in Saskatchewan were number 3. The Native Council of Canada was priority number 4.
Mounties were privy to details of legitimate Indigenous leaders’ private arguments, travel plans, home addresses, credit card numbers, licence plates, and sensitive political and legal plans.
‘Where was there any regard for our rights?’ says Métis leader
Senior Mounties revised the Native extremism program in 1978, but that didn’t stop the surveillance. Foreign involvement became the focus. The program continued. Dossiers grew. The latest report in the National Indian Brotherhood’s 2,000-page file is from 1983.
The Security Service’s excesses are well documented in this era and include forming a “dirty tricks department,” conducting break-ins, thefts and the burning of a barn, prompting a royal commission and the transferring of its responsibilities to the new Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1984.
Yet in a final report spanning more than 1,000 pages, the McDonald Commission tasked with investigating illegal Security Service tactics devoted fewer than three pages to “surveillance of the Indian movement.”
For some Indigenous leaders, the era left a persistent legacy of paranoia. It manifests in suspicion. Wariness of new people. A check under the bed when travelling. Others had no clue they were being watched. One thing they do agree on is that the situation demands further investigation, even now, 50 years later, that the documents are public.
CBC News has made repeated requests for an interview with the RCMP, beginning in November 2025. The force has yet to provide CBC News with a formal comment on this story.
