Would you believe that RCMP operatives used to spy on Tupperware parties? In the 1950s and ’60s they did. They also monitored high school students, gays and lesbians, trade unionists, left-wing political groups, feminists, consumer’s associations, Black activists, First Nations people, and Quebec sovereigntists. The establishment of a tenacious Canadian security state came as no accident. On the contrary, the highest levels of government and the police, along with non-governmental interests and institutions, were involved in a concerted campaign. The security state grouped ordinary Canadians into dozens of political stereotypes and labelled them as threats. Whose National Security? probes the security state’s ideologies and hidden agendas, and sheds light on threats to democracy that persist to the present day. The contributors’ varied approaches open up avenues for reconceptualizing the nature of spying.

In 1928 the Soviet Union proposed the establishment of an autonomous socialist Jewish republic in the far eastern reaches of Russian territory. In Birobidzhan the eternal search for a Jewish homeland would be realized and Jews would possess their own institutions, which would function in Yiddish. A "new" Jew would be created, emancipated, and rejuvenated. Although the project was eventually revealed to be a fraud, thousands of left-wing Jews in Canada and the United States passionately supported it and campaigned on its behalf - some even emigrated to Birobidzhan.

In 1898, Spanish spies based in Montreal, Halifax, and Victoria monitored the United States war effort against their homeland, while U.S. counter-intelligence officials watched the Spaniards. Neither the Americans nor the Spaniards sought Canadian permission for these activities. Britain’s enemies (and often America’s enemies) have also been Canada’s enemies. Without the heroic counter-intelligence of the mysterious Agent X, Irish Americans at the turn of the century might have blasted British Columbia’s legislature and the Esquimalt naval base the way they blasted the Welland Canal. During World War I, counter-intelligence failed to stop German agents who bombed the Windsor-Walkerville area as well as the CPR bridge on the Maine-New Brunswick border. Meanwhile, Canadian security officials ran around in a state of frantic frustration because of German "conspiracies" along the Ontario-New York State border imagined by Sir Courtney bennett, British consul-general in New york City. After the war, American moles in a Latvian post office monitored mail between Canadian Communists and Moscow. In the thirties, a Finnish-Canadian clergyman spied on Sudbury’s Red Finns for the United States consultate inNorth Bay, and Hitler’s consuls maintained surveillance of Canadian politicians and German dissidents in Canada. During World War II, Canadian authorities intercepted the mail of envoys from Vichy-France, suspected of spying for Germany, and from Franco’s Spain, suspected of spying for Japan. In the 1960s, the CIA not only observed Cubans in Canada, but also watched the situation in Quebec and used a Canadian diplomat to collect information on North Vietnam. Some of this history has merged from previously ignored and newly declassified documents from European, American, and Canadian archives. These newly revealed details show that Canada is an interesting place, both for what Canadians do elsewhere and for what foreigners do in Canada. Also, once readers have seen the kinds of activities in which friends engage, they may be less surprised at what enemies have done.

While Canadian historians have studied socialism in the 1930s, and although there have been many studies of American and British literary leftists from this period, Comrades and Critics is the first full-length study of Canada's 1930s literary left. Challenging dominant perceptions that this decade was a lull between the more celebrated modernist enterprises of the 1920s and 1940s, Candida Rifkind argues that the events of the 1930s - from mass unemployment, to the dustbowl, to the Spanish Civil War - galvanized a generation of writers, leading them to unite artistic practice and political action in provocative and influential ways. Analyzing and recovering much-neglected poems, plays, manifestoes, and documentaries, Rifkind demonstrates how leftist cultural production came to dominate English-Canadian literature by the end of the decade. She pays particular attention to the significant role that women writers played in this period and examines a diverse group of writers that included Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Irene Baird, and Toby Gordon Ryan. These writers negotiated the struggle to revolutionize both literature and politics, while being subject to the gender hierarchies of socialism and literary modernism that continued long after the thirties came to an end. A groundbreaking study in Canadian history and literature, Comrades and Critics is a much-needed examination of an important and still influential literary period.

Corbin's "red itinerary" began when she joined the Young Communist League in Edmonton. She later held party posts across the country through her involvement with The Worker in Toronto, a French communist paper in Montreal, the Workers' Cooperative in Timmins, and a lumbermen's strike in Abitibi - where she was jailed for taking part in a protest. She died of tuberculosis in London, Ontario, in 1944.