07-01 What the Hell!

“If you can raise $10,000, I can arrange for someone to put a hit on Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.” What the Hell!
It is 1970, and at the end of a massive rally at the Royal York Hotel. I am talking to media and others who were offering me congratulations for organizing opposition to the federal government's White Paper on Tax Reform. And out of nowhere came this stranger offering to assassinate the Prime Minister of Canada.
Fortunately, I had arranged for personal security and called for a chap with monster shoulders to take this man away. He was questioned by our security company and turned over to the RCMP.
Apparently, he was paid to make the offer to me as some form of test. He claimed he was approached by an individual who did not identify himself. I asked the security people if this was normal. Their reply? Those behind this kind of thing will work three steps back so that it is difficult or impossible to uncover their identity. Welcome to the world of intelligence and security.
Intelligence and security are a “what the Hell” issue for most Canadians. It is one of those things that is both complex and secretive. Most of what the public understands about intelligence and security most likely comes from old James Bond movies.
During 1970, when I was organizing public rallies across Canada, I was given access to secret reports by the RCMP. Someone in the federal government “brown bagged” them to me.
They were naturally investigating my organization, The Canadian Council for Fair Taxation, to determine who was funding us and whether we posed any kind of threat to national security.
The first report claimed we were a front for the Chartered Banks, and where that came from was a huge surprise. They never gave us a penny. But they do tend to control everything else in the nation.
The second report said we were a front for the mining industry. I could understand that one, because a very kindly old gentleman came in to see me after the big rally in Toronto and said he had a lot of friends in the mining business and would like to help. Two weeks later, $25 cheques poured in from all across Canada. It turns out this stranger, and I had even forgotten his name, was the retired past President of the Mining Association of Canada.
To be factual, we never took more than $500 from any source, and our average cheque was about $37 from 4,200 individuals and companies.
I had the distinct impression in 1970 that the RCMP was seriously incompetent. Anyway, it was in 1984 that the RCMP was split in two. The RCMP stayed as a super police force, and in most provinces serve as the provincial police. The job of intelligence gathering was given to a new agency called CSIS or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
The RCMP in Canada is like the FBI in the US. These are police forces that can arrest people. CSIS is more like the CIA in that it is concerned with all forms of terrorism. All a little simplistic, of course. They and dozens of quasi-intelligence agencies around the world all share intelligence. That is how they get their best leads on security threats.
Here is another “what the Hell” moment. I had just returned home from an International Small Business Congress in Warsaw in 1992, and received a phone call from someone from the CIA in Washington, who asked me questions about a member of the Polish Steering Committee who they claimed was in regular contact with the Russian government. Someone had been following me when this Polish small business person took me out to his factory after the Congress.
Then two days later, two Russians from their embassy paid me a visit and asked me a lot of questions that they could have gotten from our library. I did not call the RCMP. It seemed so innocent. What was weird was getting a call the very next day from two RCMP officers asking me what the Russians were inquiring about. I asked them about CSIS, and they said they do chores for one another.
They concluded that the Russians were trying to find out how friendly I was and knew that I had been in contact with their Polish spy. What the Hell!