The Secret History

Westley Wark, historian and security policy consultant, has a new post on his Substack about Nazi war criminals in Canada and a recent court decision granting more access to still-classified materials from the Deschenes commission on War Criminals in Canada and studies connected to it. 

Wark, on the basis of great experience in historical records of Canadian security policy and practice, suspects there is not too much to be found in the still-secret materials. But he also notes the Canadian penchant for keeping things secret that do not need to be secret.  There is a subtext here about Wark's history of Canadian security matters, which he researched on a classified basis and which has never been granted a proper publication -- at a time when British and American presses have long since published analogous histories of  their own security services.  

Where's the Wark history is a good question, and it should not all be up to Wark. Is some editor and publisher at an academic (or trade) publisher pushing to get hold of the manuscript and give it proper publication? 

Read of the day: Wesley Wark on leaving NORAD

Historian and security analyst Wesley Wark has an (admittedly) provocative article up at The Walrus online today, setting out why Canada should be planning for the end of NORAD and for a new NATO-based security alliance for the North American and European north.  (Wark's childhood experiences, we discover, include some years spent at a NORAD base in Montana.)

Image: Stanley Kubrick, "Dr Strangelove."

Book Notes: Legal histories from Backhouse and Molinaro

UBC Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History last night launched two new books in their hundred-plus series of legal histories.

Constance Backhouse has been working for a decade on a massive biography of Supreme Court of Canada justice Claire L'Heureux-Dubé.  It's a declaredly feminist biography of a judge greatly admired by many -- sensationally criticized by others -- for developing a powerful feminist jurisprudence within Canadian law.

It's a full scale biography, from L'Heureux-Dubé's early years as the only woman lawyer practising in Quebec City, in association with almost the only Jewish lawyer practising there, to her post-retirement involvement in Quebec's reasonable accommodation debates. To complete the work, Backhouse not only conducted 200 interviews and looked at seemingly every possible document, but also mastered French, which seems fairly heroic.

The Society's second book is at least as topical. Dennis Molinaro's findings about the secret archives of security service files that the Canadian government, ah, neglected to deposit with Library and Archives Canada made headlines last year.

An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919-1936  is the book he was working on when he found and publicised the stash.

Historians in the news: Molinaro on secret wiretapping

Dave Seglins of CBC News reports on Trent University historian Dennis Molinaro's discovery of a secret, never acknowledged, and still unarchived Canadian order in council, dating back to 1951 but continuing for decades, that authorized wide surveillance, including wiretapping by the RCMP.

I happened to be talking yesterday with a senior legal scholar, aware of this breaking story, who had noted to the McDonald Commission (1977-81, on RCMP activities) that the Official Secrets Act was a very poor legal basis for much of the surveillance that went on. He of course was unaware of this Order-in-Council under which the RCMP was actually operating, and suspects the Commission staff may have been equally in the dark.

Meanwhile, the New Yorker has a Malcolm Gladwell story on "leakers and hackers" in which Daniel Ellsberg, the ur-leaker, describes the profound gap that opens between someone in government service who has clearance for secrets and scholars outside who do not:

it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: “What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?” And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. . . . The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron.