Episode
The RCMP’s War on Dissent | A Few Bad Apples
- Podcast
- The Hatchet
- Published
- Jun 11, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 723
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://hatchetmedia.ca/p/the-rcmps-war-on-dissent-a-few-bad
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Summary
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit hatchetmedia.ca There’s this idea out there that often gets bandied about; that the RCMP, from its very inception, has been a tool of political repression. People claim that for most of the force’s 150-year history, the Mounties have been used to clamp down on perceived opponents of the state, whether they’re Indigenous activists, Francophone separatists or leftists of all stripes. And that theory, well, it’s basically true. During World War One and into the 1920s , one of the force’s primary missions was to infiltrate and surveil any group deemed potentially subversive. This typically meant leftists, trade unionists and immigrants from communities deemed untrustworthy, especially Jews, Ukrainians and Finns, even if they’d committed no crimes. When the Cold War came around, the RCMP surveilled over 800,000 Canadians . In the 1970s, Mounties were literally planting false flag bombs that they could then pin on Québécois radicals. And just this year, a CBC News investigation has revealed the ridiculous lengths that the RCMP was willing to go to in order to sabotage Indigenous rights groups in that same decade. Of course, there are many more examples. But what unites these shameful episodes in the history of the RCMP is that they were led by units within the police force dedicated specifically to targeting political dissidents within Canada. These units went by different names: the Intelligence Section, the Special Branch, the Directorate of Security and Intelligence, the Security Service. But all of them were committed to rooting out politically unreliable Canadians — and then, silencing them. After a royal commission issued a damning report about the RCMP’s dirty tricks in 1981, the federal government decided…