It’s no surprise to Bruce Flamont that police were monitoring him in the 1970s.
He saw the cruisers outside his house and workplace. He even got to know the officer who managed to keep up to him during his two-hour runs, “fishing” for information.
He also knew there were people in or close to his organization who were purposefully feeding information to police.
“I’m a suspicious person. I was that way in the ’60s and ’70s. I was trained to be that way, but I think I had reasons to be suspicious, yes,” Flamont said in an interview at his home in Saskatoon.
The 80-year-old sat down with CBC to talk about previously classified files from Canada’s Cold War-era domestic intelligence agency that were compiled on Indigenous organizations and released under the Access to Information Act.
The operation is an “an awful black mark” on Canada’s history, an expert who reviewed the documents told CBC.
Mounties used paid informants, wire taps and physical surveillance as they infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate Indigenous organizations across the country. They feared at the time that Canadian Indigenous rights movements could become subversive or violent and were susceptible to influences of communists, Black Power activists or militant Indigenous groups in the United States.
The organizations that police monitored included the Métis Society of Saskatchewan and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians — precursors to today’s Métis Nation—Saskatchewan and Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations.
The secret RCMP program to spy on Indigenous organizations
Flamont was a key force for organizing the Métis people, including acting as the recording secretary at the founding meeting of the Métis Society of Saskatchewan in the 1960s and then becoming its chief executive officer through much of the 1970s.
Issues the Métis were advocating for at the time included jobs, housing, education, social programming, hunting rights and timber rights — amidst prevalent racism and economic marginalization.
Flamont was present or helped organize many of the events police in Saskatchewan monitored and reported on in the RCMP files. Those included a sit-in at the provincial legislature in Regina in June 1974, a blockade set up at Waskesiu during the premiers’ meeting in August 1978 and a series of sit-ins at government offices in northern communities.
For Flamont, the RCMP documents prove what he already knew.
In the case of the Waskesiu blockade, he said he found out sometime later that while activists were making preparations at the Friendship Centre in Prince Albert, someone “had phoned the police to tell them we’re going to do this.”
Indeed, the secret RCMP files include a classified cypher message from the area commander in Saskatchewan to the “HQ Security Service (Attn: ‘D’ Ops – Native Extremism)” that reads, in part:
“During the morning of 11 Aug 78 [redacted] advised that approx. 200 Métis had gathered at the Friendship Centre … and intended to make their way to Prince Albert National Park … to block the entrance to the park with vehicles and felled trees.”
When asked if he knew who was informing police, Flamont said he and others had some ideas.
“Part of our role, part of our job was to identify, on an individual basis, who were, to use the words, radical, and who were the sellouts … and who were the solid people,” Flamont said.
Even though it was 50 years ago, he said he’s “still curious” about who was doing the actual informing.
“That’s irrelevant today, but still to me personally … it’s still important to me.”
The RCMP Security Service was casually monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968, but its posture changed in 1973 after 200 non-violent youth activists occupied the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa for 24 hours.
A secret internal history report, written in 1978, described how unprepared the Mounties were for that, and how the incident spurred “an extensive program of human source development in the Native area.”
One of the youth activists named in the report as being part of the 1973 Ottawa occupation was Clem Chartier, who was born in Île-à-la-Crosse and grew up in Buffalo Narrows, Sask. He went on to hold Métis leadership positions provincially and nationally, including serving as president of the Métis National Council from 2003 to 2021.
He said there was a “little bit of semblance of truth” to some of the Mounties’ worries about radicalization, recalling an occasion in 1974 when he was writing and publishing his own weekly newspaper in northern Saskatchewan. Chartier said he was given a typewriter to use, along with a box containing copies of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book to distribute to people in the north. He said he gave copies to a few friends.
However, Chartier, now 80 years old, said he doesn’t think he was surveilled by police.
“But I mean, anybody who understands, you know, so-called radicalism and the state, you know that they are watching, for sure,” he said in an interview at his home in Saskatoon.
While Chartier classified himself as radical in his youth, he decided to take a different path of political negotiation and conciliation. He went to law school to “learn the white man’s law,” convocating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1978.
He said what struck him when he started looking at the RCMP files shared by CBC was that the security sources were seeing the dire economic and social conditions and the people’s desires for land rights, land claims, self-government and self-determination.
“I would hope that their briefings to government [said] we have to correct these things. And then the potential of radicalism taking place is going to be diminished because the people will have no reason to do so.”
