CIA & Canada Chronology

1963 - Defeating the Mine Mill union in Sudbury - Little-known historical true-life battle that included vicious beatings, full on riots and worse. Mick Lowe, a American who escaped to Canada during the Vietnam War and became an investigative reporter, posits a provocative premise: that the US government sponsored a covert operation to destabilize a strategic community in Canada. This story takes place in Sudbury in the years after the US Department of Defense declares that nickle was a "true ‘war metal' deserving first priority among materials." The goal of the CIA was to prevent Sudbury's valuable iron/nickle deposits being controlled by a Communist-inspired Mine Mill union.

The backstory is that the US mining corporation Sudbury was built around, INCO, was strongly tied to Germany in both World Wars and continued to ship raw metals to Germay in both wars until stopped by a combination of local church and labour activists working with outraged politicians. INCO was represent by the law-firm Sullivan & Cromwell which was infamous for assisting many Nazi corporations, and the most infamous partners in that firm were the Dulles brothers, Allan and John. Allen Dulles was the long-serving Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 when he was fired by JFK; his brother John would be INCO's liaison with the Nazis who described INCO attitude as "completely loyal".  When WWII ended many workers began seeing pro-fascist tattoos on new hires in the shower-rooms leading to brawls.  

[The Raids: The Nickel Range Trilogy: Lowe, Mick 2014]
[http://www.shunpiking.org/ol0207/0207-AN-inco-nazi.htm]

1964 - Killing Canada's Ambassador to the USSR - John Watkins was secretly detained in a hotel in Montreal, Quebec, by the RCMP and the CIA, where he died several days into the interrogation.  The RCMP refused to hand over its full report, claiming it would damage national security, but finally admitted that Watkins had died under police interrogation in the Montreal hotel room, he had not given in to Soviet blackmailing tactics, and he had not been found to be a traitor. In 1999 Adams's detailed book suggesting that the CIA had schemed to destroy Pearson, who had become Prime Minister, and had tried to get Watkins to implicate him.
[Ian Adams’ “Agent of Influence” 1999]

1970 - Aiding FLQ terrorists to spark an Authoritarian backlash - This chapter tentatively offers a fifth possibility: that the FLQ episode may have been part of a global terrorist “strategy of tension” aimed at tilting advanced capitalist governments in an authoritarian direction. MacGregor shows the parallels to the well-investigated kidnapping/murder of  Italian Prime Minister Moro's 8 year later which has been revealed as a set-up by CIA/P2 forces.
[Canadian Stalking Horse: “A Parallel Power” - David MacGregor]

1988 - Airbus Scandal - The United States is the only country that has made it illegal for its citizens to pay bribes to clinch foreign deals, and it has become increasingly angry about what it views as an unequal playing field. Toronto-area Liberal MP Derek Lee, who heads Parliament’s spywatching subcommittee, is convinced the CIA uncovered information that led to the current RCMP investigation of Brian Mulroney and others for allegedly accepting bribes from the European Airbus Industrie consortium, which sold 34 airplanes to Air Canada in 1988. U.S. giants Boeing and McDonnell Douglas lost out. “Our current circumstance involving Airbus is, I think, a direct result of the American decision to use its agencies to track illegal trade practices abroad,” says Lee.
[THE NEW SPY WARS Nomi Morris Sept 2 1996 MACLEANS]

1996 - Dismemberment of Canada through BC and Alberta - Another senior U.S. intelligence source, who spoke to Maclean’s on condition he not be named, confirmed that intelligence ties between the two countries have become much more adversarial in recent years. “There are many intelligence studies being conducted right now on the dismemberment of Canada and the opportunity for the United States to acquire additional states,” says the source, an expert at a major think-tank who acts as an adviser to the White House and the CIA. “It is conceded within the intelligence community that Ontario would never come in but the feeling is that there are very good chances for British Columbia, Alberta and possibly Saskatchewan.” Canadians, he adds, are naïve about the “imperial American mind” and continuing U.S. expansionism. “It is very possible that some time in the next century some of the Canadian provinces will become American states. It is the task of the American intelligence agencies to prepare the ground, and that is what is happening.”
[THE NEW SPY WARS Nomi Morris Sept 2 1996 MACLEANS]

2002 - Mistaken Kidnap and Torture of Maher Arar - The head of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9-11 expressed disgust with the CIA's role in sending the engineer to be tortured. "I can tell you that a lot of people inside the CIA objected to this," Kiriakou said. "(They said), 'This is the wrong guy. He hasn't done anythin.'  He described a dynamic within the agency in which one mid-to-high-level officer, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky,  ignored repeated objections from her subordinates, and insisted on pushing ahead.

CSIS suspected, within two days of Maher Arar's deportation from the United States, that the CIA had shipped him somewhere to be tortured but refused to alerted its political masters - an oversight that smacks of tacit CIA collusion. Two days after CIA officials put Arar on a Gulfstream executive jet to Jordan then to Syria where he was tortured into a false confession, the deputy director of CSIS, Jack Hooper, later stated in a memorandum dated Oct. 10, 2002: "I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him."

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/maher-arar-s-arrest-torture-almost-stopped-by-cia-ex-spy-says-1.3021759]
[http://circ.jmellon.com/docs/view.asp?id=1132]

2002-5 - Funding the Reboot of the Conservative Party under Harper -  In the 2002 Canadian Alliance leadership race, Harper disclosed some of his donors but kept secret 10 of the major ones. Donors contributed more than $2 million to the prime minister's two leadership bids, but the identities of some of the major donors have never been publicly disclosed, according to Ottawa-based corporate responsibility advocacy group Democracy Watch. The Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cable from 2005 reveal that that the International Republican Institute (IRI), an off-shoot of the CIA and subsidiary of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) helped install Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. The cables refers to NED/Republican consultants who "which successfully carried out the process of party renovation" in Canada (also Germany & Spain).   The “party renovation” referenced in the cable is the “renovation” of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party into a Republican-inspired Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) based on neo-conservatism and subservient to the U.S Empire.

The 'Canadian Alliance' succeeded in ingesting and subsequently destroying the 'Progressive Conservative Party' along with the its centrist and Red Tory heritage embodied by the likes of former prime ministers John Diefenbaker and Joe Clark. [Harper's rise to power relied on RCMP pursuing a criminal investigation into the Liberal Finance Minister Ralph Goodale just prior to the 2006 election, a patterned repeated in the FBI's re-opening their investigation of Hillary Clinton's email in the last week of the 2016 election - both RCMP and  FBI violated long-standing norms against police interference in the final months of a national election.]

[https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WL0504/S00325.htm]  
[https://www.unpublishedottawa.com/letter/13987/canadas-quiet-coup-how-cia-shoot-helped-install-stephen-harper-canadas-prime-minister]
[https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2013/03/23/flanagans-last-stand/]

this was inspired by John Pilger's work on the CIA and Australia
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/01/john-pilger-the-forgotten-coup-against-the-most-loyal-ally/

I'm going to concentrate on CIA interference with Canada - but there is also plenty of CIA cooperation with Canada especially overseas where Canada's "neutrality" is often used for CIA cover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Caper) or when the CIA coups a mineral-rich country to the benefit of Canadian mining corps (Guatemala).

Thanks for posting this...it may be a lot of info. to take in all at once, but I appreciate learning about coups and how powers are wielded.

I've also really enjoyed starting to read the article based on John Pilger's work - but I need to come back another day to finish it!!

Well, the book about Killing Canada's Ambassador to the USSR was made into a CTV movie of the week, Agent of Influence starring Christopher Plummer