Secret Service provides the first comprehensive history of political policing in Canada - from its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, through two world wars and the Cold War to the more recent 'war on terror.' This book reveals the extent, focus, and politics of government-sponsored surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations.

Drawing on previously classified government records, the authors reveal that for over 150 years, Canada has run spy operations largely hidden from public or parliamentary scrutiny - complete with undercover agents, secret sources, agent provocateurs, coded communications, elaborate files, and all the usual apparatus of deception and betrayal so familiar to fans of spy fiction. As they argue, what makes Canada unique among Western countries is its insistent focus of its surveillance inwards, and usually against Canadian citizens.

Secret Service highlights the many tensions that arise when undercover police and their covert methods are deployed too freely in a liberal democratic society. It will prove invaluable to readers attuned to contemporary debates about policing, national security, and civil rights in a post-9/11 world.

In these essays, written during the last fifteen years, Whitaker analyses the paradoxes of federalism and democracy in a society which is deeply divided by region, language, and class. He examines the thought and action of such diverse figures as Mackenzie King, Harold Innis, William Irvine, and Pierre Trudeau and evaluates their impact on Canadian society both then and now. With an astute critical eye he surveys constitutional reform and the question of Quebec sovereignty as it has developed from 1981 through Meech Lake and beyond, and explores federalism, democratic theory, and the practice of politics in the real world. In the final essay, "Quebec and the Canadian Question," written especially for this volume, he evaluates the major changes which have occurred in Canadian politics during the last fifteen years and assesses their resounding impact on the future possibilities for Canadian democracy. The dominant political discourse, Whitaker argues, is increasingly based on human rights. This, in combination with the ascendance of free-market conservatism, the turn to continentalism under free trade, and the resurgence, since the failure of Meech Lake, of serious tensions between Quebec and the rest of Canada, has led to a compounded crisis that requires an examination not only of what Quebec wants, with or without Canada, but what Canada wants -- with or without Quebec. The Canadian idea of democracy is still evolving. Together in one volume for the first time, Whitaker's essays describe the process of that evolution and show what lies beneath the constitutional debate on the future of Canada.