thanks for a trip down memory lane

The Canadian Press has produced an interesting piece about how Michael Ignatieff was under the watchful eye of the RCMP's anti-subversion detail while an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. This hardly amounts to what one would call a surprise. In fact, most of us on campus and active in student politics at the time assumed we were the subject of an RCMP file. Having the RCMP snooping into one's activities was a kind of merit badge; it meant you were doing the right things; opposing the American war in Vietnam, opposing the social injustice at home, etc. What it really meant was you were stirring the pot, arousing interest in just causes. For what it was worth, we knew the police had also investigated our new Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau for travelling to China and other foreign places before that was acceptable. And the police didn't have to do a lot of snooping; just read the campus newspapers and attend campus meetings but even that was a bit of a stretch when few police officers had the benefit of a university education.

As reported, Ignatieff was organizing teach-ins at the UofT. At Glendon College we called them Forums and we took on such topics as national unity, the plight of those we have subsequently come to call First Nations [back in 1968 we called it The Indian Forum] and urbanization issues facing our rapidly growing cities; really dangerous, radical stuff.

If you can't count on undergraduate university students to be asking tough questions -- well you probably live in China. I would expect that the individuals who went on to be leaders were asking those questions. Imagine the file they must have compiled on Ignatieff's roommate Bob Rae! The important thing is that such files now form part of the public record with more than a hint of scorn for the police and the way we lived in the 1970s.