Reg Whitaker
Reg Whitaker is the co-author of Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
Articles by
Reg Whitaker
Deception, Betrayal and Terrorism
The Cuban-American vendetta produces a sobering and puzzling tale October 2013
Successful use of intelligence has been an important resource for states in the making of grand diplomatic and military policy. In the Second World War, the ULTRA secret permitted the Allies to decrypt German military communications, thus providing them with a strategic leg-up. Intelligence failures, like Air India or 9/11, have caused massive political embarrassment.
Yet day-to-day intelligence activities often serve less exalted…
Citizen Khadr
Either Omar Khadr has certain basic rights or no Canadian does. Which is it? April 2012
Before it was over, the Cold War did teach us a few lessons. Certainly it was important to stand up for principles of freedom and human dignity and see these through to eventual vindication. But there were more troubling lessons as well. The darkness of the deeds of the other side—mass murder, gulags, stultifying oppression—did not magically cleanse our side of moral responsibility for the means we employed to defend…
In the summer of 2001, I took early retirement from Toronto’s York University. After a 29-year career as an academic, I walked out the door from a senior position in one of Canada’s leading departments of political science in Canada’s leading metropolis.
The immediate cause of my departure was the poisonous effect on university life of two prolonged and bitter strikes at York—a two-month faculty strike in 1997 and a three-and-a-half–month strike by graduate student teaching assistants in the winter of…