Reforming the Canadian security state: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the "Key Sectors" program

Although a significant component of Cold War domestic security, counter-subversion has not received the same attention as counterespionage in recent historical writing. This article examines one aspect of the history of counter-subversion, specifically an internal attempt by the Canadian Security Service to reform itself in the face of the social change of the 1960s. ‘Key Sectors’ attempted to modernize the RCMP's pursuit of subversives by emphasizing qualitative factors and broader criteria for what constituted subversion beyond an association with communism. In the end, however, the program failed because it could not free itself from the anti-communism paradigm that the Canadian security state had been constructed on in the first place.