Subseries 7 - National Security

0.8 m of textual records

Early in 1978 I became involved with the McDonald Commission (files 4 and 5), looking into certain activities relating to the RCMP and national security (files 2 and 3). Over the next two years I worked very closely with the director of research, Peter Russell (files 9-11), and, to a lesser extent, with David McDonald, the chair of the Commission (file 8). I had two first-class summer research assistants, Chris Grauer and Ian Kyer (files 14 and 15). We produced a document at the end of the summer of 1978, National Security: the Legal Dimensions (files 20-25). This was sent out for comment by the Commission and by myself to a large number of knowledgeable persons, including Ken McNaught and John Starnes, the former head of the Security Service (files 26 and 27). I completed revisions to the manuscript before leaving on sabbatical in July 1979, received page proofs in England in December 1979, and the study was published by the Government in the Spring of 1980 in advance of the Commission’s report (files 28-30).

I spent the first part of my sabbatical in Israel and the second part in England. I gave a talk on national security issues at the University of Tel Aviv Law School and at the University of London, Leeds, and Edinburgh (files 31-34). The text was drawn from my National Security study and was later published in the Israel Yearbook of Human Rights (files 35-38). While on sabbatical, I also prepared a research paper for the McDonald Commission on entrapment, which was eventually published in the U of T Law Journal (files 40-48). When we returned to Canada in the summer of 1980 I continued to assist the commission by reading drafts of their report and commenting on other issues (file 48).

In 1983, I gave evidence on national security issues to a Senate Committee, under the chairmanship of Michael Pitfield, that was studying the issues (file 51-57). My Senate submission was published in the Globe and Mail in September 1983 as an op-ed piece (file 58).

Since then, I have had only a peripheral involvement in national security issues, apart from a retreat at Meech Lake in 1985 organised by the new Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) (file 62).

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