It was his home-town publication,
The Gazette, which
pinpointed how secret Orders-in-Council were used by Trudeau to ensure
that the new Prime Minister Joe Clark would be bamboozled into an
agreement whereby the hitherto unpublished portions of the Gouzenko
report as well as the subsequent Featherbed File remained sealed for at
least 20 years.
Following, are excerpts from a report published in the Oct. 11, 1979 issue of
The Montreal Gazette:
In a secret Order-in-Council issued in his
last days as Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau ordered all the police
intelligence files on him and his Cabinet colleagues be sealed for at
least 20 years, The Gazette has learned.
The files were part of a top-secret
investigation called “Operation Featherbed” that was started by the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the early 1960s . . .
Prime Minister Joe Clark agreed in a
letter dated June 2 that Trudeau’s final Order-in-Council would be
respected, an undertaking which has angered some Conservative MPs …
Repeated efforts by Trudeau and other
senior Liberals to gain access to the Featherbed files were turned down
by the RCMP security branch. But senior members of the security service
have told the Gazette that the file includes material on the
private lives of influential Canadian figures, their past political
affiliations, contacts with agents of foreign powers, private weaknesses
or vices and even sexual practices.
Trudeau’s decision to issue an
Order-in-Council sealing this Featherbed material just four days after
the last federal election, but while he was still Prime Minister, also
brought sharp rebukes from his former Cabinet colleagues…
There was such an uproar from backbenchers in the short-lived Clark
government over this “Operation Cover-Up” that pressure from the
grassroots finally forced PM Joe Clark to make an amazing statement
concerning the suppressed Featherbed File.
The following excerpts are from a
Toronto Star report, Dec. 1, 1979:
The Prime Minister (Clark) said he has no
intention of ever making the (Featherbed) file public. “Were we to
publish that, we would be giving credence to gossip that affects people,
some of whom are still in Ottawa …” he told a news conference.
Clark’s blunt remarks conflict with the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police and back-bench MPs in his own party who
maintain the files show direct links between government officials and
the Communist party.
Several MPs in the last month have
demanded the government review the Taschereau Papers, secret records of a
Royal Commission investigation of the 1946 Igor Gouzenko spy case, and
check out reports that a “fifth man” in the Anthony Blunt Soviet spy
ring in Britain was Canadian.
Accusations also surfaced in Parliament this week that Jean-Louis
Gagnon, a member of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications
Commission, was connected with subversive groups…”
The Sunday Star (Toronto), June 7, 1981, published a
significant story by reporter John Picton. The first part of his report
confirmed much of the Ottawa-based treason I have already mentioned, and
then continued:
Lawrence also told the Sunday Star about the time he says he was asked not to check the Trudeau files.
He said he was approached “early on in the
game” (meaning Clark’s term of office) by a man who’d been appointed as
custodian of Trudeau’s cabinet documents.
Under a so-called “convention,” leaders of
incoming governments traditionally have signed an agreement not to
delve into cabinet papers of an outgoing administration.
Tory leader Joe Clark signed such
an agreement — drawn up by Trudeau’s office — the night before he was
sworn in as prime minister.
Before signing, Clark wanted to consult
Lawrence since he was appointing him solicitor-general, but couldn’t
find him. (“I don’t know why he couldn’t find me.”)
Some Tory MPs — Lawrence among them — think that was a mistake because the agreement, they allege, went much farther than any previous pact and effectively locked away many more papers than just cabinet documents.
(Tory MP Tom Cossitt describes the signing as “a grave error.”) “He (the custodian) asked me specifically not to request documents relating to Trudeau’s personal life,” Lawrence said. “He said the RCMP had them, like past history associations.
“They related to security questions about Trudeau himself in his younger days,” when Trudeau was a world traveller.
The custodian — named by Lawrence but
unavailable for comment — “was obviously perturbed about the
availability to me of these documents, and he indicated to me it would
be a blow below the belt if I started looking at those.”
Lawrence wouldn’t say if he did look at them.
… Cossitt (the Tory MP) also says that one
of Trudeau’s last acts as prime minister in 1979, before handing over
office to Clark, was to sign an order-in-council preventing the McDonald
commission into RCMP wrongdoing from seeing certain cabinet documents
without his permission.
The agreement Clark signed ensured that the order would stand.
But, says Lawrence, that agreement covered
far more than cabinet documents. As solicitor-general he’d tried to see
documents relating to the 35-year-old Gouzenko spy case dealing with a
Soviet espionage ring.
Civil servants wouldn’t show them to him because of a previous order from Trudeau’s office.
When Lawrence asked officials why certain
“security breaches” weren’t prosecuted, he was told that was the policy
of the day. The reasons for that policy were locked away in cabinet
papers.
I was given reports on what happened, but not on the
reasons for the government decisions on why they didn’t prosecute.
Canadian governments have hushed up all sorts of things.
Lawrence added:
One of the weird aspects of this is that we can see more about our affairs in other countries than we can see in Canada…
So much for the
Star’s report. It confirms three decades of
warnings by Canadian Intelligence publications that treason has been
riding high in Ottawa; and it also confirms the fact that Joe Clark was
so politically immature that Old Machiavelli, before handing over the
keys to him for a brief interlude in 1979, tricked young Joe into
actually covering up the Featherbed File scandal and thus unwittingly
becoming himself a party to treason.
And, as Mr. Lawrence implies, it was the civil servants,
still under the former PM’s ‘orders,’ who called the tune, not the ministers in the Clark Government!