Community walks, community radio. CSIS spying, and the long Sixties.

Events in Ottawa coming up, with additional context and depth

Author

greg macdougall
April 13, 2026

For this send out of the newsletter, I’m listing some good upcoming events and along with them, giving some additional background or related info (media).

Here are the events with their links, and a little summary of the additional info you can check out further down.

(1) Enemies of the State: How spying on Indigenous activists became a priority at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service
Monday, April 13, 2026 4:30pm at Carleton University (registration required)

See below for links to the CBC reporting plus some points I sent to the reporters

(2) General Meeting for CHUO 89.1 FM campus/community radio
Sunday April 19, 7pm (To be confirmed)

See below for the outcome of the referendum, and an update on keeping the station alive.

(3) "The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left" book launch with Joan Kuyek & Lib Spry
Tuesday April 21, 6:30pm @ Great Canadian Theatre Centre (GCTC)

See below for videos from Joan’s previous books

See below for a previous Jane’s Walk I did, and an idea for another one.

Then at the end, I get into a bit about turtles as it gets warmer!

Photo at top:
One of the pair of Pileated Woodpeckers I came across recently.
Video coming soon with both of them together…

Quote:
“There’s so many things we could do, and quite a limited range of how much we can do.”

(1) How RCMP spies infiltrated the 1970s Indigenous rights movement

On March 24, the CBC did a big report: read it here including embedded videos, or see the long video (17min) on youtube here.

The event today at Carleton with one of the reporters has a bit of a confusing description, since it only mentions it being about CSIS in the 1980s (CSIS was branched off from RCMP, so its work was a continuation of the RCMP’s in the 1970s) while the reporting was about the RCMP’s work in the 1970s.

I wrote to the reporters involved once I read the article, for two reasons.

The first reason was regarding the bits about the communists and the Natives, and how the reporting didn’t acknowledge the intersectionality - for example, the Native People’s Caravan is often (in general, and in the article) portrayed as ‘Natives and communists’ but very rarely is it acknowledged that there were communist/marxist Natives. I put together the starting of an archive of the Native People’s Caravan two years ago for the 50th anniversary, and you can learn more about this there. Also to remember this was an era where the anti-colonial liberation struggles in Africa were very much Marxist, socialist, and/or communist inspired. The Black Panther Party in the USA (late 60s/early 70s) had Mao’s teachings as a cornerstone of their own education efforts.

The second reason was to just to let them know that spying continued and we had confirmation of our Indigenous solidarity group IPSMO (Indigenous Peoples Solidarity Movement Ottawa, part of the Barriere Lake Solidarity network) being infiltrated by an undercover. I’d happened to include it in a recent article:

… we had an undercover police officer infiltrate IPSMO for almost a year in advance of the 2010 G20 summit/protests in Toronto. If you’re involved in activism, it’s probably not going to be surprising to hear that this kind of thing happens. But it is surprising when it happens to you.

The ‘you’ I refer to was a group of people of varying backgrounds and also varying levels of political experience and radicalness. We were quite an open group, in terms of membership – which kind of explains how a police got involved, albeit under false pretences, but it also is to say that our membership was open to people who were new to activism. We’d do events on campus, including during frosh week, such as ‘Intro to Indigenous Solidarity’ workshops. Then on the other extreme, a few of our members got arrested in highway blockades, locked down with concrete barrels and then removed with severe “pain compliance” methods by the ‘SQs’ (the Sûreté du Quebec provincial police force).

So that is the context of the collective surprise of discovering one of our members was actually a cop. You can read more of a description here in Briarpatch magazine, and then as a more formal political analysis in Upping The Anti journal.

(2) Update on ‘Restore CHUO’ campaign

The referendum on the new uOttawa student levy of $3 to support CHUO didn’t work out.

The results were that approx 4400 students (slightly over 11% of the student body) voted in the overall elections, which is possibly a new record for turnout. For the CHUO vote itself, it was 1161 who voted for the new CHUO levy, with 1858 against it and 1378 who abstained on that question. So, a 38.5% to 61.5% loss.

You can read this article about Ottawa’s Community Media for a section near the bottom about CHUO and the referendum campaign where I am quoted. It is by a Lisgar CI (high school) student.

Moving forward, we are focused on getting new people onto the Board of Directors to see if the station can be resurrected/restored even without the student funding.

We did a petition campaign of the membership, as per the bylaws, so now the current Board has to host a special ‘General Meeting’ where votes can happen on removing current Directors and replacing them with new Directors.

That meeting is currently scheduled for April 19 but may end up being later. If you want to know more, please ask me!

(3) "The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left" book launch with Joan Kuyek & Lib Spry

I put this listing in because I can share here two videos I did with Joan on her previous books, and it sounds like it will be a good event. Note that the book is an anthology.

The first of Joan’s books I have content about is “Community Organizing: A Holistic Approach” (2011).

I wrote a review of the book, and did a video interviewing Joan; both are available here.

The interview was from when I brought Joan in as a special guest to the course I was facilitating, “Activism: Building a Better World.” I did up a zine based on the course afterwards, and included the book review as well as an excerpt from her book, plus more.

And to note, the video above is ‘highlights’ selections, approx 9min total, whereas the full recording at 22min is available here on rabble in audio. Even that though doesn’t include our collective Q&A, it is just me interviewing Joan with the students as audience.

Then more recently (2018), Joan did the book “Unearthing Justice: How to Protect Your Community from the Mining Industry” and I recorded the book launch (video & audio).

That book is based on her ~decade as founding director of Mining Watch Canada*, and includes other guest speakers in conversation with her,

*Note that MiningWatch is a Canadian ‘NGO’ but does a lot of international collaborative organizing work with impacted communities, especially because Canada is ‘corporate home’ to so many of the world’s mining companies.

(4) Jane’s Walks Ottawa

It was in May 2019 that I led a walk (x2: both on Saturday and Sunday) for Jane’s Walk at the sacred waterfalls site in Ottawa, just upstream of Parliament Hill.

It is commonly known as the Chaudiere Falls, and in Anishinabemowin (Algonquin) the site is known as Asinabka or Akikodjiwan, and the falls themselves as Akikpautik.

There were a large number of people both days, and there was a suggestion of whether I had a guide to the walk for people to be able to reference some of the things I mentioned.

So there is such a guide now! (Well, ever since I got it together a few months afterwards)

Here it is online - Sacred Waterfalls Site in Ottawa: Annotated Resource Guide - and I also have it in PDF/print as a zine format but I don’t have that file online at this point.

The other idea I and a few others talked about doing as a Jane’s Walk but it didn’t get anywhere, was about the Oblates lands (currently Saint Paul’s University and area along the Rideau River, east of Main Street in Old Ottawa East) as the historic headquarters of the Oblates missionary order of Catholics who ran a large proportion of the ‘Indian Residential Schools’ in Canada.

I had written about the importance of recognizing the site in that context back in 2021 in the local community paper The Mainstreeter, Julie Ireton of CBC did a series of in-depth reporting on the Oblates including this location (two are listed here, but that’s not all).

*I got to meet Julie when she contacted me after seeing the piece in the Mainstreeter. I suggested we meet at a baby turtle release in Brantwood Park beside the Oblates old lands, so she got to see (and film) the kids releasing the babies into the water as well as talking about the Oblates and Residential Schools situation.

That is a good note to go out on, as it is now coming up on a new season of turtles!

Our group “Turtles of Old Ottawa East & South”’s links are at linktr.ee/TurtlesOOES