Foreward

Conspiracy theories endure. There are hundreds of examples of this, the most poignant and well-known being the many conspiracies believed to be behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is a simple reason: it is impossible to prove a negative proposition.

Several independent groups of well-qualified people have concluded that the Loch Ness monster does not exist. But, for true believers, these conclusions simply show that the investigation was not sufficiently thorough, or that the people involved were biased from the start.

Our report faces the same obstacles. That is why we described under 'Methodology' the efforts we made to ensure that nothing remotely relevant escaped our attention. We realize that even this will not prevent some people from demanding another "independent" investigation, because our conclusions may not match their preconceived convictions. There will undoubtedly be others who, based upon the facts set out in this report, come to conclusions that differ from ours; we certainly have no quarrel with them.

The Review Committee took the decision to investigate the Heritage Front affair on Sunday, August 14, 1994. The investigation commenced the following day. Sometime later, at the request of the Reform Party of Canada, we expanded our usual investigative mandate to include an examination of allegations concerning the infiltration of the Reform Party. We followed a variety of leads in this area. Almost all our staff, and we ourselves, have been pre-occupied with the inquiry ever since.

What sets this report apart from all the other reports we have sent to the Solicitor General is the fact that most of it, perhaps all of it, will be made public. This will occur because the allegations against CSIS were so serious that the Security Intelligence 'system' established by Parliament in 1984 was in danger of losing the public's trust. Readers of the "Heritage Front Affair" will be able to judge for themselves the effectiveness of the accountability procedures put in place by the CSIS Act, and the Review Committee's role in that structure.

The report contains quite a melange of information. Much of it is objective fact based upon a thorough cross-checking of sensitive information, Source reports, CSIS files, and interviews. Some of it is presumed fact because of the preponderance of evidence. Some of it is what we believe to be the most likely correct version of events based upon our judgement of the weight to be given to each individual's evidence.

We have consciously limited the report in two areas only:

- we have tried to avoid providing too much information about CSIS' methods of operation so as not to endanger the Service's effectiveness in the future; and

- we have not broken the law, section 18 of the CSIS Act, by identifying the CSIS Source who was active in the white supremacist milieu.

Because of the vagaries of our two official languages, the personal pronouns "he" in the english version and "she" in the french version are used when referring to sources. These pronouns are used without regard to the actual sex of the sources.

The last chapter of the report contains our findings. We took great care in reaching these conclusions and, for our part, are confident that they are well-founded.

Finally, because there are passages in this report that could be construed as impugning the characters of certain individuals, we have attempted to contact all of them, given them the nature of passages which refer to them, and taken full account of their comments. In some cases, their comments have led to changes in the text, in others, a footnote puts their objections or clarifications on the record.

The original plaintext version of this file is available via ftp.

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