The Infernal Machine: Investigating the Loyalty of Canada's Citizens

Paperback, ix + 330 pages, NOT ex-library. Vey good interior, clean, bright, untanned, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Faint age-spotting on outer page edges (side & bottom); dusty marks on the outer corner of the lower edges. Firm binding, spine remains free of vertical creasing. -- A forceful, meticulously researched exposé of Canada's early experiments in state surveillance, revealing a system of security screening and fingerprint-based identification that predates the Cold War by decades. Challenging the dominant historical narrative that roots Canada's intelligence apparatus in the 1945 Gouzenko affair, Hannant rewinds the origins of mass loyalty testing to the First World War and interwar years, tracing a deep institutional suspicion toward dissenters, radicals, labour activists, and even ordinary citizens who simply deviated from expected norms. At the heart of Hannant's investigation is the RCMP's covert evolution from a traditional law enforcement body into a proto-intelligence agency - one which, by the WWII, had amassed an illegal and secretive archive of over two million fingerprint files. This mass collection of biometric data - conducted under the pretense of voluntariness - constituted a startling breach of civil liberties. Yet it operated with almost no public oversight and in a legal vacuum, driven by fear of communism, wartime anxiety, and an unrelenting pursuit of ideological conformity. Through ten tightly argued chapters, Hannant details how security screening expanded beyond military and federal employment to encompass wartime industry, the merchant marine, and even provincial cooperation. Chapters such as "Reds Under the Khaki" and "Gathering Information Regarding Communistic Chaps" delve into how the state rationalised surveillance and job discrimination on political grounds, often destroying livelihoods based on tenuous evidence. Equally damning is Hannant's portrait of the RCMP's unwillingness to coordinate with other government agencies - an institutional insularity that bred inefficiency even as it entrenched authoritarian practices. Drawing on declassified internal memos, personnel files, and the RCMP's own fears of acquiring a "Gestapo reputation," The Infernal Machine reveals a system built not on transparent justice, but on whispered allegations, gendered moral scrutiny, and racialised assumptions. The security net was not only vast - it was often arbitrary. For women, particularly, loyalty vetting was deeply entangled with sexual policing, while working-class Canadians found themselves disproportionately targeted for labour activism or minor infractions. Yet Hannant's work is not only a historical excavation - it is a cautionary parable about unchecked state power. His analysis of Canada's intelligence ties to Britain and, increasingly, the FBI in the United States shows how Canadian authorities gravitated toward more expansive and punitive models of surveillance even before McCarthyism set the tone for North American counter-subversion. His insight that the RCMP's focus on leftist threats led them to virtually ignore fascist and Nazi elements domestically is a chilling reminder of the political selectivity of intelligence services. This book is a landmark contribution. It excavates an under-acknowledged era of Canadian intelligence history, one in which rights and liberties were compromised not by external enemies, but by the state's own self-image and its fear of ideological difference. The Infernal Machine is a compelling, if unsettling, portrait of democratic fragility in wartime - and a necessary reference point for contemporary debates on surveillance, national security, and the politics of loyalty.…