Ronald Gostick, the Canadian Intelligence Service, and the “Paranoid Style” in Postwar Canada

ABSTRACT

This article examines the activities of Ronald Gostick who, in the 1950s and 1960s, was Canada’s leading far-right conspiracy theorist. While active for more than half a century, Gostick rose to prominence in the postwar period, years of great changes in Canadian politics, government, society, and culture. At the far right of political opinion, Gostick had much to say and write about these developments, which he traced to a vast Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy Canadians’ individual freedom and, ultimately, Canada’s supposed Christian heritage. Gostick’s views epitomized what American historian Richard Hofstadter labeled a “paranoid style,” an outlook rooted in conspiracism. What is evident from this study of Gostick’s ideas and activism is that in several areas his extremism differed little from more respectable viewpoints, signifying that the separation between fringe and mainstream opinion is often only a few degrees of difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Canadian politics
• extremism
• far right
• conservatism
• antisemitism

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to my fellow contributors to this special collection, to the anonymous reviewers, and to the editors of ARCS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Kevin Anderson demonstrates in his contribution to this collection, while Social Credit may have expelled the extremist antisemitic elements from the party, there continued to be a strain of antisemitism among Social Creditors.

2. In internal correspondence, RCMP members denied that Walsh had been a Mountie (Draper 1961).

Additional information

Funding

The author reports no funding for the preparation of this article.