The Cold War Begins: Spies, Alliances and Korea

A war without a battlefield (mostly)

On September 5, 1945, just days after the Second World War ended, a young clerk named Igor Gouzenko walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa carrying more than a hundred secret documents. At first, newspapers and officials did not believe him. Then the documents proved that the Soviet Union, Canada's wartime ally, had been running a spy ring in Canada, trying to learn secrets including information about the atomic bomb.

Many historians use the Gouzenko affair as one of the starting points of the Cold War: a long struggle (about 1945 to 1991) between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union (USSR) and its allies. It was called cold because the two superpowers never fought each other directly. Instead they competed through alliances, spying, an arms race of nuclear weapons, and "hot" wars fought in other countries.

Two sides, two systems

• The West (led by the U.S.): democracy with elections, and a capitalist economy where businesses are mostly privately owned.
• The East (led by the USSR): one-party communist rule, where the state owned most land and businesses and limited free speech.

Canada sat between the two superpowers. A Soviet bomber flying to American cities would fly over the North Pole and across Canada. Canada's geography put it right in the middle of the Cold War.

Canada joins alliances

• NATO (1949): Canada was a founding member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a military alliance of Western countries. An attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. Canadian diplomats pushed for Article 2, which encouraged economic and social cooperation too; it is sometimes called the "Canadian article". Canada stationed troops and air squadrons in Europe for decades.
• NORAD (1957, formal agreement 1958): the North American Air Defence Command joined Canadian and American air defences under one command, with a U.S. commander and a Canadian deputy commander.
• Radar lines: to give warning of Soviet bombers, three chains of radar stations were built across Canada. The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line ran along the Arctic coast. It was paid for mostly by the U.S., and it brought construction, jobs and outsiders into Inuit homelands, changing life in some communities.

The Korean War, 1950–1953

In June 1950, communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The United Nations called on members to help South Korea, and Canada sent ships, aircraft and soldiers. About 26 000 Canadians served, and 516 died.

In April 1951, at the Battle of Kapyong, soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, helped stop a major advance. The battalion received a United States Presidential Unit Citation. Fighting ended with an armistice (a ceasefire) in July 1953, and Korea is still divided today.

Korea showed that Canada was willing to fight under the UN flag and alongside the U.S. It is sometimes called "the forgotten war" because it received less attention at home than the two World Wars.

The Red Scare at home

Fear of communism also shaped life inside Canada.

• After Gouzenko, a royal commission investigated, and several people were convicted, including Fred Rose, a Member of Parliament from Montreal.
• The RCMP watched and kept files on thousands of people: union organizers, peace activists, university professors and immigrants from Eastern Europe.
• Some unions expelled communist members, and some public servants lost their jobs as "security risks".
• From the 1950s, the federal government also investigated and fired gay and lesbian public servants and military members, claiming they could be blackmailed. This continued for decades. In 2017 the federal government formally apologized for this "LGBT Purge".

A historian asks: Did these responses protect Canada, or did they go too far and harm innocent people? The answer depends partly on evidence and partly on perspective.