Department of Justice Canada

Finding no help from the provincial government, Meehan decided to craft a more direct federal intervention in Winnipeg.

He appointed Alfred Andrews a special representative of the federal Ministry of Justice, advising the government on the crisis in Winnipeg.

The role was vaguely defined, but in practice gave Andrews sweeping powers to act in the name of the federal government, to the point that it became ambiguous who was responsible for administering criminal law in the province of Manitoba.

When Meehan returned to Ottawa at the beginning of June, the federal government demonstrated its willingness to use the emergency powers it had accrued during the war to intervene directly in Winnipeg.

As that had been the key condition for the strike committee from the beginning, Robertson did not anticipate an immediate positive response.

But he hoped that the possibility of a reasonable compromise might win over enough of the moderate strikers, as well as those desperate to begin earning money again after a month out of work.

And if the settlement offer was the carrot presented to the strikers by Robertson, Alfred Andrews, the spokesman of the Committee of 1000 and special advisor to the Ministry of Justice, provided the stick.

Preparations were made for coordinated raids to arrest all the most radical strike leaders in one fell swoop.

Igor Gusenko was a cipher clerk working in the embassy of the USSR in Ottawa, Canada.

On 5 September 1945, he brought a thick folder of decoded messages to the Canadian Department of Justice.

These messages proved a widespread and effective spy network from the Soviet Union at work deep in the strategic organizations in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, essentially throughout the democratic West.

So, a year ago, I set up my recording equipment in the Diefenbunker, Canada's Cold War museum, just outside Ottawa, to record a special episode about the Gusenko affair.

All he could comprehend was the repeated, it's war, it's war, it's Russia.

Fowd sent him away.

The next morning, 6 September 1945, the young man arrived at the offices of the Canadian Department of Justice and asked for the minister, Louis Saint Laurent.

With him were his pregnant wife and firstborn son.

...

the Department of Justice Canada.

So what are we looking at here for legals? Uh, nearly, uh, $1.4 million to fight this farm to eventually kill all the birds and then nonco- not compensate the farm.

To kill them a year after they caught the flu.