Dunphy’s most searing and potentially damaging allegation was that, with the blessing and encouragement of his csis handlers and using Canadian taxpayers’ money, Grant Bristow had not only helped create the racist “monster” whom he was supposed to merely monitor, but had “goad[ed] it into a dangerous rage.” A former Heritage Front member told Dunphy, “Grant brings the wood, he brings the kindling, he brings the match and says, ‘Light it.’”
A day after the explosive story broke, the spy agency’s civilian watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (sirc), launched a probe into what they called “The Heritage Front Affair.” Four months later, sirc issued a verdict based on “source reports, csis files and interviews”: Bristow and his handlers had done the right thing for the right reasons.
sirc found that while Bristow (never identified by name in the report) was part of the Heritage Front’s “inner leadership,” he played only a small role in its genesis and growth.
The review committee rebuked Bristow for having employed tactics that “tested the limits … of acceptable and appropriate behaviour,” but ultimately found that Canadians owed him a debt of gratitude for “doing valuable work helping to protect Canadian society from a cancer growing within.”
Opposition parties and civil libertarians dismissed the report as a “whitewash.” But the media hysteria that had enveloped Bristow quickly evaporated as much of the press accepted sirc’s findings and considered the case closed.
Through it all, Bristow never uttered a word publicly about his unprecedented journey into the netherworld of racial hatred and violence. His long silence has only deepened the mystery and the ambiguity that surrounded his clandestine work for csis. To his foes, he is a Judas who betrayed loyal friends. To others, he remains an unrepentant agent-provocateur on the public payroll. Still others consider him a hero who risked his life for his beliefs, and is now living with the consequences – a dissolved marriage, an uncertain future, and an occasional brush with fear.
Last summer, almost nine years to the day after that fateful phone call from the Sun reporter, Grant Bristow finally decided to tell his side of the story. Sitting in a small, drab Edmonton motel room with its heavy drapes allowing only a sliver of sunlight to seep in, this tall, burly man with a middle-age paunch and receding hairline took a calming drag on a cigarette and cast his mind back to the frenzied days when his work and life were unexpectedly thrust into the unwelcome spotlight. The guile, the charm, the self-confidence that routinely tips into arrogance – all the qualities that made him an effective mole – were on display.
“I was fucking good,” Bristow announced, with an unabashed cockiness. Indeed, he was. Bristow was perhaps the only mole to have insinuated himself so deeply into the international neo-Nazi movement’s inner orbit. He was talking now, he said, because he wanted to set the record straight. Despite sirc’s belated “vindication,” in the years following his “outing,” the image of him as a government-paid hate-merchant had seemingly become fixed in stone. “Now is the time,” he said defiantly, “that I can say,’Not guilty.’”
Grant Bristow never intended to become a spy. Born in Winnipeg in February, 1958, Bristow was the youngest of three children – two boys and a girl. His upbringing was comfortably middle class: a large home, boy scouts, good schools, and languid summers spent at the cottage. Bristow’s father was a civilian employee at the Department of National Defence. His mother, a maverick, became a banker in the 1960s, a time when most women on Bay Street worked behind a typewriter. At the age of eleven, Bristow’s almost idyllic world was shattered when his parents divorced after seventeen years of marriage. In search of a new beginning, his mother, Janet, remarried and, with her two sons in tow (the daughter remained with her father in Winnipeg), moved to Halifax, then Toronto. Grant threw himself into school and Junior Achievement, a program that nurtured entrepreneurial spirit. “The prospect of being a dealmaker appealed to me,” Bristow says.
In the early 1980s, Bristow graduated from a Toronto community college with a business diploma, and became a private investigator – at first blush, a surprising career choice for a product of middle-class suburbia. But the job fitted Bristow’s temperament. A natural chameleon, he shifted effortlessly from one persona to another, cultivating friendships with ease. Yet behind the engaging smile lay a steely-minded loner who guarded secrets well.
