Rita MacNeil had a little chuckle on Tuesday when she learned that the RCMP had been keeping tabs on her in the 1970s, along with other members of the women’s movement.
"Maybe they have surveillance on me now," she joked. "I just finished a children’s CD."
The soft-spoken Cape Breton singer said she had no idea that the Mounties’ now-defunct Security Service had been infiltrating the women’s movement to monitor any possible link to communist ideology, as The Canadian Press reported Tuesday.
"I was a little surprised," Ms. MacNeil, 64, said in a telephone interview from her home in Big Pond.
"But nothing really surprises me anymore. It all just seemed a little silly."
The songs that came under scrutiny were those she sang at political rallies and folk festivals across the country in the early 1970s. She was part of the Toronto Women’s Caucus at the time.
Most of those songs made it onto her first album, Born a Woman. Here’s an excerpt from the title track:
The media they’ve done so fine, exploited our bodies and they buried our minds.
Follow their line and you’re sure to be another brainwashed member in society,
With a WonderBra to improve your figure and girdles designed to make you five pounds slimmer, Cover Girl to improve your complexion — oh don’t offend the male population.
Ms. MacNeil said her songs were meant to empower women. She would meet once a week with other caucus members to talk about the need for daycare, equal pay for men and women and how to change the media’s unfair portrayal of women.
"It’s kind of eerie, when you come to think of it," she said of the surveillance. "I don’t know what their full reasoning was. I heard the mention of communism — I don’t know where that came from."
Other Canadians, many of whom grew up watching Ms. MacNeil’s iconic Christmas specials, were also scratching their heads — after they stopped laughing, that is.
Under the title Communist menace Rita MacNeil, blogger Sabotabby took a couple of jabs at the RCMP.
"Yesterday . . . it came out that (the RCMP) spied on the Canadian feminist movement in the 1970s, apparently on the lookout for commie infiltrators."
"Instead, they found Canadian musical icon Rita MacNeil."
Sydney resident Krista Hooper’s eyes doubled in size when she heard about the story from a reporter.
"I’m sorry, what?" she asked, clearly baffled. "Give me a break."
"I’m just thinking, ‘Why Rita?’"
Ms. MacNeil herself did not have an answer.
