Richard Fadden probably didn't intend to invoke fears of a McCarthyite witch hunt, but he's done a fine job of it nonetheless.
In three appearances - a speech earlier this year, a subsequent television interview and before a parliamentary committee this week - the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has painted a picture of murky foreign powers - that would be China, in case you can't read between the lines - manipulating provincial cabinet ministers and municipal politicians for nefarious ends.
He will name them within a month - to Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, but not to us.
Mr. Fadden didn't actually wave a sheet of paper claiming to have the names of traitors within the government, as the Wisconsin senator famously did 60 years ago in the speech that launched McCarthyism.
But the combination of paranoid secrecy that infects this government and the inadvertent candour of the CSIS director have succeeded in tarring hundreds of politicians across Canada.
Who is alleged to be under the sway of a foreign power? How credible are those allegations? How, if at all, has the public agenda been influenced?
We may never know. Unless criminal charges are laid, the government is unlikely to divulge the names of the suspects, citing national security. (The fear of lawsuits from anyone named would also serve as an incentive.)
So everyone's a suspect, and will remain one, while all of us wonder just how far CSIS is going in investigating elected officials.
The idea that "the law enforcement branch of the government is tailing and following the activities of political figures certainly hearkens back to the McCarthy era," human-rights lawyer Paul Champ says.
Mr. Champ is representing The Canadian Press news agency in a court case that reveals the depth of the government's obsession with keeping secrets. Reporter Jim Bronskill has been trying for years to obtain the full security file on former NDP leader Tommy Douglas, who died in 1986.
The National Archives, on the advice of CSIS, backed by interim information commissioner Suzanne Legault, refuses to release the file, citing national security. Confidential informants may be involved and their identities must be protected, even if they're dead.
Among the materials disclosed as part of the legal battle over the Tommy Douglas files is a "dead list" of figures who might have had security files on them, but who have been dead more than 20 years, in which case the files can be released unless there are other considerations - national security being the prime one.
John Diefenbaker and Lester B. Pearson are on the list. Mr. Champ cautions that this does not mean the RCMP, in the years before CSIS was created, spied on the former prime ministers; they might simply have been associated with people the police were investigating.
But the relentless determination of the government and the security apparatus not to reveal their workings - and let us not forget the lengths to which this government has gone to protect documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees - means that when a corner of the tarp is inadvertently lifted - say because the CSIS director became too chatty - we imagine any number of monsters in the darkness within.
There is no good resolution to the imbroglio Mr. Fadden has created. Politicians, especially those whose business brings them into contact with foreign representatives, will just have to learn to live with the cloud.
I am beginning to wonder whether that lunch I had with Chinese embassy officials in the spring was such a good idea.
John Ibbitson