bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 17–20
In recent months some of our historians have published their matured spin to explain the course of Canadian events way back in the Trudeau era. Pirouette: Pierre Trudeau and Canadian Foreign Policy cries out for comment on its treatment of policy development in those years. Policy in midcentury Canada has been a big subject of no small interest to me, ever since my involvements in foreign policy reviewing in September 1967-March 1968 (Robertson Review); and August 1969-June 1970 (the so-called “Trudeau review”). In between these two discrete endeavours, I was asked by Undersecretary Cadieux to produce a statement on policy that had been requested by our new Minister, Mitchell Sharp. A May 29, 1968 press release issued by the Prime Minister’s Office and entitled, Canada and the World, seemed to be drawn largely from my draft for Sharp, although the text claimed to say what the new leadership of the old party had in mind for foreign affairs.
I later learned that the 1968-69 policy reviewers, operating mainly out of External Affairs, DND and CIDA, had found the May 29 paper helpful to their own endeavours. I also discovered that, in the first formative months of the Trudeau Government, the May 29 statement was virtually the only formal guidance on broad intentions that the official reviewers ever got from the new Prime Minister.
These facts hardly jibe with Pirouette’s unsupported assertion on page 14: “In charge lof the Trudeau review] was Geoffrey Murray, ironically the draftsman of the Robertson review that had drawn scorn for its perceived rejection of change”. This quotation does echo opinions Professor Granatstein and some other outside observers expressed beginning in the mid-seventies in books and articles.
Few of the published pundits ever spoke directly to me about the tales they proposed to tell.
Pirouette has some intriguing, hard information to offer — especially in Parts Two (Errand in the Wilderness: Canada and the United States) and Three (Defining the Country). Throughout there are insights drawn from selective dabblings in a wide range of documents and from interviews, on and off the record, with persons who should have known whereof they spoke. The sly ones, in particular, who had their names withheld, shed some new light on old suspicions. But the basic flaws in this kind of “evidence” are first that documents, even the once highly-classified ones, rarely tell the whole story; and secondly, that many individuals interviewed for oral history seem more interested in covering their own butts or preening their own feathers than informing posterity about the actual state of play at any given time in public affairs. In both cases, moreover, the evidence may be meaningless, even irrelevant, if it is not seen, analyzed and judged in the context of ministerial manoeuvrings and bureaucratic processes — including boondoggling and bungling in both spheres of influence. All this is especially so in the course of policy formulation and the decision-making that ultimately sets the policy line and puts it to work. Individual personalities, even strong ones with cool logic and hot charisma, rarely succeed in carrying the day — “in seizing control” — in those policy marathons. One way or another, success is a collective achievement. Could the authors of Pirouette, with all the impressive research opportunities afforded them, have penetrated the entwined mazes in which ministers and bureaucrats played their power games? Yes, I believe so, if the interviewees had been pumped until they came clean.
Pirouette seeks to substantiate its “scorn” (the authors’ word not mine), for the so-called “general paper” of 1970, entitled, Foreign Policy for Canadians, (FPC). Complaints by Pearson, shortly after its publication, are cited: angry and contemptuous scribblings on his copy of the papers, and a 20-page memorandum not released. It was never any dark secret that the former Liberal PM was upset by the way the so-called Trudeau review turned out. Peyton Lyon gleefully regaled me (and presumably anyone else in earshot) with tales about Pearson’s chafing at Carleton, where he was conducting seminars. He reportedly liked the Robertson Report; it was “so superior” to the FPC presentation of the “Trudeau doctrine”. Pirouette says that Pearson was much disturbed by the emphasis and priority given to Economic Growth at the expense of Peace and Security (two of the six policy themes in FPC). Perhaps so, but I suggest that he was most incensed by the alleged “abandonment” ’, or “renunciation”. ’, of the “helpful fixer” role, which was the media’s (and a host of academic followers’) faulty interpretation of two short paragraphs on page 8 of the FPC general paper. My best guess today is that Pearson was more put out by what the critics said from the very first day (June 25, 1970) about “helpful fixer”, “ than by what either FPC or the Robertson Report had to say about Canada’s middle power role(s) in the whole field of Peace and Security. In substance, both papers said the same thing, though in slightly different words. These were directed at Canada’s diplomacy in the mid-sixties and not at the illusory “golden age”
In the autumn of 1967, when Geoffrey Pearson and I worked jointly on our drafts for the Robertson review, requested in August by PM Pearson (not by the Department or its minister, though SSEA Martin and USSEA Cadieux were consulted), we discussed among other things my draft Chapter III entitled, Canada’s Role in International Affairs. It was one of the aspects being castigated mightily by Canadian critics of foreign policy, by the mid-sixties. The complaints derived from the deepening anguish about Vietnam. Some of the sharpest critics were younger academics and their bewildered students, both baffled by the engineered enigma of that War. The anti-war, anti-militarism, anti-American ground swell of the sixties was most unsettling for the government and its foreign policy responses, week by week, month by month, as the ugly conflict dragged on. The public demands intensified for Canadian intervention aimed at stopping the War. The Government’s reactions were decried as irresolute, backsliding from international responsibility, and unworthy of Canada’s peacekeeping tradition.
Accordingly, among other dilemmas, the Robertson review team analyzed in some depth Canada’s post-War functioning in world affairs. Specifically we found that, over the years, marked confusion had grown in the public perception of Canada’s status and capacities as a middle power. Some outside observers, for example, drew the conclusion that in all international disputes, including threats to the peace, Canada should invariably move toward middle ground positions in order to help with the reconciliation of differences between states, to find “the Canadian compromise” through a mediatory role if necessary.
Notwithstanding such enthusiasms and advocacies, clearly this could not be an immutable nor inevitable role for Canada, applying in all cases of violent conflict or other clash of interest. To begin with, we were among the committed states of NATO which had banded together to ward off perceived threats from the Soviet Union. Canada had even longer and closer bilateral ties with our big allies in the Western world, above all with its superpower leader, the USA, with its powerful and manifold influences on Canada’s economic, cultural and political life as a nation. Contrary to what many critics argued, it was Canada’s firm position in NATO, our long-standing links with its leading members, and our identification with the progressive wing of lesser powers in the alliance, that enhanced (not restrained) our capacity to serve effectively as a middle power, inside and outside the UN family of international organizations. In my ten years of consecutive involvement in UN affairs (1955-64), I never had the slightest reason for doubting that conclusion. UN members from neutralist and non-aligned groups fully understood, I found, our need to help preserve the NATO security shield; many appeared to welcome our moderating influence within NATO forums. It all provided solid under-pinning for Canada’s various contributions to the enlarging UN peacekeeping responsibilities of the fifties and early sixties, the establishment of UNEF in ’56 being a paramount example. It helped in the Commonwealth too, in its intercultural bridging operations, and in the various fora where disarmament and arms control were pursued.
Months, if not years before the Trudeau ascendancy in April 1968, External Affairs knew that the foundations on which that “traditional role” rested were becoming shaky and unreliable, especially after the UN’s debilitating experience in the Congo, its feeble response to the Six-Day War, and its helplessness in the face of Vietnam. We were acutely aware of the changing agendas and priorities (emphasizing heavily: race conflicts, development assistance and lingering remnants of colonialism), across the whole spectrum of UN activities and reflecting the swelling influx of third world nations after 1960. More specifically, External Affairs officers with firsthand experience in Indochina knew full well how and why events had moved badly for the USA and its adherents since 1954. Our echelons engaged in defence matters knew that the resurgence of power in West Germany and France, and in Western Europe generally, called for reassessment of Canada’s ongoing participation in NATO, and the related arrangements under the NORAD treaty with the USA. At the same time, Europe’s quickening march toward integration raised growing political and economic problems for Canada. Policy reviews in most of those areas were in train, in some cases two years before the Trudeau phenomenon occurred in Canadian politics. De Gaulle’s adjustment in 1966, of France’s military ties with NATO, for example, had caused all treaty members to reassess their own positions, not the least Canada with its growing balance of payment problems. well, the international implications of the emerging Quebec factor in Canada had closely engaged the personal attention of the Under-Secretary virtually since the “quiet revolution” of the early sixties.
As for China policy, the Trudeau Government made the long delayed decision to recognize Beijing. But was that really the brilliant Trudeau innovation that Pirouette is at pains to portray? Most of External’s Far Eastern experts and our international lawyers, had known for two decades that there was no legal justification for the Canadian government refusing to recognize the Chinese Communists, virtually since their victory in 1949. We all understood the hesitation of successive Canadian governments. Added to the splits in Canadian public opinion, were the potentially grave risks of rocking Canada’s complex relations with the USA. The Korean War, with its decisive Chinese involvement, had crystallized the impasse on recognition. Trudeau arrived in power about the time that US opposition was beginning to crumble, which many observers could see coming even before 1968. The Trudeau government saw advantage in jumping ahead of Nixon by a few months with the China decision and made it public a few days before Nixon’s first inaugural address. The timing was terrible and undoubtedly seen in Washington as a deliberate snub. Yet it was only part of a mismanaged Canadian diplomacy that ran roughshod over the well-established norms of Canada’s inevitably close relations with the USA. These called for full and frank consultations, on an ongoing basis, with honest differences freely expressed, to be sure, but no unpleasant surprises, please! The China disaster was paralleled only weeks later by the clumsy implementation of the Government’s shotgun decision (in March-April, 1969), to reduce Canada’s military participation in NATO. The allies were not amused, but we could hardly console them with tales about the bizarre tactics through which our political masters shaped and decided their policy “innovations.
And how did all this earlier “innovation” impact abroad on the “third option”, when it slowly emerged half-baked in 1971-72? Pirouette seems to say it was Trudeau’s failure to follow through. But why? He was the leading light, not the follow-up ministers)? It was the much more significant failure to foresee and prepare, by Trudeau’s team AND their predecessors, that really scuppered the attempts at establishing new economic contractual links with Europe (and Japan) in the early seventies. From Canada House in London, we were preaching “be prepared” sermons from 1966 on, when it became clear that Britain would join the march toward European integration. The economic fraternity back in Bytown kept their own counsel, as far as we ever knew in London. It was 1971 and Nixonomics, before the economic specialists seriously began to scratch their heads. Why were Canada’s global economic relations not given the collective, comprehensive and systematic scrutiny long overdue by the sixties?
Pirouette has very little that is solid to say about this whole complicated prelude — including the sharp rifts among Pearson’s ministers, about similar defence issues, for example — to those major decisions of the first Trudeau term. Pirouette is weakest when it seeks to analyze policy developments, apparently because the authors gained no firm grasp from their research of what constituted the substance of policy; nor of the arcane processes whereby it could be achieved. They may have been misled by what they were told in interviews about Trudeau seizing control and knowing what he wanted, as regards foreign policy, supposedly from the outset of his tenure. Pirouette here seems obsessed with showing that the old “elitists” of External Affairs had become atrophied dodos with long necks and fuzzy heads tucked in the sands of a past long gone. It was the new birds on the upswing — identified in the later chapters as brilliantly feathered but at first found coyly nesting in secret cabals — who conspired and counter-planned in the cause of “creative tension”
To round out this charming charade, Pirouette cites from its eighty-six “confidential interviews” to show how the new elitists eventually dragged the newly “consolidated” External Affairs into the “modern era”. ’ whatever that means in “post-modern” today! The fantasy spoils its own splendour with a confession (Page 222), that, after the second coming in 1980, Mark MacGuigan, by then SSEA, reaffirmed Foreign Policy for Canadians as the Government’s enduring “policy” guide.
Now that “white paper” (which was not really a white paper) was many things to many people; anathema to most of its critics inside and outside government circles, before and after its release. But it was not what it started out to be in late 1969, an agreed statement on Foreign Policy for the Seventies, with clearly defined objectives and priorities. Higher authority than I in “the Department” decreed that this general paper should be seen as Ways of Thinking about Foreign Policy, and that is how it was put before Cabinet Committee on 2 March 1970. Unlike the November encounter, which yielded enthusiastic agreement in principle on the “conceptual framework” for a six-theme approach to foreign policy, the March meeting was decidedly unpleasant, with sharp differences among ministers and noticeable irritation around the table. The discussion ended inconclusively as regards some key questions (about national aims and interests, and Government objectives and priorities, for example and we were left with meagre guidance about how to write the general paper, by then envisaged as a policy framework and tone setter for the five “sectoral papers” in the FPC packet. I should make it categorically clear here that no mention was made, nor query raised, about the absence of a separate paper on Canada-USA relations. There had been no separate and comprehensive review of that “sector” although frequent references to USA influences and related factors were to be found in both the general paper and the sectoral papers, on Europe, Latin America and the Pacific, for example. But that random approach did not satisfy very many policy watchers on the outside, waiting in anticipation for what the Trudeau government would say about its intended relations with the US Administration (Nixon). Most commentators, after the FPC papers were released, lambasted the Government for the gaping black hole in Canada’s six-pack survey of our universe. I still wonder why and how we landed in that predicament. Pirouette leaves the mystery unresolved, notwithstanding a very good factual account of specific Canada- USA encounters, and including the “third option” proceedings that began in August 1971 and petered out a few years later.
There is no space left to spell out the long story about my pilgrimage along the corridors of power in search of grist for the required general paper, or about the designing and eventual dropping of the hexagon, which many well-meaning people found so despicable in the early seventies, when computer graphics were just emerging. Somewhere along that tortuous way, a final chapter on Foreign Policy in Practice was also dropped, for reasons never explained to me. The chapter seemed essential to bring the “conceptualizing” in the earlier chapters down to earth, where ordinary readers might have some hope of understanding, in practical terms, what the general paper was seeking to say. My guess has long been that this sixth chapter, which was a wide-sweeping but coherent account of how Canadian representatives abroad operated in the late sixties, was axed because it tended to undercut the position, pushed arbitrarily by PCO at senior levels, for full integration of the “foreign service” at home and abroad. Instead of that chapter, seven paragraphs (Pages 39-41, FPC general paper) were tacked on to Chapter V on Policy Projections. This was part of another half-baked scheme for bringing about “integrated planning” for foreign policy and its implementation.
It failed in the end, just as the broader quest for an updated foreign policy rationale failed, for want of agreement among key ministers and senior bureaucrats, on answers to fundamental questions. Trudeau’s ministers seemed to be as paralyzed as their Pearson predecessors had been, in articulating where and how they wanted to go in foreign policy, and why. The dialogue on policy died down and muddling through the weekly hodgepodge prevailed, as it had from time immemorial. Policy returned once again to its sterile reactive mode, while creativity withered away, as it had by the sixties. Why were the Trudeau reformers unable to find their way forward to new areas of opportunity for clearcut Canadian creativity in world affairs? The answer to that question, and others I have posed, may still be worth finding. The opportunities for new creativity are out there somewhere — especially today, on the expanding margins of a world in transition — just waiting to be embraced
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 8, No. 3 (1991) — Summer 1991 // Été 1991, pp. 17–20. Read the rest of this issue →
