bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2005) — Spring 2005 // Printemps 2005, pp. 33–38

Readers of bout de papier need no introduction to James Bartleman, currently the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario and formerly a member of the Canadian foreign service, as well as an advisor for four years to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien on Canada’s international relations. The passages reprinted below are taken from Mr. Bartleman’s most recent book, Rollercoaster: My Hectic Years as Jean Chrétien’s Diplomatic Advisor, 1994-1998. As with his earlier memoirs, Out of Muskoka and On Six Continents, this account is distinguished by elegant prose, frank observations, critical judgment and humour (often at the author’s expense). For reasons of space, it was only possible to provide a few examples from many possible of what readers may expect from this volume. Unfortunately, that meant that we were unable to include the farcical visit of Li Peng to Canada nor to reproduce at length the advisor’s unique perspective on the Great Lakes Crisis of 1996. Saddest of all, it was not possible to offer more than a brief excerpt from the remarkable story of the prime ministerial visit to Cuba and the peculiar role in that tragicomedy assigned to the author by Fidel Castro. As the extracts and the rest of the book eloquently attest, the boundary between the professional and the personal in such work may not always be as clear as one would wish – whatever challenges that may have posed for the author, it certainly adds to the enjoyment for the reader. Rollercoaster: My Hectic Years as Jean Chrétien’s Diplomatic Advisor, 1994-1998 by James K. Bartleman is published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., The Canadian Publishers, with whose kind permission the following extracts are reproduced.

Called on the Carpet

Before we left Mexico an unhappy Jean Pelletier gave me some less than fatherly advice. The advisor, and no one else, not even the local ambassador, was responsible for ensuring that the prime minister was properly briefed each morning during trips abroad! The advisor, and no one else, must prepare the prime minister for each of the meetings he would have in the course of an official visit, remaining close to him at all times to be of assistance during discussions! The advisor, and no one else, was to provide the substance for press releases on foreign-policy developments! The advisor, and no one else, furnished definitive government positions on foreign-policy matters to the press! The PMO, he said, was composed of a limited number of officers, each with major domestic responsibilities. Not one of them had my foreign-policy background; all had been instructed not to meddle in foreign affairs, which was my exclusive sphere of authority. No one had intervened to help me since it was up to me to take charge. Everyone on the prime minister’s team, and that included Jim Bartleman, had to produce or get out!

At least I knew where / stood. There would be no breaking-in period for me. I returned to my lonely house in Ottawa, my tail between my legs, regretting that this wisdom had not been given to me at the beginning rather than at the end of the trip to Mexico – perhaps I would have stayed at home. The reality I now had to face, however, was that after only a few days on the job, I was already in trouble. The senior ranks of the bureaucracy in Foreign Affairs and the PCO, not having had a hand in my selection, were suspicious of – and in some cases actually hostile to – my appointment. The people in the PMO did not know me and could not be counted on for support until I had earned their confidence.

An Irate Ambassador

Spanish ambassador Enrique Costa José Luis Pardos did not take the news well. He had arrived at my Blackburn Building office on Sparks Street on short notice on Friday, March 3, 1995, to warn the Canadian government not to apply the provisions of the Coastal Fisheries Protection Act to Spanish fishing boats operating beyond the two-hundred-mile limit on the continental shelf on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. I could not provide the assurances he sought. In tact, I was aware that as we were meeting, a PCO official was walking from one minister’s office to another seeking the requisite four signatures on an Order-in-Council document to amend the Act. Before the end of the day, Spanish (and Portuguese) fishing vessels would be barred from what until then had been international waters off Canada’s east coast. I therefore reiterated Canada’s well-known position: Spanish fishermen were destroying the last commercially available groundfish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Canada had negotiated an international agreement to conserve the stock, which Spain and the European Union were ignoring. We intended to arrest fishing vessels if need be.

Pardos stared at me for a long, silent minute. He then carefully put down his cup of coffee, rose to his feet, hitched up his trousers, clenched his hands into fists, and approached. Fierce and distraught, he towered over me; in my imagination, he was trying to decide whether to throttle me or to smack me. I braced myself and held tightly to my coffee mug. Fortunately, he picked a non-violent but very surprising option. Dropping to one knee, he thrust out his jaw, pounded his chest with his right fist, and told me “as a Spaniard” that his country would never accept the jurisdiction of Canada on the high seas. If Canada’s “gunboats” tried to arrest Spain’s fishing vessels, “Canada would bear the consequences.” He then rose to his feet and stalked out the door, muttering that I harboured a personal anti-Spanish bias and was doing everything possible to punish his country for innocently fishing off Canada’s east coast.

Thus began the endgame in Canada’s dispute with the European Union, acting on behalf of Spain, over fishing rights in the Northwest Atlantic. For the first time in its peacetime history, Canada would resort to force to impose its will rather than use diplomacy to settle a dispute. Latecomers to Bismarckian tactics, we learned the dark arts quickly, and progressively raised the stakes until some of us did not know when to stop, coming within hours of conflict with Spain on the high seas after Madrid had conceded victory. Lester Pearson must have turned over in his grave

[Fisheries Minister Brian] Tobin sat in on a discussion I had with the prime minister. Foreign Minister [André] Ouellet, who favoured going the extra mile to obtain a negotiated settlement, perhaps frustrated by the hard-line atmosphere that pervaded Ottawa, had by that time largely abandoned the field. What was my opinion, asked the prime minister. I reviewed the options and concluded by saying that at the end of the day, the government would have to be satisfied that the national interest would be served by using force and risking the lives of young Canadians and Spaniards. Tobin had already raked over the coals other senior public servants, notably Ambassador [to the European Union Jacques] Roy, and Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Gordon Smith for signs of independent thinking. It was now my turn. His eyes blazing, he said nothing to me while the prime minister was present. But he telephoned me in a rage soon afterwards to administer a vicious tongue-lashing at high volume. Before I could open my mouth, he began shouting that he wanted no voices counselling restraint with the prime minister. He called me a “gutless do-nothing, know-nothing Central Canadian who never had to fish for a living and wouldn’t know one end of a fish from the other even if it was laid out before your eyes.” After warning me never to cross him again, he slammed the telephone down without hearing me out as I tried to tell him that Central Canadians were not so bad. Some were even fishermen, including my father and my grandfather.

I said nothing to the prime minister about this attempt to muzzle me, but continued to provide advice as before.

Prime Minister and President

The two leaders had hit it off when they first met at the November 1993 Seattle APEC summit, shortly after the prime minister’s election victory. Chrétien put his cards on the table at that time, explaining that one of his campaign planks had been to promote a close but not chummy relationship between the leaders of Canada and the United States. [Bill] Clinton welcomed this straight talk and found he had much in common with Canada’s new leader – although perhaps not as much as he believed Both were small-town boys, populist champions of the common people who, against the odds, had risen to the highest offices of their countries. The president, however, was from a dysfunctional family and the prime minister from a closely-knit, high-achieving one. Clinton was a ladies’ man and a charmer, in contrast to the prime minister, who was devoted to his wife and an upholder of family values. The American president was a policy wonk, perhaps the brightest leader I saw in action in over thirty-five years in the foreign service, able, at the drop of a hat, to discuss authoritatively the most arcane detail of international monetary policy, the origins of the Balkan crisis, and obscure labour market problems in Mexico, although he hid his intellectual dominance over his peers under an “Aw shucks, I’m just a country boy” demeanour. The prime minister was more pragmatic than blue sky, and possessed more common sense than his American partner.

The Quebec Referendum

Even if personal relations between the leaders of Canada and the United States are excellent, it is a rare occasion indeed when an American president has the authority and is willing to step in to help his Canadian counterpart with a difficult file. President Clinton did so, however, in the run-up to the referendum of October 30, 1995, perhaps saving Canada as we know it in the process. At first the president did not need to intervene. Bolstered by opinion polls that showed that a majority of Quebeckers continued to oppose sovereignty, even after the victory of the Parti Québécois in the provincial elections of September 1994, the prime minister remained confident throughout 1994 and most of 1995 that the sovereignty option would be rejected.

I am in no position to comment on the policies he adopted to counter the separatists at home. Internationally, however, I was a witness to his actions to ensure that they gained no international support for their cause. He first of all reminded Foreign Affairs, which had grown lax over the years in allowing Quebec and other provinces more scope to deal directly with foreign governments, that the federal government had the exclusive authority to represent Canada abroad. In all countries, with the exception of France, where Ottawa had conceded to Quebec the right some years earlier to have direct contacts, Canadian embassy officials would henceforth make all appointments for and accompany all travelling provincial ministers and premiers on their official calls; in this way, separatist lobbying for international support would be curtailed. He also told dozens of world leaders that international law allowed breakaway regions or provinces to become independent states only in conditions of repressive colonialism. Canada, however, was a democracy and Quebec was not a colony. And francophones, including the then governor general, the prime minister, and the head of the public service, were represented at the highest levels of Canada’s power structure. The implied message was that Canada would consider the recognition by any country of a unilateral declaration of independence by Quebec to constitute an unfriendly act. His appeal was received sympathetically. Many of the leaders governed countries with minorities or regions which would have been tempted to follow the example of Quebec should it succeed in its bid for independence. The result, they all agreed, would be international chaos.

The president was then dragged into the debate. Lucien Bouchard, leader of the official Onnosition Ring Ouéhéenis mananad to wanna a arguing that it was his right as leader of Her Majesty’s official Opposition to make courtesy calls on official visitors to Canada. The prime minister agreed, but insisted that Canada’s ambassador to Washington sit in on the discussion. The president listened politely to the separatist leader’s case for a sovereign Quebec, and then left to deliver a speech to Parliament endorsing Canadian national unity. In October 1995, the president spoke out again in favour of Canadian unity, just when the momentum for separation seemed to be unstoppable. No one will ever know to what extent Clinton’s efforts influenced the referendum outcome. He was, however, personally popular and respected in Quebec. And in a virtually deadlocked situation where the sovereigntist option was rejected by a bare majority, his support for a united Canada may well have made the difference.

Not True

Thus, the story that Canada tried to punch above its weight in eastern Zaire in November 1996 is simply not true; we were acting in close collaboration with the most powerful country on the planet. Canada reacted responsibly to back-channel requests from the White House and the State Department to help the United States find an acceptable way of committing its military forces to a potentially perilous operation in Africa. We were, however, left holding the bag and bore the blame for allegedly forsaking hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees. It is not fair, however, to say that refugees were abandoned. The terms of reference of the rescue mission did not include forcing refugees to return to Rwanda. By precipitating the Rwandan government attack on the camps before the mission could be deployed, however, it led to a return to Rwanda of all refugees who wanted to go back. Those who feared judgement in their homeland for genocide and other crimes fled into the jungles escorted by their Interhamwe escorts. Some fifty thousand refugees crossed the Congo River to add to the Republic of the Congo’s turbulent tribal mix. Others are reported to have made it to the Central African Republic. An unknown number were later massacred by Rwandan soldiers on their way to Kinshasa to overthrow [President Sese Seke] Mobutu. Later on, Interhamwe forces were drawn into the fighting on the side of the new government against Rwanda. They appear destined to roam Africa in a state of self-imposed exile indefinitely, as punishment for their horrific crimes in the spring and summer of 1994, afraid to go home, but unwanted except as soldiers in their places of refuge.

There was, however, an even greater tragedy than the flight into exile and death of the Hutu refugees and their Interhamwe protectors in November and December 1996. For when the rescue force did not deploy, the Tutsi army was left free to occupy eastern Zaire, to assemble a motley mallantion of anti Mahit, Jaina– It-lt… ..11.

I ne lutsis then installed Laurent Kabila, an obscure Zairean rebel, as president of Zaire. Kabila, whose chief claim to fame up to then had been an unsatisfactory collaboration with the famous Che Guevara in a failed rebellion decades earlier, renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo and turned against his Tutsi friends. In the ensuing turmoil, “the widest interstate war in modern African history,” in the words of Amnesty International, broke out. The armed forces of Rwanda, Namibia, Chad, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Uganda allied themselves with competing Congolese factions and joined the bloody fight for diamonds, precious metals, and spheres of influence. More than a million would die, towns and cities would be destroyed, entire regions would be depopulated, the vestiges of civilization would disappear in vast areas, children and youth would be turned into hired killers, and even cannibalism would reappear in the eastern part of the country. The Western press would largely ignore the story, even though the number killed would exceed by far those massacred in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

And finally, it is worth reflecting on the response that more than a dozen heads of state and government gave to Canada on the weekend of November 11, 1996. With no prior notification, they committed troops and financing solely on the word of Canada’s leader that help was needed. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, who could have been speaking for others, told Canada’s prime minister: “Just tell me where to send our peacekeepers and they will be on their way.” His answer was an eloquent testimony to the credibility that Canada had earned internationally in the latter half of the twentieth century. I hope, however, that we remember November and December 1996 the next time our American friends make us an offer too good to be true.

The Prime Minister in Havana

Thus began the first official visit to Cuba by a Canadian prime minister since that of Pierre Trudeau in 1976. From the start, it was a clash of two different personalities with diametrically opposing visions of the future. The jousting started at the airport arrival ceremony, broadcast on all Cuban radio and television channels. [Cuban President Fidel] Castro, radiating new-found vigour, welcomed the Canadian prime minister by delivering a vicious anti- American diatribe during which he pledged fidelity to the principles of the revolution. On the flight down from Ottawa, I had prepared the prime minister for a tough propagandistic statement from Castro, telling him the press would be watching him closely to see if his body language conveyed sympathy for Castro’s message. It would be best, I said, to look enigmatic. Castro’s speech was so violent, however, that there was no need for the prime minister to restrain his enthusiasm. Everyone, the prime minister, his advisor, and media on the Canadian side were surprised that Castro would exploit the arrival ceremony for such blatant propaganda purposes.

The prime minister then delivered a calm, measured speech containing the messages he would convey to Castro repeatedly over the next thirty hours: “The winds of change are blowing through our hemisphere … And we must all adapt…. This is an expression of confidence … to a more dynamic, more democratic, more prosperous hemisphere … that is becoming a family … with shared goals, shared values, shared hopes and dreams. … And we are committed to working to achieve greater social, economic and political justice throughout the region.”

The two leaders then got into Castro’s big Soviet-era limousine and led the way to the newly restored National, a beautiful pre-revolutionary hotel overlooking the sea on Havana’s famous Malecon drive. The official talks began later in the morning, with the prime minister and me on one side of the table and Castro and [Vice President Carlos] Lage on the other. The winds of history, great ideas, and the principles of the Cuban revolution were the themes of Castro’s opening remarks. He assumed that the prime minister would be overwhelmed with the brilliance of his analyses and allow him to dominate the discussion. The prime minister, however, stopped the president in full rhetorical tlight. I want, the prime minister said, to discuss the Fourteen Point Declaration. Could the Civilian Complaints commission be empowered to investigate human-rights complaints? Could foreign non-governmental organizations be granted greater freedom of action? Would Cuba sign the United Nations Covenant on Social and Economic Rights? He then passed over a list of four high-profile dissidents languishing in a Cuban jail for the past year without being charged and asked Castro to release them.

Castro’s face betrayed all manner of emotion, passing from astonishment to anger and then to bitterness. He said nothing for some time, picking up and throwing down distractedly the cue card with the names of the four dissidents scrawled in my barely legible handwriting. “I have never been so humiliated,” he said in a barely audible voice. He would have walked out the door, I believe, had he not been in his own office. The dialogue never recovered, although the leaders remained at the table for two hours and fifteen minutes. The president had been prepared to release three low-level prisoners as a sort of human gift but the prime minister had just raised the stakes. It was at this point that Castro probably decided that the policy of constructive engagement with Canada had reached the limits of its usefulness. The Canadians were taking human rights far too seriously.

Although other bilateral and international issues were then discussed, there was no meeting of minds. The prime minister mentioned that Canada had been happy to resume our aid program. And to commemorate his visit to Havana, CIDA intended to announce that it would provide funding to allow Cuba to provide new textbooks and scribblers for its schoolchildren for a year. Castro and Lage sat silent and tight-lipped. They were not about to say thanks to a visitor who had not listened to Castro’s thoughts on the future of humanity. Eventually, after stroking his beard attentively, always a sign that he was thinking hard, Castro turned to Haiti and proposed that Canada fund a program to pay Cuban doctors to administer to the desperately poor in that country. While not rejecting Castro’s suggestion, the prime minister made one of his own. Why should Canada and Cuba not collaborate in clearing anti-personnel mines in Angola and Mozambique? Cuban forces had operated there for over a decade. Canada could fund a program and Cuban soldiers could remove the mines.

Castro looked devastated. He would later tell a national Cuban television audience that he had rarely heard a more imperialist proposal. Imagine! Canada suggesting that Cubans do the dirty work in the minefields, while the Canadians sat off to one side gathering all the credit!

Castro glanced at me angrily from time to time as the ill-fated talks progressed, as if I were to blame for his game plan going wrong. Finally, the meeting dragged to a conclusion and the prime minister and I got up to leave. Prime Minister Chrétien proceeded out the door and I prepared to follow when I felt the hands of the president on my shoulders from behind, squeezing hard and shaking me.

“I hope you are satisfied, Bartleman!” He hissed out the words in Spanish, his voice cold, high pitched yet low enough not to attract the attention of Prime Minister Chrétien who was already striding rapidly ahead to meet the assembled Canadian press contingent. I had no idea why Castro was so mad at me. Perhaps he felt I had not conveyed his message to the prime minister not to ask Cuba to do anything during his visit that could damage it. Whatever the reason, the rage in his eyes made me glad I was a Canadian able to depart with the prime minister rather than a Cuban who would have felt the full wrath of an unhappy leader in a police state! I also thought his sentiments were a touch unkind to someone who had spent a night with him so recently.

After the press conference, we all moved on to an official lunch hosted by the prime minister and Mrs. [Aline] Chrétien for Cardinal Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino, fully covered by the press, the first time Castro had ever allowed the media to report on such an event. Michael Kergin [Assistant Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Americas] and I then met with Cuba’s leading dissidents not in jail, demonstrating to them that they were not alone in their struggle for political justice. I had enormous respect for their courage, appreciating that they risked many years of prison just for talking to us. That evening over dinner, Castro had calmed down but the contest between the two leaders continued. Discussing issues as diverse as the Euro, the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, and the future of the European Union, Castro as usual threw out a myriad of statistics and facts. The prime minister matched him, statistic for statistic.

Castro resorted to revolutionary rhetoric, describing his vision of the future where the disinherited would triumph through all-or-nothing revolutionary action. The prime minister said that he shared the same goal but proclaimed his taith in solving problems pragmatically one at a time. Castro was pessimistic regarding the future; Chrétien believed greater wealth was being created now through capitalism than at any time in world history. On globalization, Chrétien argued that countries had to adapt or their populations would suffer. Castro, using arguments which presaged those that anti-globalization crusaders would adopt at the Seattle WTO meeting a year later, retorted that the wealth being generated through globalization was not being shared with the poor. The so-called democracy that had appeared in Latin America was just a cover, he said, for monopolizing wealth by selfish neo-liberals. Chrétien said Castro was being simplistic; there were at least three types of liberals in the world including the centralist Canadian variety. Mrs. Chrétien weighed in from time to time in Spanish, ensuring that the mood remained friendly.

An ebullient Castro bade farewell to Prime Minister and Mrs. Chretien at the airport late the next morning. As I said goodbye, the president drew me toward him, grinning. “Your prime minister and I had a good discussion in my car on the way to airport. And do you know why?”

I said that I had no idea and smiled expectantly, hoping that he had overcome his fit of pique at me of the day before. But I had no such luck.

“Because you weren’t there, Bartleman, that’s why!”

I decided that I would drop Cuba from my list of vacation destinations for the foreseeable future.

Epilogue

As I put these words to paper, less than a year has passed since Jean Chrétien stepped down as prime minister. At this early stage, some critics consider the 1990s to be a black hole in terms of Canadian foreign-policy achievement and hold Canada’s leader responsible for this alleged sorry state of affairs. This school blames him (fairly) for depriving Canada’s military and diplomats of the resources they needed to do their jobs, and (unfairly) for presiding over a decline in Canada’s place among the nations that had actually been ongoing for decades. Critics, perhaps nostalgic for the Trudeau era, allege that Chrétien lacked charisma, claim that his decision making was whimsical, avow that he was intuitive rather than intellectual, and assert that his leadership on the great issues of the day was handicapped by an inability to articulate great ideas in his public speeches. One commentator, Andrew Cohen, author of the best-seller While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, has even said that Mir. Chrétien was the most parochial prime minister since Mackenzie King.

On the other side are those who point to the strengths he brought to the conduct of foreign policy — his sense of humour, his avoidance of cant and pretence in public utterances, his ability to take tough decisions and live with the consequences, and his exceptional and sustained personal popularity that made him the envy of leaders around the world. Joel Sokolsky, Dean of Arts at the Royal Military College, has said that the Chrétien era was one of the most active in recent decades. I am on the side of Sokolsky but am not by definition an objective observer since I was there. I was also Mr. Chrétien’s advisor for less than half of his time in office and cannot comment as an insider on the big foreign-policy challenges that came up in his remaining years in office, in particular the Kosovo and Afghanistan military campaigns, his management of relations with George W. Bush, his response to the September 11, 2001 tragedy, his opening to Africa, and his refusal to commit troops in Iraq. In my opinion, however, his early foreign-policy initiatives were key in setting the course for what would come later. And Chretien’s record tor these years speaks for itself.

There were, of course, failures and miscues, described throughout my account. The most serious of these was in not doing more for Rwanda during the three horrible months of genocide in the spring of 1994. The positive side of the ledger, however, overwhelmingly outweighs the negative. In a famous analogy, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, quoting the Greek poet Archilochus, said that great men could be foxes “who knew many things” or hedgehogs “who knew one big thing.” In my opinion, contemporaries of Jean Chrétien such as Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Frangois Mitterand were foxes — as much at home among foreign ministers and the foreign-policy elite as among the rank and file in their countries, but with their energies dissipated by trying to juggle too many policy balls at the same time. Canada’s leader, however, like Helmut Kohl, Jacques Chirac, and Boris Yeltsin were hedgehogs — political animals who derived their strength from being close to the pulse of their peoples and who communicated emotionally as well as intellectually with the crowd. Chrétien was a natural member of the latter group, a man of deep convictions, seizing on one or two big ideas and doggedly pursuing them to a conclusion. And in terms of ideas, the greatest for Chrétien was his love for Canada. When he took office, he had, to paraphrase de Gaulle, “une certaine idée du Canada.” For Chrétien, Canada would not be Canada without being a successful multicultural exception among the racially divided nation states of the 1990s, and a leader among the middle powers. And Jean Chrétien was as passionate about Canada as Charles de Gaulle was about France. He could not stand the thought that his beloved country, crushed by debt and unemployment as it was when he came to power, might tumble down into the ranks of the Third World. He thus pursued integrated foreign- and domestic- policy goals from the outset to lead Canada out of the recession of the early 1990s by export-led growth. This contributed to the decade of prosperity, social peace, relative political harmony at home, and credibility abroad that will, I suspect, be seen by future historians as his greatest contribution to his country.

Other ideas that he pursued tenaciously were his efforts to embrace globalization, rather than trying to hide from it. He was one of the first to recognize that Canada’s growing population of Chinese, Indian, Filipino, and Latin American citizens gave us a natural advantage in establishing links of privilege with their countries of origin, and that these links in turn made these new Canadians more comfortable in their adopted homeland. The highly popular campaign against anti-personnel mines would not have come to a successful conclusion were it not for the priority he attached to the initiative over a three-year period. His role in encouraging NATO enlargement to take in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, and correct a historical wrong, will eventually be recognized as one of his leading successes. And no leader could have done more to encourage Canadians to embrace their Pacific and Latin American destinies, in particular with China, even if only time will tell whether the seeds he planted will take root.

Looking back, I feel immensely lucky arrived in Ottawa to be part of the action in early 1994 just after one political generation had run out of steam and had given way to another, still filled with optimism and excitement. I was in on the ground floor when Team Canada was created and participated in its missions when it was blasting Canada’s way into new markets, and was gone before it ran out of worlds to conquer. I was present during the honeymoon period of federal relations with all provinces except Quebec, and was privileged to come to know Canada’s premiers as a result of travelling each year with them on lengthy trips to Asia and Latin America. I was at Chrétien’s side when shrewd investments of prime-ministerial time brought disproportionate returns in new links with the Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions. There were occasions when I helped steer him away from the edge of precipitous foreign-policy cliffs, but that was part of my job. I did not turn out to be a Henry Kissinger, but Jean Chretien functioned quite well without a foreign-policy giant alongside him.

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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2005) — Spring 2005 // Printemps 2005, pp. 33–38. Read the rest of this issue →