AN INSIDE LOOK AT EXTERNAL
AFFAIRS DURING THE TRUDEAU
YEARS: THE MEMOIRS OF MARK
MACGUIGAN, P. Whitney Lackenbauer
(ed.), Calgary, University of Calgary Press,
2002, pp. 208, $34.95
shaping Canadian foreign policy. “Trudeau’s style,” MacGuigan writes, “was … dangerous. His instinct, it always seemed to me, Was not just to establish objectively that he was right, by demolishing his opponents’ arguments, but also to destroy their self-respect, to hurt them in the deepest recesses he could reach with his words … to demean them, to rub their noses in their deficiencies.” MacGuigan has a good eye for character and his surprisingly sympathetic portrait of US President Ronald Reagan, and his sharp sketches of other world leaders of the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Schmidt, for example, are also well worth reading.
These memoirs are also a book — appropriately enough for a former law professor — that seeks to teach its readers, quietly and unobtrusively, how foreign policy should be made. Like his prime minister, MacGuigan was a cool and self-reflective rationalist, who came to office in March 1980 convinced that a country’s foreign policy ought to be dictated primarily by its national interest. Neither international law nor morality, he thought, provides much of a basis for a country’s foreign policy. And in this short study, he sets out to explain how his diplomacy — in virtually every corner of the globe and across a host of issue areas — served and advanced Canada’s national interest. It is a persuasive case.
MacGuigan’s tenure as Secretary of State for External Affairs was brief and his opportunity to decisively shape Canada’s foreign policy, limited. He acknowledges this frankly but, as these memoirs make clear, he still accomplished much during his time in office. He is proud of his judicious handling of relations with the United States during an exceptionally difficult period in the North American relationship. Bilaterally, the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan challenged the Trudeau government’s determination to assert greater control over the Canadian environment and economy. MacGuigan vigorously pressed the Canadian case, and with the help of Allan Gotlieb, who served first as his undersecretary of state for external affairs and later as his ambassador in Washington, pioneered a new and more high-profile diplomatic style in the American capital. This was never easy, the job made more difficult by the prime minister’s poor relationship with Reagan and his tendency to thumb his nose at the Americans.
Equally important, Canadians and Americans found themselves divided over a host of international issues in the early 1980s. MacGuigan arrived in office just as a decade of détente ended and the Cold War turned hot again following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. There was no question where MacGuigan stood: the source of tension, he recalls, was the Soviet Union and its totalitarian allies in Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea and Poland and he never forgot that “our profound” differences were with the Soviets and not the Americans. Still, the hardline American response, particularly under Reagan, who tended to see a complex world in simple bipolar terms, often disturbed MacGuigan, who saw the world — in the words of the Irish poet Louis MacNiece — as “incorrigibly plural”. Conscious of operating in the tradition of L.B. Pearson and Paul Martin Sr., MacGuigan embraced Quiet Diplomacy, and when he opposed American Cold War strategy — as he did over South Africa and Central America, for example — he did so as constructively and as diplomatically as possible.
MacGuigan was also proud of his role in helping Trudeau, and the minister of justice, Jean Chrétien, guide the government’s constitutional resolution patriating the amending formula and a charter of rights through the British parliament. Again this was no easy diplomatic task, as Ottawa confronted recurring British doubts about the legality of Trudeau’s initiative. It was an issue that struck at the heart of Canada’s nationhood, and in MacGuigan’s view there could be no question of retreat. MacGuigan tells his side of this complicated story clearly and with humour. And as a strong supporter of individual liberty and human rights, he celebrates Canada’s Charter of Rights as “the leading edge of a new belief in the strength of shared values and opportunities”.
Throughout this book of memoirs, there is much evidence of MacGuigan’s close and warm relationship with the officers who served him. Indeed, MacGuigan dedicates the book to the “men and women of the Department of External Affairs”. It comes as no surprise then to learn that he considered Gotlieb “as the ablest public servant I had the opportunity to associate with during my sixteen years in Parliament”. But, and the memoirs make this clear in a provocative discussion of Flora MacDonald’s experiences in the same portfolio, MacGuigan was never a captive of his bureaucracy. He enjoyed challenging the carefully considered opinions of his officials and shaping policy according to his own views. As parliamentarian and minister, MacGuigan only sought for himself what he sought for all Canadians: “a world of creative freedom”.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 4 (2003) — Winter/Spring 2002/2003 // Hiver/Printemps 2002/2003, pp. 27–28. Read the rest of this issue →
