bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 34–35
Max Yalden, who died in Ottawa on February 9, 2015, entered the public service as a foreign service officer in 1956. After serving in Moscow, Geneva and Paris, he transferred to the Secretary of State’s Department as Assistant Under-Secretary in 1969. Subsequently he held appointments as Deputy Minister of Communications (1973-77), Commissioner of Official Languages (1977-84) and Chief Commissioner of Human Rights (1987-97). He returned to diplomacy from 1984-87 as ambassador to Belgium and Luxembourg. At the end of his career, he served as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee for eight years. One of the outstanding public servants of his generation, he was a Companion of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honour; had been awarded honorary doctorates both by Carleton and Ottawa universities; and been named Commandeur de l’ordre de la Pleiade. He is survived by his wife Janice, former Dean of Arts at Carleton University, his son Robert and daughter-in-law Pearl of Montreal and by a granddaughter, Zoe.
Max Yalden’s career as a public servant followed a pattern set by a number of his contemporaries. But for the foreign service competition, he might never have come to Ottawa. A brilliant graduate of the University of Toronto, he had earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Michigan and was on the point of taking up a fellowship at Harvard when he decided instead to enter the Foreign Service. Ottawa was then, for many young people, a remote and not necessarily attractive capital – especially perhaps for French-speaking graduates. The Foreign Service, however, had a special appeal. A notable group, including some of its most talented recruits, after serving an apprenticeship in the Foreign Service, were later attracted to more senior responsibilities elsewhere in the public service. Thus the Foreign Service, thanks to its system of annual recruiting, came to serve not only as a source of future diplomats, but indirectly as well, as one of the most important sources of senior public servants. Max Yalden’s career was an example.
Attitudes towards this unavowed but effective recruiting mechanism varied within the Department of External Affairs, depending on who was in charge. The great Norman Robertson, who had himself worked for three unhappy years outside the service as Secretary to the Cabinet, believed that the departure of talented officers to other departments should not be a cause for regret, so long as those leaving were enabled thereby to make a greater contribution elsewhere. For Marcel Cadieux, on the other hand, to enter the foreign service was to make a lifetime commitment to a sort of secular priesthood. He set his face against departures and warned those who applied to leave that they could never come back.
This was Max Yalden’s experience: he applied to Marcel Cadieux and was told that if he went he could never return. Max then consulted Gordon Robertson, the Secretary to the Cabinet, who told him in effect to ignore the warning. This, as it turned out was shrewd advice. Max left the Department, served brilliantly in a succession of senior appointments, yet was not prevented from returning to serve as ambassador.
Max Yalden’s early years in the Foreign Service provided him with solid experience. His first posting, after a year of Russian language studies at Cambridge, was to Moscow, during the testing but interesting Khrushchev years. Moscow was not, as Max later wrote, “a bowl of cherries”. For all the attractions of Russian language and culture, life in the Soviet capital was a daily struggle with unpleasant restrictions and discomfort. Contacts with ordinary Russians were limited, however much one admired the sacrifices they had made during the Second World War, and the stoicism with which they endured the stultifying burdens placed on their lives by the Soviet system. No amount of ritual boasting on official occasions could conceal the vast human and material waste, nor the spiritual oppression, involved. All this left a lasting impression on all those who served in Moscow, despite the degree of insulated privilege in which resident foreigners lived.
After the Moscow posting, Max was assigned to the disarmament file, on which he worked for three years in Geneva and Ottawa. His boss at the time was General E.L.M. “Tommy” Burns, a formidable and sardonic figure also known from his wartime days as “Smiler”, because he never smiled. These were not easy years for the cause of disarmament, despite the earnest advocacy of Canada’s Secretary of State for External Affairs, the Honourable Howard Green, nor was General Burns always an easy boss. It was not until Max had moved on to other things that the East- West dialogue produced in 1963 the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first step towards lessening the threat of nuclear war through negotiation.
By then, Max was enjoying the posting to the embassy in Paris that marked his career more than any other. These years were his introduction to the struggles over Quebec separatism, as they played out in the context of “les relations triangulaires”: Ottawa, Quebec, Paris. He became deeply concerned with the issues of language rights and national unity that dominated the public debates of the Trudeau era. In the process he emerged as an uncompromising federalist, who over the years maintained an adamant belief in strengthening the federal role within confederation, and in Pierre Trudeau’s firm confrontational opposition to all manifestations of separatism. Max always doubted the wisdom of some of Prime Minister Mulroney’s concessions to Quebec nationalism – for example, the bargain Mr. Mulroney struck with Premier Bourassa over provincial representation at meetings of La Francophonie, which opened the way to permitting summits of francophone leaders, a file that had been frozen through the Trudeau years. Max’s posting in Paris under Jules Leger, then ambassador, led on in time to a succession of his later appointments centred on the issue of official languages, first within the Department of External Affairs, as a special adviser on federal-provincial relations, subsequently as Commissioner of Official Languages and finally as Chief Commissioner of Human Rights.
Paris also confirmed Max, in his private life, as a lover of France and the French language and culture. He became a gourmet and a wine connaisseur. In later years, the Yaldens decided to make a second home in France, acquiring a property at Sablet, among the vineyards of the Côtes du Rhone, where they extended generous hospitality to friends escaping the rigours of a less fortunate climate.
With his Foreign Service experience and his seven years as Commissioner of Official Languages, Max was well equipped to serve in Belgium as ambassador between 1984 and 1987, when he was also accredited to Luxembourg. Belgium, like Canada, was a country with two official languages, one of them French. Max was able to address his audiences in both French and Flemish, a rare perhaps unprecedented accomplishment for a Canadian ambassador. While he was intrigued by the comparison of Belgium’s linguistic problems with Canada’s, he recognized that the two countries even in this respect are not easily comparable, and that Belgium’s answers to its dilemmas over offi- •cial languages are unlikely to reply to Canadian problems.
From a concern with official languages, Max progressed in the final years of his career to a broader concern with human rights in Canada, as Chief Commissioner of Human Rights, and then in the world at large, as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee. He will be remembered particularly for his work in overseeing the implementation of the Official Languages Act. It is largely to him that we owe the fact that the Act, which in other hands might have become an enduring and difficult source of controversy, passed off as easily as it did. His tenure of the Chief Commissioner’s office was notable for the extension of gay rights and for a vigorous defence of the rights of native peoples. He served on the Human Rights Committee not as a national representative, but in his individual capacity, as one who by then had become one of the world’s leading experts in the human rights field, well able, albeit not a lawyer, to more than hold his own in a circle dominated by distinguished international lawyers.
The motto of the Order of Canada, in which Max Yalden, as a Companion of the Order, held the highest rank, is “They desire a better country.” Max strove all his professional life for that great objective, and left all Canadians more secure in their rights as citizens through his work. The Foreign Service can take pride in its association with so distinguished a career.
James H. Taylor is a retired Foreign Service Officer who served as Under- Secretary of State for External Affairs and Ambassador to Japan and NATO. Mr. Taylor is Chancellor Emeritus of McMaster University, and an Officer of the Order of Canada.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), pp. 34–35. Read the rest of this issue →
