bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 41–42
O.D. SKELTON: A PORTRAIT OF
CANADIAN AMBITION, by Norman
O.D. SKELTON: A PORTRAIT OF CANADIAN AMBITION, by Norman Hillmer, University of Toronto Press, 2015, 455 pp, $39.95
Those who glance at the historic plaque dedicated to Oscar Douglas Skelton in the Skelton Lobby of the Pearson Building may ask themselves what else there was in the life of this long-departed figure of External Affairs lore. After many years of patient study, Carleton University’s Norman Hillmer has answered the question in a first-rate, thoughtful biography of one of Canada’s most influential figures. He builds on an initial portrait he sketched in an edited volume of Skelton’s writings published in 2013, which Hillmer appropriately subtitled “The Work of the World, 1923-1941”.
Skelton was a rare but growing breed at the turn of the last century — a Canadian nationalist who wanted an independent Canada rather than merely a British ally and colony. Born in 1878 in Orangeville, Ontario, a graduate of Queen’s University, he returned from studies in the United States to take up a position in political economy at Queen’s in 1908. As his reputation grew in Kingston and Ottawa, he created the public policy connection between the public service and Queen’s men (yes, virtually all men) which lasted more than half a century after Skelton’s death.
Hillmer paints a sympathetic portrait of the founder and architect of the nonpartisan Canadian public service, who also happened to be a passionate Liberal. In 1923 Prime Minister Mackenzie King lured Skelton to Ottawa to take on duties in an exceptionally small, almost clerically-oriented Department of External Affairs, on the promise of eventual nomination to its top job. Skelton made his mark almost immediately at the Imperial Conference of 1923, where Canada won the right to negotiate and ratify its own international agreements. In 1925 King appointed him Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, a post he held until his death in 1941 at the age of 63.
Skelton moulded “External” in his own image. In search of thinkers who could write quickly and well, he initiated a rigorous, competitive recruitment process as the Canadian foreign service was launched, and he appointed others, like Hume Wrong and Escott Reid, whose qualities he knew well. In time and for years after his death, “External” was loaded with Skeltonian internationalists, men (all men) whom Hillmer characterizes as “flexible, versatile and adaptable pragmatists”, “widely read generalists” and “anti-imperialists, suspicious of the worst excesses of both British and American power”. This legacy, too, would endure, as a succession of his acolytes, from Robertson to Pearson, took over his office (and his desk).
Hillmer ably recounts the vast range of issues under Skelton’s command, a testament to the tiny public service of the 1920s and 1930s and the confidence vested in Skelton by a Prime Minister who required subtle guidance on files both foreign and domestic. Skelton was thought to be on thin ice when R.B. Bennett and the Conservative Party won the election of 1930. Bennett and Skelton were polar opposites in temperament and policy, but Bennett found Skelton so valuable he could not contemplate his departure. When King returned to office in 1935, the world was drifting inexorably towards war. Skelton tried to steer a determined course of action against commitments in Europe and undue deference towards British requests for assistance against the growing Nazi menace. While he claimed to be internationalist rather than isolationist, he essentially believed that Canadian foreign policy began and ended in North America, because Canada was far from the growing threats in both Europe and Asia. In Skelton’s words, drafted for a prime ministerial speech, Canada was “fortunate both in our neighbours and our lack of neighbours”.
Hillmer is balanced and cogent in his discussions of Skelton’s foreign policy views and strategies. Modern readers are likely to applaud his dogged emphasis on Canadian autonomy, eventually crystallized in the Statute of Westminster in 1931. They are likely to be less sympathetic to Skelton’s visceral opposition to the League of Nations’ attempts to build a system of collective security, first in the mid-1920s, then in the 1930s at a time of crisis with Japan, Italy and Germany. If he believed at all in the League, he thought multilateral security cooperation “the futile hope of a few dreamers”, in Hillmer’s words. As deputy minister, Skelton could advise, but he could not decide. R. B. Bennett disagreed with Skelton and chose to support British and French advocacy of economic sanctions against Italy in the Ethiopian crisis of 1935. That policy was reversed when King returned to power and, under Skelton’s guidance, the government was able to avoid Canadian involvement on the other side of the Atlantic.
Most readers will also be perplexed, as is Hillmer, about Skelton’s failure to adjust his own prejudices and views at times of European crisis in 1938 and 1939. He sensed creeping imperialism behind every British proposal for assistance in the latter 1930s, and his resistance to cooperation with Britain left Canada as a undependable security partner at a time when cooperation, publicly expressed, might have had some deterrence value. In September, 1939, when Britain declared war, Skelton wanted Canada to stand aside, and he believed the Canadian declaration of war had destroyed his dreams of an independent Canada. By that time, as Hillmer notes, the Prime Minister had “a superior grasp of the national interest”. Opposed to war but soldiering on as King’s deputy in organizing the war effort, Skelton was already seriously ill. He died in January, 1941, still bearing the enormous burden of being both his department’s deputy and the Prime Minister’s principal adviser on virtually everything.
Hillmer notes that many of Skelton’s instincts became traditions of “Old External”, including an eloquent integrity in telling truth to power, combined with a blithe disregard for administration and management. The workaholic public servant could not keep Canada out of foreign wars, despite the cogency of his views. But he built a first-rate foreign service which came into its own as the war ended and as Canada took its place in the post-war world. The remarkable career of O.D.Skelton comes to life again in the pages of Norman Hillmer’s superbly-crafted biography.
Daniel Livermore studied history at Queen’s University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1975 immediately prior to joining External Affairs. He served for over thirty years in the department as a Foreign Service Officer, and his last assignment prior to returning to the historical profession was as director general, Security and Intelligence.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
