Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s Pacific tilt, 1945–1984
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Author | Greg Donaghy |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702019834883 |
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Lessons of History |
Lessons of History
International Journal
2019, Vol. 74(1) 135–150
Pierre Trudeau and
! The Author(s) 2019
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Canada’s Pacific tilt,
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DOI: 10.1177/0020702019834883
1945–1984
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Greg Donaghy1
Historical Section, Global Affairs Canada, Ottawa, Ontario,
Canada
Abstract
Canadian international history is currently enjoying an Asian moment. A handful of
younger scholars have cast their attention eastward, generating exciting new work on
Canadian relations with specific countries and regions across the Pacific region. This
article draws on some of their work, as well as the author’s own long-standing research
on Canada’s Department of External Affairs, to weigh the Pacific’s changing importance to
Canada. The article argues that the domestic and foreign policies of Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau, elected in 1968, were truly transformational. Trudeau swept away the traditional
hesitations and confining North Atlanticism that characterized the diplomacy of his post-
war predecessors. Instead, he pursued a full-throttled policy of strategic engagement that
repositioned Asia front and centre of contemporary Canadian foreign policy.
Keywords
Canada-Asia relations, Canada-Pacific relations, Canada-China relations, Canada-India
relations, Pierre Trudeau
Understanding Asia’s place in Canada’s international history since 1945 is not
always easy. A rich and persistent romantic tradition is inclined to claim deep
Canadian roots in Asia in the form of established trade relations, missionary enter-
prises, and foreign aid. Implicitly, Canada’s deepening engagement with contem-
porary Asia reflects the natural working out of the country’s inevitable historic
destiny. Steely-eyed realists have long rejected this view, dismissing the Pacific
region as peripheral to Canada’s core interests in the United States, and perhaps
1.
The views expressed in this paper are the author’s alone, and do not reflect the policies or views of
the Government of Canada or Global Affairs Canada.
Corresponding author:
Greg Donaghy, Head, Historical Section, Global Affairs Canada, 125 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A
0G2, Canada.
Email: greg.donaghy@international.gc.ca
136
International Journal 74(1)
Western Europe. This view certainly underpinned the dominant interpretation of
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s approach to the Pacific during his 16 years in
office. His excursions into Asia are treated as simply pit stops on his grand foreign
policy ‘‘pirouette’’ away from the United States, and then back again. Progressive
Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s turn towards free trade with the
United States completed the manoeuvre as Canada hunkered down in its North
American fastness. Ahistorical to their core, Ottawa policymakers and policy
wonks have readily accepted this received history, bemoaning Canada’s obstinate
failure to engage with rising Asia, and trotting out papers calling for Ottawa to
‘‘strategize’’ the Pacific, to catch up to Australia.2
Romantics and realists distort Canada’s Pacific past, and both groups under-
value the transformative character of Trudeau’s efforts to engage Asia. An accurate
appreciation of the extent to which Canada was not a Pacific nation in the two
decades after 1945 casts Trudeau’s Asian policies into relief. His government’s
sustained and cumulative engagements with China, Japan, and the rest of Asia
represented a more coherent foreign policy strategy than is generally acknowl-
edged, and signalled a permanent shift in Canada’s global alignment. Reflected
in, and reinforced by, a series of domestic changes—a shift in political power to
western Canada, accelerating Asian immigration, and changes in Ottawa’s foreign
policy establishment—Canadians’ view of their place in the world changed irrev-
ocably between 1968 and 1984. Trudeau’s ‘‘Pacific tilt’’ transformed Canada from a
North Atlantic to a Pacific nation.
During the postwar decades of the 1940s and 1950s, Canada was undeniably a
North Atlantic nation. Its cultural, economic, and political interests lay in Europe,
where the main Cold War threat remained Joseph Stalin’s communist Soviet Union.3
Twice in a generation, Canadians had gone to war to protect those interests, leaving
behind over 100,000 dead. Postwar Canada was overwhelmingly European in origin
and outlook. Asian-Canadians, largely excluded by racist legislation, accounted for
just 0.52% of the population in 1951.4 Canadians exported 83% of their goods to
Europe and the United States, sending less than 5% to Asia.5 In 1950, 46% of
Canadian diplomats were stationed in Europe, and just 12% in Asia.
Even as the nationalist and revolutionary masses of postwar Asia bounded,
often violently, on to the global stage, Canada continued to approach the continent
2.
For a critical review of Asia’s place in Canadian historiography, see John Price, Orienting Canada:
Race, Empire, and the Transpacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 2–3. A typical call to strategize
Asia is Patrick James’s ‘‘Grand, bland, or somewhat planned? Toward a Canadian strategy for the
Indo-Pacific Region,’’ SPP Research Paper, University of Calgary, https://www.policyschool.ca/
wp-content/uploads/2016/03/indo-pacific-region-james.pdf (accessed 2 January 2019).
3.
I have made this point elsewhere. See ‘‘Pacific diplomacy: Canadian statecraft and the Korean War,
1950–53,’’ in Rick Guisso and Yong-Sik Yoo, eds., Canada and Korea: Perspectives 2000 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press and the Centre for Korean Studies, 2002), 81–82.
4.
Dominion Bureau of Statistics, The Canada Year Book 1952–53 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer and
Controller of Stationery, 1953).
5.
Canada Year Book for 1952–53, 933.
Donaghy
137
through a North Atlantic prism. As historian David Webster demonstrates,
this was certainly the case in Indonesia—then the fifth largest country in the
world, the largest Muslim-majority state, and a charter member of the new post-
colonial order.6 With Canada elected to the UN Security Council in 1948,
Canadian diplomats were surprised to discover Indonesia at the top of their
agenda. The former Dutch colony had declared independence in 1945, named
Sukarno as president, and launched an armed struggle against its Dutch rulers.
When US efforts to broker Indonesia’s independence ran afoul of Dutch oppos-
ition, Canadian External Affairs Minister L.B. Pearson and UN representative
Andrew McNaughton rushed to compromise. They cared little about Indonesia’s
fate, but were motivated by fears that Dutch–American tensions might upset
ongoing and delicate North Atlantic Treaty negotiations.7
Interest in Indonesia flickered briefly in 1953, when the opportunity for wheat
sales beckoned. Ottawa responded with a small mission in Jakarta, prospecting for
trade in this ‘‘potentially wealthy state,’’ while encouraging closer contacts with the
West.8 Trade expert George Heasman set up shop in borrowed offices, finding extra
space in hotel rooms and beneath the sprawling veranda of the Hotel des Indes.
It was an inauspicious start, and bilateral relations remained anaemic. When Prime
Minister Louis St. Laurent passed through on his 1954 world tour, the delegation
returned home with unappealing memories of ‘‘Sukarno boasting and posturing.’’9
Ted Newton, who doubtless dreamed of a better fate, responded to his appoint-
ment as Canada’s second ambassador with bemused wonder: ‘‘Indonesia? The
other side of the world[.] . . . [M]y ignorance was colossal and what little knowledge
I possessed of it was bookish and remote.’’10
Trade was disappointing. Early wheat sales temporarily goosed trade figures
upward, but total trade soon settled in at roughly
$1 million annually, far
below prewar levels, which had reached CA$8.2 million in 1941. Canadian exports
crept up to just over $2 million by 1960. Foreign aid, which remained confined to
Commonwealth countries for most of the decade, was equally insignificant.
Progressive Conservative external affairs minister Howard Green offered three
Otter aircraft in 1958, followed by $300,000 worth of wheat flour in 1960, a min-
imal aid package totalling just $2.37 million.11
More important, Canadian governments were loath to complicate solid North
Atlantic relationships by involvement in the Pacific, and they kept their distance.
Ottawa rejected Indonesian requests for military aid in 1954, insisting that
6.
This discussion draws heavily on David Webster, ‘‘Eyeing the Indies: Canadian relations with
Indonesia, 1956–1999,’’ in Catherine Briggs, ed., Modern Canada: 1945 to Present (Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 2014), 218–229.
7.
David Webster, Fire and the Full Moon: Canada and Indonesia in a Decolonizing World
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 42–43.
8.
Cited in Webster, ‘‘Eyeing the Indies,’’ 218.
9.
Charles Ritchie, Diplomatic Passport: More Undiplomatic Diaries (Toronto: Macmillan, 1981), 69.
10.
Cited in Webster, ‘‘Eyeing the Indies,’’ 216.
11.
Figures from P.M. van Weert, ‘‘The politics of Canada’s foreign aid programme: Indonesia—A
case study’’ (Master’s thesis, McMaster University, 1979), 100.
138
International Journal 74(1)
‘‘nearer neighbours had a more direct interest.’’12 When Indonesia sought help in
its dispute with the Dutch over West New Guinea, progressive Conservative Prime
Minister John Diefenbaker refused to be drawn in. Ottawa maintained ties with
Jakarta, but inched away when Sukarno challenged the creation of Malaysia in the
early 1960s. Sukarno’s decision to quit the UN and form a...
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