On a hot September evening in 1945, Igor Gouzenko slipped out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa and brought Canada into the Cold War. Mackenzie King’s first inclination was to deliver the Russian cypher clerk back to his masters. Canadians could not escape the post-war trauma so easily. Nor, in their unaccustomed prosperity, did they wish to do so. The war seems to have convinced most Canadians of the need to play a role in the world. The collective security Mackenzie King had so scorned between the wars might have stopped Hitler; the new feeling was that it certainly must stop Josef Stalin. Prosperity raised Canadian self-confidence, and it made the costs of defence, diplomacy, and external aid vastly more bearable.
A return to isolationism would, in any case, have been impossible. Gouzenko’s revelation that a Soviet spy ring was operating in Canada, extending even into the sacred sanctum of the Department of External Affairs, only renewed awareness of a struggle that had begun with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Instead of its old geographical immunity, Canada found itself placed squarely between two hostile neighbours. Knowledgeable Canadians might argue that a war-ravaged Soviet Union would have all that it could do to absorb its new European satrapies, but Canadians since 1940 were no longer the sole judges of what they must do for their defence. Acutely aware that Washington had never acknowledged Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic—the vital geographical buffer between the United States and Russia—Ottawa officials confessed that they would have to do more in continental defence than any cool assessment of the risks might warrant. Otherwise, the United States might defend Canada out of her vast geographic future.
Not all Canadians agreed. Isolationism had survived the war, notably in French Canada and at the universities. In a Soviet-American conflict, only dreamers could believe in Canadian neutrality, but the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon would breed such dreamers by the thousand. Mackenzie King had been as dismayed as anyone by the drift of post-war power politics, but he and his caution were gone by 1949. In Louis St. Laurent, the able, ambitious officials in the Department of External Affairs had someone to fight their battles in the Cabinet and to give voice to their bold vision of Canada’s place in the world. Whatever intellectuals, isolationists, and a tiny fringe of Communist apologists might wish, most Canadians were intrigued by their international stature and converted to the once-suspect doctrine of collective security.
In the wartime alliance, Canadian officials had insisted on a “functional principle”: representation in United Nations councils only when Canada could be a major actor. In allocating supplies or feeding refugees, Canadians must have a voice; on grand strategy, they would be silent. At San Francisco in May 1945, Canadian delegates applied the same “functional principle” to Canada’s role in the new United Nations Organization. Between the great powers, bent on monopolizing decision making, and a host of minor countries with voices but no leverage, Canada was a “middle power,” with too little influence to claim a global voice, but with too great a material strength to be ignored.
On the whole, “middle” was not a category that major powers deigned to notice. Canada was excluded from talks on a German peace treaty—pretext enough to withdraw its occupation forces in 1946 and to send no more than good wishes to the Berlin airlift of 1948. Within the United Nations, deadlocked almost at once by stormy Cold
War debates, Canada’s pretensions of independence were brutally deflated by Andrei Gromyko: it was, claimed the Soviet delegate, only “the boring second fiddle in the American orchestra.”
The charge was true enough to be deeply wounding. Canadian diplomats struggled to give their country options beyond the U. S. sphere. In the wake of the Brussels treaty of 1948, cobbled together by Britain, France, and the Low Countries after the Soviet take-over of Czechoslovakia, Ottawa had used an invitation to join the alliance as a lever to involve the United States. As promoted by Escott Reid, an ingenious official in External Affairs, a North Atlantic alliance was almost “a providential solution” to a host of Canadian concerns. It would prevent a new American isolationism, but it would also subject Washington’s policy makers to the influence of more powerful allies than Canada. It might even create a broader economic community for a country searching desperately for alternatives to the U. S. commercial embrace. Among the twelve signatories in Washington in April 1949, there were many who claimed some authorship of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato); a handful of Canadians could take discreet but honest pride in their creation. A prosperous middle power had shown its value.
NATO and the Marshall Plan of 1948 solidified the front lines of the Cold War in Europe. They did not affect the titanic civil war in China, which ended in 1949 with a Communist triumph. Ottawa, with whatever misgivings, might well have recognized the new regime. For once, it followed the U. S. lead and did nothing. Suddenly, in June 1950, forces of the Soviet client state of North Korea invaded the U. S.-backed republic to the south. A Soviet boycott at the United Nations allowed the Security Council to authorize U. N. assistance—although an outraged United States would have poured in its troops in any case. U. N. support made it easier for Ottawa to dispatch three destroyers and make an air-transport squadron available to the U. S. airlift to the Far East. Six weeks later, with U. N. forces driven back to a narrow bridgehead, the St. Laurent government added a brigade of 5,000 troops to its commitment. Eight months later, when Canadian soldiers finally entered battle, the campaign had careered up and down the narrow peninsula, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese troops had come to North Korea’s aid. The Canadians spent two more years of struggle along the 38th parallel until the armistice in 1953. For Canada, the cost included 312 soldiers’ lives.
Fiardly had the war in the Far East absorbed all available U. S. forces than the horrifying implications struck NATO planners. Flad the Russians deliberately sucked U. S.
Rene Levesque interviews French-Canadian soldiers in Korea. If Quebecers, like other Canadians, were puzzled and surprised by their role in the post-war world, Levesque made himself their guide and interpreter through his brilliant television program Point de Mire. In turn, his credibility as a commentator gave him powerful credentials as a politician.
Military power into a remote corner of Asia to leave Europe defenceless? Instead of a leisurely rearmament, nato needed strength at once. The wartime allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, was summoned from retirement to become Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Ottawa had to respond. A new brigade was recruited from the part-time Army Reserve, with the balance of an infantry division, 15,000 men, in immediate reserve. Twelve squadrons of jet fighters would strengthen NATO’s obsolete air forces. A crash program to build destroyer escorts would meet a Soviet submarine threat in the Atlantic. Canadian defence spending, only $196 million in 1947, soared to $2 billion by 1952, two-fifths of all federal spending for the year. In the crisis, the original Canadian dream that nato could also be an economic and even a cultural union faded fast. Instead, even the unthinkable was possible: West Germany was
Rearmed and two bitterly antagonistic neighbours, Greece and Turkey, were added to NATO to “secure” its southern flank.
NATO grew under a menace more dangerous than that of Korea. Far sooner than experts had predicted, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. Thermonuclear weapons followed fast. So did huge bombers, able to deliver nuclear devastation to the heart of North America. Elected president in 1952, Eisenhower switched U. S strategy to a policy of nuclear deterrence—“a bigger bang for a buck.” A new world war might now begin in Western Europe or with the mutual destruction of the nuclear superpowers. In either case, Canada would be involved. For the first time, the defence of its vast territory actually mattered. To protect the U. S. deterrent, three sets of radar stations, the Pinetree, Mid-Canada, and Distant Early Warning (dew) lines sprouted across Canada’s northern expanse. Squadrons of fighters practised interceptions. Hundreds of millions of dollars were poured into the development of a supersonic interceptor, the Avro Arrow, powerful enough to cover Canada’s vast distances.
Surprisingly few Canadians, English or French speaking, condemned NATO, the Korean involvement, or the rearmament of the 1950s. Brooke Claxton, the defence minister who presided over the tripling of the armed forces, even believed that conscription had lost its political dangers. His faith was not tested: regions that prosperity had bypassed filled the ranks of the expanding forces with volunteers. The implications of the nuclear age were slowly absorbed. Rearmament had eased a slight recession in 1949, and it spread jobs and contracts. As part of the 1954 agreement to build the dew line, Washington even recognized Canada’s territorial sovereignty in the Arctic.
The Cold War also heightened Canada’s bilateral involvement with the United States. After 1947, Canada’s armed forces were systematically converted from British to American equipment, tactics, and training. Canadian troops in NATO joined the British Army of the Rhine, but the rcaf’s air division was integrated with the U. S. Air Force. Air defences in Canada developed in close co-orperation with the United States long before the North American Air Defence Command (norad) was formally established in 1957.
Rational, beneficial, even inescapable as Canada’s Cold War arrangements might be, they could be frustrating for those who had imagined more creative and idealistic roles for a young and prosperous middle power. If NATO had proved less than a providential escape from the bilateral yoke, perhaps there would be more hope in a Commonwealth organization which, by definition, Americans could hardly join. Mackenzie King and St. Laurent deserved much of the credit for broadening a small club of white dominions into an organization dominated by Third World countries and their concerns. It was King—grandson of the leader of the Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837—who helped persuade India’s Jawaharlal Nehru that Commonwealth membership was compatible with India’s long and sometimes cruel struggle for independence. Louis St. Laurent’s discomfort with much that was ostentatiously “British” gave him a kinship with the Indian leader and the newer Commonwealth members. In turn, Commonwealth connections made Canada a logical source of military observers in Kashmir after the first India-Pakistan War of 1948. In 1952, at Colombo, capital of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), a Commonwealth conference committed Canada to its first significant program of external aid.
Yet, like NATO, the Commonwealth left Canada with only meagre options. No more than any other alumni association could the Commonwealth interfere with its members’ careers and private lives. Only a few of the new members maintained the parliamentary institutions that symbolized a common British heritage. Nehru’s conspicuous neutralism and the diverse and often conflicting policies of other members, notably South Africa’s apartheid, were reminders that the Commonwealth survived as a forum, not as an alliance. Not all Canadians understood the changes or welcomed them if they did.
After NATO and the Commonwealth, Canada’s third multilateral forum was the United Nations. Canadians had welcomed the new world body in 1945 with an emotional idealism that somehow survived the worst years of Cold War deadlock. Perhaps it was the relative proximity of U. N. Headquarters in New York, or guilty memories of letting down the League of Nations, but ordinary Canadians, as well as their diplomats, showed a constant allegiance to a world body that more often frustrated than fulfilled its designers’ hopes.
Canada’s patient commitment to the United Nations was finally vindicated at Suez. Lester Pearson, one of O. D. Skelton’s ablest appointees to the Department of External Affairs, had switched from civil servant to politician when he had replaced St. Laurent as minister in 1948. Pearson’s prestige was valuable to Canada and to the U. N. Security Council in 1956. It was a difficult year. Furious at the United States’ refusal to finance his Aswan Dam project, on July 26 Egypt’s Carnal Abdel Nasser seized the Suez Canal, connecting the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, from its British and French owners. The tolls from the vital shipping route would replace the U. S. funds needed to finance the dam across the Nile at Aswan. In turn, Britain, France, and the tiny imperilled State of Israel secretly plotted revenge. As planned, Israel struck first, at the end of October, driving an armoured wedge across the Sinai Desert. As agreed with Israel,
Britain and France commanded both Egypt and Israel to stay clear of the canal and, as fast as their rusty war machines allowed, proceeded to intervene directly by bombing the Canal Zone.
Much of the world was outraged. Third World countries instantly sympathized with Egypt. The Russians, who saw Nasser as a client, threatened to bomb London and Paris. The Americans were furious that they had not been consulted. Even St. Laurent’s blood boiled at such apparent latter-day British imperialism. Not least, Whitehall’s assumption that Nasser’s regime would crumble proved absurdly wrong. To add to the crisis, the Suez affair coincided with the brutal Soviet repression of an uprising in Hungary.
For once, the United Nations abandoned posturing for peacemaking, and the clearest reason was the influence of Lester Pearson and the credits that Canada had collected in a decade of middle-power diplomacy. By inserting a multinational peacekeeping force between the combatants, the United Nations helped to extricate British and French forces while the Israelis returned to their own borders. Appropriately, the Canadian who had been commanding the U. N. truce supervisors on the Israeli frontier, Lieutenant-General E. L. M. Burns, took charge of the new United Nations Emergency Force. Among his first problems was softening Colonel Nasser’s blunt rejection of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada, not least because of its British-style uniforms and traditions. After wearying negotiations, Canada was allowed to supply administrative troops for the mundane but necessary support of the U. N. force.
In Canada, Pearson’s achievements met mixed reviews. Opinion polls showed that most Canadians had sympathized with Britain and France. Voters resented their humiliation at the hands of an Egyptian ruler who, in some bizarre fashion, had commanded both Soviet and U. S. backing. Few understood the intricacies of Pearson’s diplomacy and the magnitude of his accomplishment. While the world might understand how Pearson could win the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize, many of the people of a middle-power Canada could not, and their discontent would matter.
World History
