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Article Excerpt
Canadians have long delighted in the notion of a diplomatic "golden age," whose Pearsonian qualities of selfless and progressive internationalism set them apart as a chosen, if perhaps smug, people. Even today, the notion retains its potency, encouraging pundits and politicians alike to hark back to a simpler age when, in the pithy words of journalist Lawrence Martin, there "was some idealism around this place. We didn't kneel at the altar of militarism." (2) While historians have generally acknowledged that there was obviously more Canadian foreign policy after 1945, they have been skeptical of the idealist notions associated with a transformative "golden age." Canada's postwar diplomats, argues Carleton University historian Norman Hillmer, "were cautious, careful in their actions, and hewed closer to the approach followed by Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King in the 1930s than they later confessed." (3) King's successors grasped the nature of global power, were conscious of Canada's limited means, and were inclined to shun international responsibilities. As political scientist Denis Stairs explains, they were traditional realists "who owed more to Metternich than to Axworthy." (8)
Recent scholarship has tended to confirm these conclusions, while pushing their critical analysis in new directions. Younger academics, more attuned to the Cold War's transitory character and the persistent challenges of the postcolonial world, have begun to explore the limited geographical reach of Canadian diplomacy in the period just after 1945. Their general conclusions are no longer surprising: the familiar North Atlantic and its safe alliance structure, where Canada's most obvious economic and political interests lay, constrained Ottawa's ability to address the emerging challenges of distant lands, torn asunder by decolonization and revolution. (5)
Canada's relationship with a decolonizing Commonwealth Caribbean has not attracted much attention. Consequently, the evolution of this relationship since 1941 remains largely overlooked in the literature, which still tends to emphasize the well-documented prewar period or to offer brief, prescriptive analysis of contemporary policy. (6) Yet Canadian-Caribbean relations after 1941 clearly deserve more study. In 1964, for instance, Canada exported more to this region than it did to India, and it ranked third as a destination for exports from the Caribbean. (7) Nor can the region's later importance as a source of immigrants be overstated. This article begins to address this gap, tracing the Canadian government's reaction to political and economic changes in the Commonwealth Caribbean from the early days of the Second World War until the mid-1960s, when Canada and the area's newly independent states met to fashion a mature relationship. During this quarter-century, Canadian policymakers were often divided over the significance of Caribbean decolonization and their appropriate response. Rarely, and then only briefly, did Ottawa show any signs of developing a coherent strategic vision for its relations with the Caribbean. The result was an inconsistent and incremental approach, seeking largely to meet Canada's immediate economic and political interests. As Klaus Goldschlag, a senior Canadian diplomat, once quipped, "In the Caribbean we have interests but no foreign policy." (8)
By 1939, Canada's relations with the Commonwealth Caribbean were ripe for examination. The product of over two centuries of political and economic interaction, the relationship had settled into a complacent routine in which Canadian salt-fish, wheat, and flour flowed southward in exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum, all effectively subsidized by Ottawa under the terms of the 1925 Canada-British West Indies Trade Agreement. (9) As well, several of the big Canadian banks--the Bank of Montreal, the Bank of Nova Scotia, and the Royal Bank of Canada--had located in the regions in the 19th century and remained very active on the islands they served. While the banking role remained virtually unchanged during the course of the Second World War, trade patterns did not, because the conflict placed outside pressures on them. As American forces moved into the British Caribbean under the provisions of the 1940 "destroyers-for-bases deal," Washington became concerned about the stability of this impoverished corner of the British Empire. In April 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt formally proposed the creation of an Anglo-American commission to promote development within the region. The new Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC), which advised London and Washington on local social and economic developments, was intended to oversee the long march toward independence. (10) While Britain acknowledged Canada's stake in the region's economy, it asked Ottawa not to press for membership, lest the United States insist on inviting representation from the South American republics. (11) Fearful that the British hoped to use the commission to "unload some of [their] economic responsibilities for the dependencies on us," Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was happy to decline membership and avoid any additional responsibilities. (12)
It soon became apparent to Canadian observers, however, that this facile response was inadequate. As the AACC settled in during the spring of 1942, its consideration of issues soon exceeded its mandate: the commission began, to address areas such as the region's food and transportation problems, in which Canada had a large stake. The AACC's American co-chairman, Charles Taussig, had little regard for Canada, whose attitude toward the Caribbean he characterized, not unfairly, as irresponsible and uninformed. Nor did he make much effort to hide his desire to promote American interests at others' expense. (13) During the summer of that year, American authorities unilaterally stockpiled flour in Puerto Rico and used the AACC to pressure colonial authorities in the British West Indies to draw supplies from American rather than Canadian sources. While the quantity initially involved was not significant, Dana Wilgress, the able deputy minister of trade and commerce, pointed out the obvious: "A joint commission, on which we are not represented, is taking steps to divert trade away from Canada." (14) And that struck at the heart of Canadian policy.
In Wilgress's view, Canada's traditional ad hoc approach to Caribbean development was clearly insufficient. The whole incident brought the broader question of the nature of Canada's relationship with the British West Indies into sharper focus. As he wrote to Norman Robertson, the DEA's under-secretary, "I think we are now very definitely faced with the issue as to whether or not we wish to divorce ourselves entirely from the political and economic future of the British West Indies," a course of action Wilgress clearly thought short-sighted. Robertson, however, ignored the letter, perhaps hoping the question might resolve itself or, more likely, finding the pressures of total war in Europe all-consuming.
However, the issue did not disappear. The question of Canada's relations with the Caribbean was reopened in the spring of 1943, when the United States invited Ottawa to a conference on regional social and economic conditions. Robertson, insisting that Canada's links with the Caribbean were solely economic, rejected the invitation. (15) The under-secretary's response provoked a heated reaction from some of his Canadian colleagues. (16) At an interdepartmental meeting in June, Hugh Keenleyside, an assistant under-secretary of state for external affairs, mounted an attack on Robertson's position, an unusual thing to do in the department of the early 1940s. Joined by H. F. Angus and F. H. Soward, the under-secretary's own special wartime assistants, Keenleyside argued that the Anglo-American request represented a test of Canada's willingness to deal with "the world problem of backward areas and colonial economies." Dismissing Canada's own substantial economic stake in the region, he suggested that Canada, as a "disinterested" third party, had an international and moral obligation to ensure that neither Britain nor the United States sought to use the Caribbean Commission to exploit the dependent peoples of the region. (17)
The issue remained unresolved, and debate in the department continued sporadically throughout the summer and fall of 1943. Advocates of a more active Canadian role in the work of the AACC soon found new allies. Two other special wartime assistants to the under-secretary, John Holmes and George Glazebrook, composed a strongly argued paper which went much further than anything then circulating within the department. Framing their paper in the widest terms, they expressed a conviction that the economic, political, and social problems of the colonial world were almost certain to occupy a prominent position on any future global agenda. They drew on the liberal notion that world chaos and war were rooted in international poverty, contending that Canada had an inescapable obligation to...
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