Adam Chapnick

Inevitable co‐dependency (and things best left unsaid): The Grandy report on Canadian‐American relations, 1951‐?

In 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, Canadas Secretary of State for External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, commissioned a comprehensive report on Canadian‐American relations. The project was never completed, and neither it, nor the documents that formed its general framework were ever published. Not surprisingly, the significance of the Grandy Report has been neglected. This paper explores the Reports relevance to the past, present and future of Canadian foreign policy. It concludes that, as the Cold War developed, Ottawas fate became tied inevitably to that of Washington in a relationship of mutual dependence, or co‐dependency. Since the Second World War, the US has tended to exercise power through statements and actions; sometimes, Canadian power can best be understood with reference to those things left unsaid.

Canada’s functional principle: 75 years on:

On 29 March 2016, in a speech at the University of Ottawa, Stéphane Dion outlined “the guiding principle” that he intended to follow as the Trudeau government’s first minister of global affairs. He called it “responsible conviction”: an approach to policymaking that combined the need to balance his personal sense of right and wrong with a pragmatic understanding of the consequences of Ottawa’s policy choices. The decision to announce Canada’s new global posture so publicly recalls the conduct of the Canadian foreign policy establishment during the Second World War, when Ottawa first proclaimed its allegiance to another decision-making framework: the functional principle. This brief essay reviews the history and utility of the Canadian version of functionalism with an eye to drawing lessons for Minister Dion’s successor, Chrystia Freeland, and her contemporaries. Understanding the ultimate plight of the functional principle might make the new minister less adamant about placing responsible conviction at the centre of her foreign policy platform.

John W. Holmes: A Re-Introduction

For close to 50 years, John W Holmes (1910-1988) played a leading role in the development and interpretation of Canada and its place in the world. Long-time students of Canadian foreign policy still recall his remarkable abilities as a diplomat, essayist, historian, commentator, university professor, and mentor. Nevertheless, today, Holmess name no longer resonates with the average Canadian as it may have in the 1960s and 1970s, when he was a frequent commentator on television and in the newspapers. Of the substantial body of scholarship he accumulated in the 1970s and 1980s, his two-volume history of postwar Canadian foreign policy continues to appear on some course outlines and is consulted by university students (particularly in history departments), but a great deal of his other writing is relatively unknown to contemporary students and policymakers.Given the increasingly presentist focus of the study of Canadas place in the world, this is perhaps hardly surprising. Canadians today, or so we are often told, face challenges that are nothing like those before them. The world is more complex, and as a result we need new solutions, new approaches, and new ways of understanding our globalized village. What relevance, some might ask, could a man who passed away before the Cold War even came to a close, let alone before 9/11, have to Canadians with an interest in foreign policy today?To mark the centenary of Holmess birth, the editors of International Journal asked the two of us - Chapnick is a historian who has just published a biography of Holmes; Nossal, a political scientist, was a student of Holmess - to examine what relevance Holmess reflections on Canadian foreign policy might have in the 21st century.1 We invited nine commentators to write short papers inspired by some OfHoImCS1S most notable quotations. Our contributors were selected with Holmess own approach to such academic exercises in mind: a mix of young and old, academics and policy practitioners, with both traditional and nontraditional approaches to the study of Canadian foreign policy. Some, like Nossal, knew Holmes well; others, like Chapnick, had never met him; indeed, some contributors had hardly read his work before they were asked to participate. AU, however, have brought a flair for writing and a depth of analysis to the quotations that would have made Holmes proud.There is no denying that the world has changed since Holmess name stopped appearing in newspapers, magazines, and academic publications across Canada and around the world. Denis Stairs, whose academic career spans both Holmess most prolific years and the two decades that have followed, captures those changes effectively in his contribution to this collection. But Stairs also demonstrates that much of the international context is not quite as different as contemporary analysts often make it out to be. Moreover, one might even venture to say that the demands of the 21st century, while more complex, are hardly greater than those faced by Holmes during his junior years as a civil servant in the 1940s. Two years after he joined the Department of External Affairs in 1943, Holmes and Lester Pearson were leaving the Hotel Savoy in London when they noticed a news bulletin informing them of the detonation of the worlds first atomic weapon in Hiroshima. The paradigm shift faced by policymakers that day was overwhelming, and its impact on the development of foreign policy was no less significant than that of 9/11 on the world more recently. The ability to be flexible, to adapt to changing international circumstances, and to manage the unexpected are all skills that Holmes was forced to master. Given the events of the last decade, the lessons that he learned, and passed on to generations of Canadians from all walks of life, are all the more relevant and worth recalling than they ever have been.John Wendell Holmes was born in London, Ontario, on 18 June 1910. The second of four children, he was brought up in a household that was fairly standard for a smaller city in Ontario at the time. …