Reason over passion: Pierre Trudeau,human rights,and Canadian foreign policy

Self-determination, sovereignty, and stability

Toward the end of 1968, Prime Minister Trudeau accepted the assurance of the Cuban ambassador in Ottawa that, contrary to press reports, Havana was not involved in training or arming Quebec separatists. In response, Trudeau remarked that it was “a basic requirement for good relations between states that each respect the unity and independence of the other.” ⁹ Earlier that year, in a published collection of essays written throughout his career, Trudeau had issued a plea “of considerable urgency for world peace and the success of the new states that the form of good government known as democratic federalism should be perfected and promoted, in the hope of solving to some extent the world-wide problems of ethnic pluralism.” Six years earlier, he had denounced the growing Quebecois separatism that was beginning to strain the cohesion of Canada’s federation as an example of destabilizing nationalism. ¹⁰ Mindful of Canada’s own domestic situation and a committed believer in federalism and the limits imposed by state sovereignty, Trudeau also proved hostile toward excessive nationalism, factors that, together, led him to oppose a variety of movements for self-determination—itself a human right.

These concerns came to a head early on with Trudeau’s response to the Biafran attempt to secede from Nigeria. The resulting civil war from 1967–1970 provoked deep concern among a growing number of Canadians fixated on events in the so-called Third World, many of whom urged Canada’s government to pursue a United Nations (UN) ceasefire and disburse humanitarian assistance. ¹¹ Ottawa proved forthcoming on the latter, sending supplies to starving Biafrans via Canadian military aircraft. However, when it came to political involvement in the civil war, Trudeau was firm: “We cannot intervene, short of committing an act of war against Nigeria and intervening in the affairs of that country.” ¹² In laying out his reasoning for avoiding direct action, Trudeau stressed that Canada was “distant” and that intervention would be “an act of stupidity,” alarming to African leaders who, with their history of colonialism, would bristle at Western meddling. ¹³ Making a similar case in Cabinet, SSEA Mitchell Sharp added that there was “no evidence of genocide or violation of human rights,” incidents of which could permit action under the UN Charter. ¹⁴ In these explanations, we can trace hesitancy to involve Canada in the internal affairs of another country, especially one where wounds of colonialism were still fresh.

Overall, Trudeau’s position on events in Nigeria was summed up by his response to a reporter’s question about the breakaway province. “Where’s Biafra?” Trudeau inquired. In explaining what seems to be a rather callous comment, he later told journalist Peter Newman that legally Biafra did not exist, and so “[t]o ask, ‘Where is Biafra?’ is tantamount to asking ‘Where is Laurentia?’ the name Quebec nationalists give to the independent state of their dreams.” ¹⁵ Nigeria, after all, was a federation like Canada, a fact that did not escape notice either by Trudeau or French president Charles de Gaulle, who had famously called for Quebec independence in 1967 and who likened Biafra to Quebec. ¹⁶ Mindful of French backing of Quebec separatism, Trudeau was wary of outside intervention in Canadian internal affairs, just as he took a dim view of blanket self-determination for “nations, national groups or tribes,” explaining in a 1968 defence of his position on Biafra that it was “in no one’s interest to divide the world along ethnic lines.” So he did not accept that “groups of people within a country had the right of self-determination, and the rest of the world had the right to support them in seeking independence.” In words that would have resonance in Canada only two years later, he noted that on Biafra he would “not be stopped by bleeding hearts.” ¹⁷

Nor did time change Trudeau’s position. Years later, he and Head stressed the strictures imposed by state sovereignty and their concern over the threat to Nigerian unity, a concern which one political opponent regarded as “an obsessive wariness about anything that looked like secession.” ¹⁸ Yet Britain, the United States of America, and many African countries shared these concerns over Biafran separatism and the implications it had for secessionist movements more broadly. A preference for stability and a mindfulness of Canada’s own domestic position conditioned Canada’s diplomatic stance toward the Nigerian civil war, though humanitarian concerns did result in the despatch of relief supplies.

Biafra was one among many self-determination movements opposed by Trudeau’s government. Canada did not support East Timor’s independence struggle, nor did it take serious action in confronting the Indonesian government’s crackdown on Timorese secessionism. A similar lack of activity characterized the Canadian response to the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. Despite a significant Canadian development assistance program and deep involvement with Pakistan’s nuclear program, Trudeau failed to use these levers to punish the Pakistani government for its violent attempts to crush Bangladeshi independence as some activists hoped. As Head later recalled, “Trudeau did eventually recognize Bangladesh, but he explicitly drew the Quebec parallel” while mulling a response to secession and the resulting bloodshed. ¹⁹ As with Biafra, East Timor and Bangladesh were cases where Trudeau avoided involvement in nationalist conflicts, ones that seemed to parallel Canada’s situation all too closely.

The Trudeau government’s aversion to self-determination and preference for stability were not confined to the Third World, but extended behind the Iron Curtain. Asked whether he had pressed for the release of jailed Ukrainian nationalists while visiting the USSR in 1971, the prime minister explained that his stance “in the Soviet Union or in Canada is that anyone who breaks the law in order to assert his nationalism doesn’t get much sympathy from me. But I didn’t feel like bringing up any case which would have caused Mr. Brezhnev or Mr. Kosygin to say, ‘Why should you put your revolutionaries in jail and we shouldn’t put ours?’” Consistent with his views on secessionist movements, the remark provoked criticism for likening Ukrainian dissidents to Front de libération du Québec terrorists. ²⁰ Trudeau’s consistency is startling, given the extent to which human rights were employed as a rhetorical weapon during the Cold War, with Western leaders often admonishing their Soviet counterparts for their repression of Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic nationalists. Trudeau, then, avoided scoring easy rhetorical points. Nor did he abandon this position even with the Cold War’s end. In reflecting on the collapse of the Soviet Union, in his memoir Trudeau complained, “When Gorbachev was trying to hold the union together by transforming it into a truly federal state, we in the West made sure it would break up by rushing to recognize every Tom, Dick and Harry republic that decided to proclaim its independence.” ²¹ Whatever else it may have been, his opposition to what he saw as excessive nationalism and his commitment to sovereign state jurisdiction were admirable in that Trudeau applied them universally. The result was little official Canadian enthusiasm for the right to self-determination.

Interests, sovereignty, and the fate of freedom elsewhere

Beyond deploring secessionism and valuing sovereignty, Trudeau prized détente and the broadening of Canada’s external relationships, factors that ranked well above promoting rights abroad. Due to his concerns about Canada’s economic reliance on the United States of America, he sought to forge new economic relationships for Canada among socialist bloc countries and in what was then called the Third World. In turn, human rights violations in these countries were largely an afterthought. While Canada supported multilateral rights initiatives, within the scope of the country’s bilateral relations with various rights offenders, Trudeau did little to stake out a tough stance. He and his government stuck to this position even as the rights revolution took shape internationally and growing numbers of Canadian activists began to challenge the official foreign policy line that rights were not a pressing matter of national interest. When international rights issues were pursued by the Trudeau government, they were done so legalistically through multilateral channels.

Recounting for historians Robert Bothwell and Jack Granatstein that he had raised rights issues with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in a quiet tête-à-tête during his 1971 visit to the Soviet Union, Trudeau explained that while “this area was important in human and personal terms … it shouldn’t prevent talking to the USSR. The survival of mankind was worth talking about even if you disliked the USSR’s attitude on human rights.” ²² Trudeau did plenty of talking with the Soviets, as well with the Communist Chinese and Cubans, none of whom, to put it lightly, had a sterling record on protecting their citizens’ civil and political rights. Motivating his outreach efforts were goals of lessening world tension and normalizing and expanding Canadian relations with these countries, efforts paralleled by most Western governments in the 1970s.

There were human rights issues that Canadian officials took up with their Soviet counterparts: the right of Jewish migrants to leave the Soviet Union and the reunification of families separated by the Iron Curtain. But caution pervaded. Discussing Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin’s October 1971 trip to Canada, the first such visit by a Soviet head of government, Trudeau explained that he had raised these two matters, but that he had been careful in his language to avoid the impression of outside pressure. “I pointed out very carefully to him,” Trudeau told the House of Commons, “that I was raising this matter merely on a humanitarian basis and that, as with other subjects, I was not trying to interfere in the internal affairs of their country but I was appealing to him on a humanitarian basis.” ²³ While Jewish groups in Canada loudly protested Kosygin’s visit to Canada (and a Hungarian nationalist would tackle the Soviet premier on Parliament Hill), the government’s emphasis on improving relations with Moscow meant downplaying rights violations. Later reflecting on the mistreatment of Soviet Jews, Mitchell Sharp admitted that “from time to time I did protest publicly, so that Canada’s point of view would be apparent to all. But more often I enquired of those who urged me to protest what their purpose was—to help the victims or to give satisfaction to Canadians that their government had expressed their abhorrence of the way the victims were being treated?” ²⁴ Here, as with disagreements with Washington over the US war effort in Vietnam, the Canadian stance was conditioned by quiet diplomacy and at odds with activists’ demands for a louder approach.

Rarely did Trudeau offer sharp criticism of rights violations in Eastern bloc countries; rather, he and his ministers avoided rhetorical sound and fury of the sort that characterized former Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker’s position on Soviet rights violations and denial of Eastern European self-determination. ²⁵ In explaining why he did not do more to protest the treatment of Ukrainian dissidents, Sharp mused, “[W]hat is important is helping people, not giving ourselves the satisfaction of having made protests in particular ways,” and so he advocated using “very persistent and quiet diplomatic means.” ²⁶ When Trudeau was asked in the House of Commons to respond to the Polish government’s imposition of martial law to crush protests by the Solidarity movement in 1982, in effect he defended Warsaw’s actions by noting that the crackdown avoided outside intervention by the Soviet military in what would have been a replay of the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Furthermore, he added, his own government had used the military under the War Measures Act in the October Crisis of 1970, just as the British were then doing in Northern Ireland. ²⁷ There was, then, a tendency to draw equivalencies between West and East, which aligned with adherence to norms about state sovereignty. For Trudeau, at least, such considerations, along with his allergy to destabilizing nationalism, remained paramount even as the Helsinki Accords legitimized criticism of Soviet conduct.

Agreed to in 1975 by thirty-five states (most of Europe plus Canada and the USA), the Helsinki Accords were meant to improve East–West relations and normalize the postwar division of Europe. Negotiated over two years at the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), the agreement included language on human rights, which, combined with monitoring groups and follow-up meetings between its signatories, ultimately played an important role in fostering the rise of organized dissent within the Soviet empire. Enthusiastic about the CSCE negotiations, Canadian diplomats pushed Canada’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to take a firm stand on family reunification and migration, a stance supported by Cabinet. ²⁸ Speaking at the signing ceremony for the accords, Trudeau praised the agreement for recognizing “that security and co-operation are not matters of concern only to governments. To usher in a new era in Europe we need contacts among individuals, exchanges of views and opinions.” ²⁹ He saw it, then, as a means of fostering détente and of promoting stability, and in his comments he noted too that it would aid in family reunification efforts. Trudeau also informed Jewish groups in Canada that Helsinki afforded him the right to raise the treatment of Soviet Jews. ³⁰ In short, it provided a multilateral basis for raising rights concerns with Eastern bloc countries. Yet still, Trudeau remained hesitant. As Mark MacGuigan later recalled, in weighing a response to the Polish crackdown on Solidarity, Trudeau had asked him how he “could possibly justify Western meddling in the internal affairs of Poland,” to which MacGuigan “replied that normal international law in this respect had been drastically altered” by Helsinki. ³¹

Canadian diplomats seem to have been more gung-ho than the prime minister about pursuing Soviet rights violations through the Helsinki framework. At the opening session of a follow-up CSCE meeting in Belgrade in 1977, the Canadian delegation admitted that provisions under the Final Act were “unilateral undertakings” by individual states, but because of the multilateral nature of the agreement Canada rejected the view that discussion of its provisions, including those covering human rights, “constitutes an intervention in the internal affairs of participating states.” ³² Thus, Western countries were permitted to scrutinize whether Eastern bloc countries were living up to their rights obligations (and vice versa). Similarly, Mitchell Sharp noted that the CSCE process was “valuable” in terms of “putting pressure on the Soviet Union with respect to cultural contacts, emigration, family reunification, and human rights.” To Mark MacGuigan, meanwhile, Helsinki “gave us an opportunity to critique the members of the Warsaw Pact, particularly on their human rights performances, and to give voice to the powerful feelings of our domestic minorities. Canada was thus an active participant in the pillorying of the Soviet Bloc.” ³³ Trudeau’s officials appear to have been far more cognizant than the prime minister of Helsinki’s value as a human rights instrument.

As the CSCE process indicates, under Trudeau Canada did emerge as a supporter of multilateral rights initiatives. At the UN, the Canadian delegation backed a range of international instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (1979) and the Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religious Belief (1981), and worked through the UN Commission on Human Rights. Moreover, in 1976 the Trudeau government ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. ³⁴ Binding, the covenants not only necessitated action on Canada’s part at home, but, like the Helsinki Accords, they provided international legal cover for criticism of other signatories. As MacGuigan put it, parties to the covenants and to the various UN rights agreements “assume obligations both to their own citizens and to the international community. Every state party to such a treaty in effect has invited every other state party to examine the treatment it affords its citizens.” Yet, he stressed that there were limits to this scrutiny, for condemnation of other states “may only serve to harden attitudes,” and he maintained that Canada’s “first priority” lay domestically. By advancing rights at home—and here he pointed to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a constitutionally entrenched bill of rights and Trudeau’s signature achievement—Canada would become “a creditable voice” for human rights internationally. ³⁵ In short, only by fulfilling its own multilateral rights commitments would Canada be positioned to criticize other states, a recognition of the two-way nature of human rights dialogues. This point had been spelled out in Foreign Policy for Canadians, the government’s 1970 policy blueprint. Emphasizing the connection between domestic developments and international obligations, the document made clear that Canada was focused inward toward meeting commitments, and avoided any mention of sanctioning rights violators or cutting ties with odious regimes. Instead, it stated simply that “the Canadian record of implementation” would serve as an example to other countries. ³⁶

Although backing multilateral rights agreements, bilaterally Canada was much more circumspect, not only because the preoccupation with sovereignty impeded action but because other interests took precedence. In addition to pursuing détente, a centrepiece of Trudeau’s foreign policy was the broadening of Canada’s international links, especially in the economic realm. So, not only did the Trudeau years see an outreach to Cuba, China, and the USSR, but they saw an aggressive trade promotion campaign that included trade missions to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Romania, none of which had a sterling rights record. ³⁷ Furthermore, Canadian government trade and finance officials supported expanded exports to, and investment with, the military regimes in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, and with a variety of authoritarian governments in Africa. The trade-off of dealing with various regimes as they were, and not as they ought to have been, was human rights.

For instance, on South Africa, the target of activists keen to isolate the apartheid regime, Canada sought to balance trade and human rights, a position outlined in Foreign Policy for Canadians: “Canadian interests would best be served by maintaining its [sic] current policy framework on the problems of Southern Africa which balances two policy themes [Economic Growth and Social Justice] of importance to Canadians.” ³⁸ In practice, growth trumped rights. Seven years later, William Barton, the Canadian representative on the UN Security Council, referred to Canada’s past denunciations of apartheid in fora such as the UN, and noted that Ottawa was both discouraging sporting contacts and following a Security Council resolution barring arms sales. Yet he explained that there would be no further economic sanctions, because an “essential element of Canadian foreign policy is that we trade in peaceful goods with all countries, even those with whose politics we are in profound disagreement.” As for effecting change, what would be the “decisive element” was resistance within the country itself, not outside intervention into South African affairs. ³⁹ While the maintenance of Canadian economic ties was self-serving, it reflected one strain of thought regarding what diplomat Max Yalden called “the continuing debate over the question whether human rights should be dealt with through engagement on the one hand or isolation and even punishment on the other,” or as Trudeau characterized trade even with repugnant regimes: “it’s not only good economically, but it’s good in the human relations between these countries.” ⁴⁰ This was a traditional position in Canadian foreign policymaking, with successive generations of government officials largely hopeful that contact with Canada and the West more broadly would promote change, whether in apartheid South Africa, right-wing Chile, or communist Cuba.

Fundamentally, promoting human rights at the bilateral level via sanctions treads too closely to violating state sovereignty. Addressing the place of human rights in Canadian foreign policy in 1977, SSEA Don Jamieson was clear that there were no rules for raising “what are essentially the domestic concerns of other states.” He appealed for Canadians to understand that other societies held different perspectives on human rights “because they may not be Western or democratic in background, or partly because their economic situations are vastly different from ours.” Beyond this appeal for a recognition of cultural relativism, he added that Canada was “not perfect” and had its own work to do in securing rights at home. ⁴¹ Jamieson’s comments downplayed the promotion of international human rights, especially in non-Western countries. Some of Canada’s allies, too, had repressive governments. Responding to criticism of Canadian policy toward right-wing regimes in Greece and Portugal, Sharp noted that he and other Trudeau government officials had emphasized broadly “the desirability of all NATO member states maintaining democratic institutions and divesting themselves of colonial encumbrances,” but that to offer specific, pointed criticism of these allies would do little to enhance private overtures to these governments. ⁴² In short, quiet diplomacy was a blanket policy, applied North and South, East and West.

Quiet diplomacy, or something louder?

By the mid-1970s, as the rights revolution took hold at home and abroad, Canadian government quiescence faced an increasingly vocal challenge from within Canada. From without, moreover, sharp contrasts were drawn with Jimmy Carter, who—rhetorically, at least—moved human rights toward the centre of US foreign policy after becoming president in 1977. If Canada’s approach to international rights issues centred around quiet diplomacy, Carter’s stance was much more audible, a shift signalled when the new US president took up a correspondence with Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, and when he offered sharp criticism of the conduct of US allies and client states, even cutting aid to anti-communist regimes in South America. Trudeau later recalled being “skeptical” of Carter’s approach. ⁴³ In his initial private talks with the president, Trudeau was demure in discussing rights violations in the USSR or elsewhere. Publicly, he stressed that while endorsing the new president’s objectives, Canada’s government preferred “to work more quietly toward those goals.” Probed by opposition MPs about this quiet approach, Trudeau explained that he was “somewhat envious” of Carter’s ability to “get results by speaking directly,” but that for Canada, a small state with limited influence abroad, loud statements were “more rewarding in terms of self-satisfaction but not necessarily in terms of results.” ⁴⁴ Here was a clear, realist expression of Canada’s limited interests and of its limited influence.

While Carter’s louder approach earned kudos from Canada’s press and Canadian rights activists, diplomats shared their prime minister’s skepticism. In an analysis of the new US emphasis on human rights and its implications for Canada, Department of External Affairs officials stressed the power differential. Certainly, as the CSCE process showed, human rights gave Western states “a powerful card” in their dealings with the Soviets, while growing opprobrium toward South Africa demonstrated the need to address the advocacy of domestic rights groups. Although Canada had a “respectable” record of promoting rights in fora such as the UN, Carter’s actions posed a “challenge” by conveying “the impression of being more committed to them than we are and of doing more for their promotion than we do.” But what set the United States of America apart from Canada was that the Americans were powerful, and that they were enhancing their influence through rights promotion. Conversely, Canada was “not a superpower and [was] not engaged in a global competition with the Soviet Union.” The DEA's recommendation was for Canada to continue its “flexible policy,” which left room to offer criticism in cases where it was due—such as condemnation of Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda—but that accounted for “certain facts of life,” such as Canadian economic interests and the desire for détente. In sum, External Affairs judged that “human rights are not a central feature of our foreign policy as proclaimed by President Carter, but they are a central concern.” ⁴⁵

For other Canadians, Carter’s rhetoric—if not his actions—offered a guide for a change in policy, as did congressional activism, which was endeavouring to use US economic power as a lever with rights violators. Yet Trudeau was unmoved. When asked whether Canada would follow Carter in restricting development aid and export credits to repressive regimes, the prime minister affirmed that “we have not made it a condition of our assistance to starving people in the third world that their government be above reproach.” ⁴⁶ Although both New Democratic Party and Progressive Conservative MPs backed a private member’s bill banning Canadian aid to countries with poor rights records—a bill that specifically cited Carter’s position on this issue and one very similar to bills that had emerged in the US Congress—Trudeau’s Liberal government allowed the initiative to die. As a government spokesperson explained, not only would cutting aid hurt poor people, but it would make aid policy “hostage to only one factor, human rights, a factor which is largely beyond our control,” and it would “place Canada in the untenable role of an international moral arbiter.” ⁴⁷ Canadian development assistance would be withdrawn in several cases—Uganda, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cuba—but largely because internal conditions made aid disbursement ineffective or even dangerous, or because these countries were engaged in hostilities abroad. The failure to use aid as a lever to promote rights has been a source of criticism of the Trudeau government from across the political spectrum. ⁴⁸ However, in opposing linkage between aid and rights violations, Mark MacGuigan stated his preference for “action which is effective and which stands a real chance of influencing the government in question.” In a sign that economic self-interest was prized, he added, “I oppose hollow gestures and the withdrawal of mechanisms which benefit Canadians.” ⁴⁹

Rights did form an element of Canadian policy in individual cases where diplomats acted to help political prisoners. But caution pervaded even these considerations. For instance, in responding to inquiries from Canada’s transport minister about a persecuted Cuban, the DEA counselled that Canada tended to act only in situations where a Canadian citizen was involved, and that Havana “would consider representations on individual cases of non-Canadians to be unwarranted interference” in internal matters. Additionally, the department judged that past experience had “shown that such representations by foreign governments can actually worsen the situation of the prisoners who are intended to be helped.” ⁵⁰ Similarly, Canadian officials spoke out in support of various jailed dissidents in the Soviet Union—offering asylum to jailed activist Natan Sharansky, for example—but were cautious enough in doing so to earn criticism from activists who wanted a more resolute position. ⁵¹ There were also Canadian overtures made in Santiago, Brasilia, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo on behalf of jailed dissidents. Yet the focus on freeing certain political prisoners deflected from more serious actions, such as sanctions, that were capable, perhaps of challenging systemic repression and bringing real pressure to bear on rights violators. ⁵²

Where human rights saw greater acceptance in determining policy was with refugees. In 1969, Trudeau’s government ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, and by 1976 Canada’s immigration law included a section on refugees—a first for Canada. Moreover, Canada took in asylum-seekers: beyond the rather typical acceptance of refugees fleeing communist terror in Czechoslovakia and Vietnam, the Canadian government took in Ugandans in 1972, an important development given that these refugees were non-white and that Canada had historically barred racialized refugees, such as Jews fleeing Nazi persecution (a 1971 program accepting Tibetans took in refugees who were non-white and fleeing communism). However, there was caution even in the ideological struggle against international communism. In 1978, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Allan Gotlieb advised “against a blanket policy of offering admission to all Soviet dissidents, if only for the reason that the question of who precisely qualifies as a dissident is not one on which the Government and all sectors of the Canadian public are in perfect agreement.” ⁵³ More problematic still, at least initially, proved to be persons seeking refuge from the odious juntas that emerged across South America during the 1970s: Canadian officials feared taking in far-left extremists whose numbers might have included the same sort of urban terrorists who had necessitated the implementation of the War Measures Act in 1970. But under considerable pressure from church and labour groups, opposition MPs, and activists, the Canadian government turned Canada into one of the largest receivers of Argentinian, Uruguayan, and Chilean refugees. ⁵⁴ In this case, rights activism worked because the government was responsive and chose to act along lines that did not impede on other states' sovereignty or involve loud condemnations. Overall, when it came to bilateral dealings involving international human rights, the Trudeau government opted for the quiet path long typical of Canadian diplomacy.

A rights revolution in Canadian foreign policy?

This is not to deny that there was more attention to human rights in Canadian foreign policy in the 1970s than in previous decades. One can see evidence of a much more active approach on the part of Canada’s diplomats to building an international rights regime, whether at the UN or through the CSCE. Their actions reflected not only Canadian officials’ postwar enthusiasm for multilateralism, but also the reach of the rights revolution. As its official history observes, by 1979 members of the DEA were “increasingly attuned to the human rights dimension of contemporary foreign policy.” ⁵⁵ The DEA’s archival record from the 1970s shows far more interest in human rights issues than in the past, with Canadian diplomatic posts having begun to monitor and report on rights abuses, on the treatment of political prisoners, and on the actions of various human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs). ⁵⁶ Even so, and despite individual Canadian diplomats’ concern for human rights, observers of the Trudeau government’s foreign policy could rightly affirm that it “placed a price tag on the basic social and political values which Canadians might expect that foreign policy to reflect.” ⁵⁷

For Trudeau, Canadian foreign policy had to reflect what seemed to him a realistic appraisal of interests and capabilities, as well as his own concerns regarding nationalism and sovereignty. Nor was he alone among Canadian officials in adopting this approach. The result was that it seemed as if, as journalist Robert Fulford put it in 1973, “Ottawa has something like a passion for totalitarian states.” Going on to observe that the Trudeau government was catholic in its tastes, for it was cozying up to regimes across the ideological and geopolitical spectrum, Fulford lamented that “decency should draw a line somewhere.” ⁵⁸ Human rights took a back seat to Trudeau’s efforts to push for détente, trade expansion, and a broadening of Canada’s international relationships, as well as his preoccupations with sovereignty and national unity. He and other government officials were also mindful of the limits of Canadian influence abroad. “It is essential that Canada respond to the legitimate concerns of Canadians, and it is entirely right and appropriate that we accord human rights its place as one of the main principles of Canadian foreign policy,” affirmed deputy prime minister and SSEA Allan MacEachen in a speech to the Canadian Human Rights Foundation. “Canadian policy,” he added, “should and must remain rooted in a certain realism.” ⁵⁹ In short, during the Trudeau era and at the state level, Canada’s rights revolution largely stopped at the water’s edge.

Given government inaction except through multilateral fora, the main international thrust of the Canadian rights revolution during the Trudeau era occurred among activists, church members, trade unionists, and everyday people alarmed by suffering abroad—and by what they often saw as official Canadian complicity in these crimes. A broad-based human rights consciousness took hold, then, at the sub-state level, just as it did transnationally. ⁶⁰ Canadian Labour Congress president Donald MacDonald noted in 1974 that recent events “in such countries as Chile, South Africa, and Guinea-Bissau have at least brought these names into the everyday language of Canadians,” while in 1976 critics of Canadian policy in Southern Africa contended that “progressive Canadians are participants in a world-wide struggle,” which they characterized as an “‘unofficial’ people’s diplomacy.” ⁶¹ In effect, Trudeau himself backed this development. In 1968, in laying out why he did not support Canadian government involvement in the Biafra issue, he praised relief efforts by churches, explaining that NGOs “could act in ways not open to the Government.” ⁶² Yet to be effective in promoting rights abroad, frequently activists needed to secure government support, a difficult task in the Trudeau years, given his government’s other more pressing priorities and his sense of Canadian interests and limitations. With a Trudeau currently in office in Ottawa, one might wonder: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose?