Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s Pacific tilt,1945–1984

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 enterprises, and foreign aid. Implicitly, Canada’s deepening engagement with contemporary 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 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 undervalue 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 acknowledged, 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 irrevocably 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 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 postcolonial 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 opposition, 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 appointment 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 minimal 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 “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 rival group of emerging powers demanded a stiffer response. In 1965, Liberal prime minister L.B. Pearson’s government sent military aid to Malaysia, and slashed Indonesian foreign aid to a paltry $80,000. ¹³ Canada, replied a Sukarno newspaper, could “go to hell.” ¹⁴

Canada’s North Atlantic outlook determined relations with South Korea as well. Ottawa was reluctant to join the UN Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK), struck in 1947 to oversee elections throughout the peninsula. The Canadian decision to join the commission, taken to appease Washington and fulfil its UN commitments, threatened a cabinet split and left a bitter aftertaste. ¹⁵ When a visiting South Korean delegation urged the acting prime minister, Louis St. Laurent, to establish relations in 1948, he quietly replied that Korea was “still a long way from Canada.” ¹⁶

It was, indeed, and when troops from communist North Korea marched into South Korea in June 1950, cabinet proved slow to react. As a US-led UN command took shape, Canadian ministers, half-convinced Korea was lost, grudgingly dispatched three destroyers, and promptly left town for the summer. But Washington wanted “boots on the ground,” and by mid-July, amid mounting popular and political pressure, the ministers were back. Through July and August, a divided cabinet debated increasing Canada’s contribution. The prime minister, with an eye on skeptical Quebec opinion, was doubtful. Defence Minister Brooke Claxton dismissed Korea as a “side-show,” insisting that Ottawa focus on the North Atlantic and Europe. ¹⁷ In the midst of the row, Pearson slipped into Washington to consult US secretary of state Dean Acheson. “Korea,” the American observed, was “not important,” and he promised Pearson that the United States remained focused on the communist threat in Europe. That assurance won cabinet support for sending a combat brigade to Korea. ¹⁸

As the Korean conflict deepened, Ottawa redoubled its efforts to constrain Washington and keep its focus on Europe. This was clear in October 1950, when US and South Korean troops, rebounding from their initial defeats, crossed the 38th parallel and headed for China. Canada’s interest stopped at the border, and Pearson did what he could to stall the UN advance and create space for negotiations. Constraint was evident, too, in his frantic UN efforts to find a formula for negotiations after China’s intervention in January 1951, and again in the fall of 1952. ¹⁹ Pearson’s diplomacy was directed mostly at Washington, though he kept a wary eye on South Korea’s impetuous president, Syngman Rhee. Seoul’s interest in national reunification and its unyielding opposition to Asian communism was not shared in Ottawa.

For the next two decades, Canadian diplomats kept a “sanitary distance” from South Korea. “On no account,” External Affairs told them, should they “give any hope” that Ottawa might open a mission in Seoul. ²⁰ Although South Korea sent a resident ambassador to Ottawa in 1965, Ottawa remained aloof. President Park Chung-hee’s “doubtful credentials” and outspoken anti-communism made him unpopular across the Global South, whose UN votes were treasured in Ottawa. ²¹ That especially mattered to Foreign Minister Paul Martin Sr., who had made peace in Vietnam the major plank in his foreign policy. He avoided Korean leaders and actively discouraged them from visiting Ottawa.

Postwar relations with Japan were hardly more fruitful. The wartime internment of Japanese Canadians (and their postwar deportation) created resentments that hindered close ties between Ottawa and Tokyo. Canadian prisoners of war, who resented Tokyo’s unwillingness to acknowledge their brutal experiences, nursed a parallel grievance and viewed with suspicion Ottawa’s efforts to normalize relations. Far more important, the war consolidated US power in Asia, persuading Ottawa that the Pacific was now a US region with little scope for Canadian initiative.

Canada’s ranking Japanese expert, the diplomat Herbert Norman, was ready to challenge Washington. He questioned the reluctance of US proconsul General Douglas MacArthur to hold prewar civilian leaders like the former prime minister Konoe Fumimaro to account for their part in Japan’s aggression. He was determined, as well, to claim a voice for the UN’s Far Eastern Commission (FEC) in shaping Japan’s new constitution. But Ottawa policymakers were much more cautious. “While it is in our interest to maintain the authority and prestige of international bodies such as the FEC,” diplomat Jack Maybee advised Pearson, “it would probably not be desirable to oppose the US … since their interest in internal Japanese affairs is far greater than ours.” ²²

As the United States tightened its Cold War grip on Asia, Ottawa hewed closer to its US ally. In the spring of 1948, Pearson swept aside Norman’s doubts about Washington’s “reverse course,” backing its decision to abandon plans for a speedy peace treaty and political reforms. Similarly, Pearson ignored concerns about the Japanese peace treaty that the United States suddenly sponsored in the winter of 1950–51. Canadian diplomats fretted that it set unfavourable precedents for peace with Germany, isolated the Soviet Union and communist China, and alienated non-aligned Asians. At best, it merited only moderate support. Pearson demurred, and at the San Francisco Conference finalizing the treaty, he made it clear where his sympathies lay. He praised its US architects, MacArthur and diplomat John Foster Dulles, and challenged Asian hesitations. The treaty, he said, reflected “the wisdom and basic democracy of the US government and people in refusing to embark on the imperialistic course of making Japan a mere appendage to the United States; or more subtly perhaps, of attempting to refashion Japan in the image of America.” ²³

Denied political standing in Japan, Canada confined its postwar interests to concrete matters such as fisheries and trade. Over the next two decades, such limited interests defined bilateral relations, which expanded slowly and fitfully. The conclusion of a limited trade agreement in 1954 and the creation of the Canada-Japan Ministerial Committee in 1961—the two highlights of the period—underscored how slight the relationship remained. When diplomats and politicians from the two countries met, as they occasionally did, they congratulated each other on their fortunate good relations, engaging in what diplomat Derek Burney later scorned as just “smiling diplomacy.” ²⁴

Relations with the communist People’s Republic of China, whose revolutionary government swept to power in November 1949, might have been different. Then, as now, Canadian policymakers thrilled as they considered the “great possibilities” for trade with Beijing. Cabinet was sorely tempted to recognize the new state in early 1950, but on the advice of its ambassador in Washington, Hume Wrong, it postponed action until far too late. The Korean War and China’s fateful intervention put paid to further cabinet discussion. Ignoring his own doubts about the wisdom of US policy, Pearson signed on to the US economic boycott of China in December 1950. Two months later, he voted at the UN to condemn China as an aggressor in Korea, backing a dangerous policy solely to keep the Western alliance united. “Surely, peace with Washington,” he observed later, “is more important than praise in Beijing.” ²⁵

Over the next decade or so, Canada often chafed at the economic and political costs of China’s isolation, but it rarely challenged US policy. When the United States and China squared off in January 1955 over the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Pearson tried to mediate, but quickly retreated after US secretary of state Dulles warned him away. ²⁶ Ottawa flirted as well with recognition in 1955 and 1956, but again recoiled in the face of the strong “emotional response” from the White House. ²⁷ Even as the postwar commodity boom slumped in the mid-1950s, and Canadian trade officials railed against the “undue rigidity” of US trade restrictions behind closed NATO doors, Ottawa continued to side with Washington in public. ²⁸

The exception—Diefenbaker’s massive wheat sales to China—proves the rule. For Canada and Diefenbaker, who swept to power in 1957 with solid Prairie support, the stakes were unusually large. Over the previous three crop years, Canada’s share of the world market for wheat and flour had fallen by a third. ²⁹ Net farm income in Saskatchewan, where wheat was king, plummeted from $531 million in 1951 to $179 million in 1957. ³⁰ Washington, which had begun to flood the global market with subsidized wheat in 1954, was clearly to blame, and everyone knew it. Diefenbaker righteously defied US strictures on exports to China, while presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy squirmed uncomfortably but impotently. ³¹

But the sales signalled no substantive change in Canadian policy, despite the election of a Liberal government in April 1963. Foreign Minister Paul Martin had toured Asia in 1956 and had come to appreciate China’s global importance. He pushed aside doubts in External Affairs, scheming to overcome US opposition to recognizing Beijing and sitting its representatives in the UN. Cabinet bent, but it did not yield, forcing Martin to tailor his plans to suit US objectives. The views of Transport Minister Jack Pickersgill were typical. His blunt advice was that Canada should “recognize China the day after the Americans do.” ³²

Surely, at least, relations with India were different? Escott Reid, Canada’s high commissioner in New Delhi from 1952–1957, thought so. Indo-Canadian relations, he argued in his memoir, Envoy to Nehru, were based on the new multiracial and postcolonial Commonwealth that emerged following South Asia’s decolonization in 1947. As former British colonies, Canada and India seemed to share a political and cultural inheritance that made communication easy. Exposure to the Indian perspective on world affairs, especially when presented by the charismatic prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, offered Ottawa a less rigid view of the Cold War world, which Americans simplistically divided into “them and us.” ³³ As historian Robert Bothwell put it, Indo-Canadian relations were to be “a marriage of Canadian [or Western] strategy with Indian tactics.” ³⁴

Most Canadian policymakers were more skeptical than Reid. Pearson found Nehru hard to handle, describing him as “an extraordinary combination of a Hindu mystic … and an Eton-Oxbridge type of Englishman.” ³⁵ A tough-minded realist, whose childhood sparkled with the resplendent grandeur of the Victorian Raj, Pearson doubted Canada’s capacity to engage or influence India, which he judged “a Great Power.” ³⁶ St. Laurent, too, was eventually put off by Nehru’s “Bloomsbury style” and his anti-Americanism. ³⁷ Assessing Indo-Canadian cooperation in 1952, UN ambassador David Johnson warned from New York that “not too much should be made of Commonwealth solidarity.” ³⁸

The skepticism was soon justified as bilateral irritants and misunderstandings piled up. Hurtful quotas, negotiated in late 1950, placed tight limits on South Asian immigration to Canada. ³⁹ Canadian foreign aid, extended under the Colombo Plan in 1951, exerted only a slight and disappointing impact on bilateral trade. There were political differences, too. Pearson blamed India for skirting its UN responsibilities in Korea. India’s refusal to sign agreements safeguarding the nuclear fuel rods that powered its new NRX reactor, a Canadian gift, dismayed Ottawa policymakers. There were more sharp differences in 1956 over the Suez Crisis and Moscow’s invasion of Hungary. Above all, there was Southeast Asia, where Canadian and Indian diplomats on the international commission overseeing the fragile ceasefire clashed repeatedly over communist truce violations. “There is,” fumed Marcel Cadieux, a rising diplomat with first-hand experience in Vietnam, “a misunderstanding between us and India on the subject of Communism, and I wonder whether this is not related to a more basic misunderstanding of the implications of the real nature of ‘neutralism’ as practiced by the Indians.” ⁴⁰ By the late 1950s, relations were so badly frayed that Canadian diplomats began casting about for additional Pacific partners. ⁴¹ Finding none, they clung tenaciously but unhappily to New Delhi through the 1960s.

Pierre Trudeau, chosen Liberal prime minister in April 1968, was different. The Quebec intellectual and politician, first elected as a member of parliament in 1965 and promoted to justice minister two years later, brought an outsider’s critical perspective to bear on Canada’s postwar diplomacy. Sophisticated and well-travelled, he shared the views popular among campus radicals and their youthful professors, who charged Pearson’s government with failing to respond to East-West détente, to recovery in Europe and Asia, and to surging Canadian nationalism at home. ⁴² Trudeau was especially skeptical of the North Atlanticism that underpinned Pearson’s brand of helpful internationalism, and he sought a more modest and realistic foreign policy, rooted in limited economic notions of Canada’s national interest. Convinced that Canada lavished too much attention on the United States and western Europe, Trudeau wanted a foreign policy that extended the country’s reach beyond the North Atlantic. “Because of past preoccupations with Atlantic and European affairs,” he told Canadians during his first election campaign in the spring of 1968, “we have tended to overlook the reality that Canada is a Pacific country too.” ⁴³ His government’s shift in perspective was cemented in place in the early 1970s, when cabinet adopted its “third option” strategy to diversify Canadian trade away from the United States. Asia was an obvious target.

In charting his path to the Pacific, it helped that Trudeau could draw on a younger generation of diplomats and advisors to shape and implement his policies. Raised in the prosperous and confident Canada of the postwar boom, and recruited in the late 1950s and 1960s, they came to prominence in the 1970s, welcoming Trudeau’s search for a foreign policy freed from its North Atlantic constraints. They were skeptical of the Pearsonian “golden age,” and impatient with its “regal ambassadors,” who populated too many Canadian embassies, parading “their erudition and genteel tastes.” ⁴⁴ Young, often single, and usually male, a disproportionate number served on the peace commissions in Indochina, absorbing a Pacific outlook. Increasingly—as with John Hadwen, Tom Delworth, or Glen Shortliffe, for instance—their rise to the department’s senior ranks included a head-of-mission stint in Asia. Many, like Earl Drake or Derek Burney, who served in Japan in the 1960s and as ambassador to Korea in the 1970s, were drawn to Asia and the freedom to operate in largely uncharted territory.

It mattered, too, that the changes in Trudeau’s foreign policy reflected, and were reinforced by, fundamental changes within Canada itself. During the 1970s, political and economic power moved west, spurred on by the oil and gas bonanza that followed the 1973 energy crisis. In 1961, Alberta and British Columbia contained just over 16% of Canada’s population. That figure edged slowly upward during the 1960s, reaching 17.68% by 1971, before accelerating to 20.79% by 1981, and 28.48% by 1986. Federal politicians from both sides of the House appreciated the implications of this change in the national distribution of power. Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark, an Albertan, worried in 1979 that the “tremendous” shift in economic power might encourage the West to pursue its own offshore interests independently, “making federal authority appear less and less significant.” ⁴⁵ Similarly, recalled Lloyd Axworthy, a Liberal member of parliament from Manitoba, Trudeau’s governments were increasingly sensitive to “the strengthening drumbeat of Western alienation.” ⁴⁶ Ottawa hoped to defuse these threats by meeting Western expectations for more Asia-Pacific engagement.

Just as important, Ottawa removed the racial barrier to immigration in 1967, transforming Canada’s demography. Asians accounted for just 11.7% (or 21,686 of the 183,974) of the immigrants who crossed into Canada in 1968. By 1973, those figures had climbed upward to 23.44%, representing 43,193 of 184,200 immigrants. By the end of the decade, Asia had become the largest source of immigration into Canada, accounting for 45% or 50,540 immigrants in 1979. Asian Canadians, who numbered only 122,000 in 1961, now constituted over 600,000 of Canadians. Official multiculturalism, adopted in 1972 to combat Quebec separatism, bolstered their place in Canadian society.

Trudeau’s first order of business, of course, was China. He had visited Canton and Shanghai in 1949 and Taiwan in the 1950s, returning to the mainland for a month in 1960 with his friend, Jacques Hébert. Young Trudeau had witnessed the chaos unleashed by the machinations of Chiang Kai-Shek in the 1940s, and felt the stirrings of China’s potential under Mao. During the 1960s, he and Toronto MP Donald Macdonald had joined Martin in pressing cabinet for reform. ⁴⁷

Trudeau made his intentions clear during the 1968 election campaign: “We have an economic interest in trade with China … and a political interest in preventing tension between China and its neighbours … . Our aim will be to recognize the People’s Republic of China Government as soon as possible.” ⁴⁸ Speedy action followed the vote. Cabinet reviewed China policy in August and December, before agreeing to pursue recognition in January 1969. The difficult talks with China in neutral Stockholm extended into late 1970, only concluding when Ottawa and Beijing agreed on a deliberately ambiguous formula that “took note” of their opposing positions on Taiwan’s status. On 13 October, Canada and China finally announced their agreement to exchange diplomatic representatives. ⁴⁹ The break with tradition and Washington signalled an abrupt departure in Canada’s approach to the Pacific.

Recognition was followed in 1973 by a high-profile prime ministerial visit, designed to bolster Canada’s claim to a lasting special relationship with China. The lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution and the instability that followed Mao’s death in 1976—a return visit was not possible until Chinese Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang visited Ottawa in 1984—made progress tough. But for years after, recalled diplomat Jeremy Kinsman, “at UN conferences where Canada and China were apt to be alphabetical neighbours, there would be much hugging and bowing between us: ‘Ahhh, Canada … TRUDEAU … very good, very good.’” ⁵⁰ Moreover, a steady stream of senior ambassadorial appointments—John Fraser, Ralph Collins, John Small, Arthur Menzies, and Michel Gauvin—signalled Ottawa’s commitment, ensuring that when Trudeau sought a last-minute meeting with China’s disapproving premier, Deng Xiaoping, during his 1983 peace mission, he got it. ⁵¹

Japan, too, was a Trudeau priority, though it proved a tough nut to crack. The prime minister’s official visit to the World’s Fair in Osaka in 1970 encouraged External Affairs officials to take stock of bilateral ties. There were plenty of hopeful signs: Japan was poised to become Canada’s second most important export market; there was a “staggering” array of existing contacts; and the recent Canada-Japan ministerial meeting in April 1971 had been “unprecedented in its candour.” ⁵² But daunting barriers remained. Established North-South trade patterns would be hard to shift, and easily discouraged Canadian diplomats were forced to admit that booming Japan simply did not need Canada nor its resources. “The problems are all on our side,” sighed ambassador Ross Campbell. “In all except a few very circumscribed areas, we are demandeurs.” ⁵³

But Trudeau and his foreign policy advisor, Ivan Head, insisted on action. In early 1974, Head pressed officials “to move into high gear with the Japanese.” ⁵⁴ By the following June, after almost three years of talks, foreign minister Allan J. MacEachen had secured a Japanese promise to identify industrial sectors ripe for cooperation. A delighted Campbell called the breakthrough “a minor miracle.” ⁵⁵ But it was not enough for the prime minister, who again demanded a “substantial degree of progress.” ⁵⁶ His persistence was rewarded. By the time Trudeau met Prime Minister Takeo Miki in the fall of 1976, their advisors could point to a small but impressive pile of bilateral undertakings: a cultural agreement initialled, the Canadian Studies program in Japan inaugurated, and a Framework for Economic Co-operation signed.

Implementing the framework agreement proved difficult. Japan’s cultural and linguistic barriers intimidated Canadian firms, who preferred to trade with their familiar US neighbours. Although Japan took in just over 9% of Canada’s exports in 1980, by the time Trudeau left office in 1984 its share of Canadian goods had shrunk to 6.7%, almost exactly where it had been in 1972. Yet Japan remained atop the government’s list of priorities. It certainly helped, as John Kirton argues, that the two prime ministers met annually at the G-7 summits, beginning in 1976. ⁵⁷

Most important, the two governments were yoked together by their need to manage bilateral tensions created by Japan’s surging automotive exports to Canada in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Besieged by the struggling domestic industry, labour unions, and the Ontario government, Ottawa responded with temporary import quotas, negotiated annually. But these were not good enough for the industry or industry minister Ed Lumley, whose task force on automotive production demanded a quota of 60% Canadian content in Japanese vehicles sold in Canada. In December 1983, rejecting the cautious advice of Canadian diplomats, Lumley threatened Tokyo with legislated content requirements designed to compel its car-makers to negotiate firm investment targets. ⁵⁸

Lumley met “secretly” with Japanese industrialists and ministers to press his point, sending teams of hard-nosed senior officials to Tokyo to monitor progress. ⁵⁹ Declining to negotiate further import quotas, he squeezed the industry tightly in the spring of 1984, gleefully anticipating as much as $250 million in investments during the next six months. By June, Lumley’s team had nailed down Canada’s first major Japanese automotive investment with Honda, which poured $100 million into a plant in Alliston, Ontario, creating 359 jobs. The investment reshaped Canada’s industrial landscape, and bound the Canadian and Japanese economies more closely together than ever before.

Booming South Korea also emerged as a target for Trudeau’s diversification efforts. Early progress was glacial. Closer relations with the People’s Republic of China were at the heart of the government’s Asian strategy, prompting worries that ties with anti-communist Seoul might provoke Beijing. Consequently, Korean–Canadian relations initially remained frozen lest they had a “detrimental effect” on relations with China. ⁶⁰ But the context shifted after 1970. Cajoled by Korean ambassador Pil Shik Chin and his Canadian backers, the ageing government leader in the Senate, Paul Martin Sr., and trade minister Jean-Luc Pepin, cabinet finally agreed to open a mission in Seoul in 1973. ⁶¹

Prospects brightened through the mid-1970s. In December 1973, the Korea Electric Power Corporation signed letters of intent with Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) to purchase a 600 MW nuclear reactor worth $332 million, with options on two more. Foreign minister Kim Dong-Jo and secretary of state for external affairs Allan J. MacEachen closed the deal during reciprocal visits in October 1974 and June 1975. ⁶² Fish and large-scale wheat sales were in the offing as well, exciting trade officials who speculated that Canada’s bilateral trade deficit, running two-to-one in Korea’s favour, might soon be eliminated. There was also a strong shared political interest in enhancing stability along the Korean peninsula, with additional benefits for Canada’s relations with Japan. In the fall of 1975, MacEachen and Canada’s UN delegation devoted their energies to a stillborn initiative to reaffirm the Korean armistice and kick-start North-South exchanges. ⁶³

But bad news confounded relations with South Korea. In 1976, reports leaked that governments in Ottawa and Seoul had stood by as Atomic Energy of Canada Limited hired Saul Eisenberg as its agent to bribe Korean hydro officials. ⁶⁴ There were also unsettling rumours that South Korean diplomats were spying on and hassling Canadian human rights activists and recent Korean immigrants. Even more damaging, South Korea’s heavy-handed response to its domestic human rights and pro-democracy movement roused large numbers of Canadian sympathizers among former missionaries and recent Korean immigrants. United Church activists in Toronto alone commanded the attention of 427 interested congregations. ⁶⁵

Korean intransigence exasperated Canadians. “As a friend of South Korea,” MacEachen begged, “I tell you that your current image is not helpful.” President Park Chung-hee, fingers snapping and knuckles cracking, simply shrugged. ⁶⁶ What about Trudeau’s recent use of the War Measures Act in Quebec, he asked. Growing popular protests prompted Ottawa and Seoul to postpone ministerial visits in 1977, but work on relations barely missed a tick. Meeting discreetly in New York with his Korean counterpart, foreign minister Don Jamieson assured him in late 1977 that Canada was “equally desirous of not wishing to see this [corruption] issue affect our overall bilateral relations.” ⁶⁷

Indeed, by 1979, the coast was clear enough for Park himself to visit Ottawa. He arrived in North America, whose economy had stalled badly amid crippling inflation and political malaise, carrying his copy of Oswald Spengler’s Decline and Fall of the West, and he left the prime minister’s office “with [a] sense of strong support … for ROK’s attempts to sustain security and legitimacy.” ⁶⁸ Even the arrest and sentence to death of democracy activist Kim Dae-jung in late 1980 barely slowed Ottawa’s drive. There was a threat of sanctions, a House of Commons resolution, and a protesting letter to Seoul. But when foreign minister Mark MacGuigan unveiled the government’s new strategy of “bilateralism” in January 1981, Korea figured prominently as one of Canada’s countries of focus. ⁶⁹ As its opening gambit, cabinet promptly sent the senate speaker and Trudeau confidant, Jean Marchand, to the inauguration of Park’s authoritarian successor, Chun Doo-hwan.

Even distant Indonesia assumed a new relevance in the 1970s. It was the largest member of the anti-communist Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was welcomed in Ottawa as a source of regional stability and a moderating voice in Third World councils. More important, the region enjoyed strong economic growth and offered Canada rare opportunities for trade and economic cooperation. ⁷⁰ Trudeau, who visited in 1973, singled out President Suharto’s Indonesia as “a nascent power among the non-Communist nations because of its position and population, and the development potential of its natural resources.” ⁷¹

Ottawa courted Jakarta. In 1968, Canada announced its interest by joining the global consortium coordinating aid to the sprawling island nation, the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI). The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) selected Indonesia in 1970 as its only “country of concentration” outside Canada’s traditional Commonwealth and Francophonie circles, qualifying it for exceptional development assistance. Canadian aid soared from less than $400,000 in 1967 to $2.02 million in 1968–1969, to over $35 million in 1976, making Indonesia the second largest recipient of Canadian largesse. ⁷² When Suharto made his first official visit to Ottawa in 1975, the government’s Export Development Bank joined the major chartered banks to offer a $200-million line of credit as “the centrepiece of the visit.” ⁷³ Between 1968 and 1978, over $150 million worth of Canadian aid flowed into Indonesia.

Trade, investment, and a stream of VIP visitors followed. CIDA’s imperious president Paul Gérin-Lajoie arrived in 1976, dispensing more loans and grants. Foreign minister MacEachen came too, immodestly offering Canada as the regional “Western representative in the struggle against the influx of ideological communism.” ⁷⁴ Don Jamieson, minister of industry, trade and commerce, anxiously followed, determined to “push” Canadian industry into Indonesia. It was hardly necessary. Canadian exports soared from $2.4 million in 1968 to $65.9 million in 1977, to over $206 million in 1982. ⁷⁵ Toronto-based Inco spent $25 million just to chart its new nickel reserves in Sulawesi, before ramping up its mine operations in the early 1970s. Suharto’s investment czar, Mohammad Sadli, his eyes “round as saucers,” gushed that Indonesia had “never seen so much money.” ⁷⁶ By 1971, Canada was the country’s fourth largest investor, behind the United States, the Philippines, and Japan. ⁷⁷

Politics reinforced economics. The two coastal states found common ground at the UN Law of Sea negotiations as they championed the idea of a 200-mile territorial sea. Ottawa and Jakarta collaborated easily in 1973 on the revived peace commission in Indochina, both anxious to usher the United States out of Vietnam as quickly as possible and shore up regional anti-communist forces. When Indonesian troops invaded East Timor in 1975, calling it “a second major Cuba,” they found a sympathetic audience among Canadian policymakers. There were murmurings from opposition backbenchers Douglas Roche and Howard Johnson about forced labour and human rights abuses, but these were ignored.

Beset by the devastating 1982 recession, Trudeau and his ministers returned to Indonesia and ASEAN in 1983, working 12- and 14-hour days in dogged pursuit of economic opportunity. ⁷⁸ Although it reinforced ASEAN’s regional importance in his eyes, the prime minister’s visit was frustrating. Suharto’s bewildering monologue on ASEAN left little time for Trudeau to speak, and bilateral trade talks were judged “particularly disappointing.” ⁷⁹ Trade minister Gerald Regan, trailing 40 Canadian business executives, did better in May, inking deals worth $150 million. MacEachen arrived in June, travelling to Bangkok to attend the ASEAN Post Ministerial Conference with Dialogue Partners, trumpeting the trans-Pacific links being forged by trade, banking ties, and the flow of Southeast Asian refugees to Canada. ⁸⁰

Clearly, Trudeau’s efforts to engage Asia were not uniformly successful. How could it be otherwise? The messy reality of competing interests and values, and political and economic upheaval, naturally upset the strategies and objectives laid down with clinical precision in foreign policy white papers. But Trudeau’s investments of time, energy, and political capital had one vital and lasting consequence: henceforth Asia would matter to Canadians. By the early 1980s, Trudeau and his diplomats in External Affairs certainly knew this. During the prime minister’s last year in office, they put the finishing touches on plans for a federally funded think-tank to help hone Canada’s stake in the Pacific. In June 1984, Trudeau himself helped to steer legislation to establish the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada through parliament with all-party support. As minister of state for external relations Jean-Luc Pepin acknowledged in debate, the foundation “symbolized” the government’s recognition that the Asia-Pacific had come to play a permanent role in Canada’s national life. Canadian attention might wax and wane, as it did in the mid-1980s, but thanks to Trudeau, no government could afford to adopt the distracted posture on Asia once favoured by St. Laurent, Diefenbaker, and Pearson.