Foreign policy advice in the Prime Minister’s Office: Mackenzie King to Brian Mulroney

When Prime Minister Mackenzie King invited O.D. Skelton to lunch at Kingsmere on “a beautiful bright clear day” in June 1927, he perhaps had more than just departmental business in mind. King had been entertaining Burgon Bickersteth for the weekend in an effort to convince the Warden of Hart House to leave his post and join the prime minister as an executive assistant; engaging Skelton in convivial pre-luncheon and post-luncheon conversation might illustrate for the young Englishman the possibilities that government service in Canada afforded. It was all part of a multi-front effort to lure Bickersteth—son of a Canon of Canterbury, grandson of the Bishop of Exeter, and clearly a well-connected warden of the student centre at the University of Toronto—to Ottawa. King had secured the assistance of the governor-general and had encouraged Bickersteth to discuss the offer with members of the British Cabinet Office, whose work he hoped to replicate. Skelton was paraded as a successful example of public service in Canada.1

There was much that was similar about King’s efforts to convince the two men to join him in Ottawa, Skelton early in King’s first administration, Bickersteth a few years later in 1927. Each invitation was made because King needed assistance—from Skelton in managing foreign policy, part of the prime minister’s portfolio as minister of external affairs, and from Bickersteth in managing everything else. Each considered the invitation carefully, Skelton calling it a “source of disturbance for many weeks,” and Bickersteth likewise canvassing input on the offer over most of the summer of 1927.2 Each man weighed the advantages and disadvantages of the offer similarly: for Skelton, the move to Ottawa offered “the possibility of doing something effective on a big scale for the country and particularly of defining and nailing down the imperial and international status which so long I have had in mind.” Bickersteth also weighed the opportunity to shape the administration of government in Canada, and, like Skelton, he also did so against the need to continue his work at the University of Toronto.3

Skelton had a certain advantage over Bickersteth in that he had already accompanied the prime minister to the 1923 Imperial Conference as an “advisor” and had been tapped as a successor to the undersecretary of state for external affairs (essentially the deputy minister, in today’s language, to King as the prime minister and minister of external affairs) as soon as the incumbent could be excised. Skelton both knew the job he was being offered and knew what it entailed.4 Bickersteth, on the other hand, was being offered a job in the office of the prime minister that did not yet exist. King wanted an assistant who could both organize his office and advise him on the business of government, but the details of the position were neither clear in the prime minister’s mind nor formalized. Ultimately, Bickersteth decided against taking the chance, and King continued to look for the help he needed in domestic affairs.5 Thanks, however, to Skelton’s existence within the Department of External Affairs (DEA), King was able to bumble along without any other senior administrative assistance beyond that which the Herculean Dr Skelton was able to provide.

King’s quest for individuals who would both see the world in the same way he did and work in the way he demanded, was not always successful. Nor was it always clearly defined. However, in hiring O.D. Skelton as his undersecretary in 1925, and expanding, somewhat unexpectedly, the capacity of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) over his multiple administrations, Mackenzie King managed to set the course for much of the twentieth century. Foreign policy advice officially emanated from its own institutional system; unofficially, and with increasing importance, it had a spot in the PMO, where advisors sat close to the prime minister unhampered either by election or civil service examinations. The shift from formal to informal advice occurred gradually, enabled by the separation of responsibility for foreign affairs into its own department and assisted by suspicions of and disdain for that office on the part of prime ministers. This shift, then, brought the prime minister more control over external affairs as the twentieth century drew to a close, despite no longer controlling the portfolio itself.

The DEA has always been anomalous—more closely associated with the prime minister than any other department, yet more independent from cabinet in its necessarily far-flung structure than any other department as well. It should come as no surprise, then, that, unlike other departments, it has its own historical section, where scholars of the stature of Greg Donaghy have moiled far from their colleagues in university departments across the country. Thus positioned, Greg was well-placed to consider the evolution of the DEA and to assess the nature of its influence. Indeed, he was instrumental in identifying the seeds of declining influence even within the so-called “golden age,” and in mapping the relationship between politicians and diplomats in the post-war years.6 But if Greg’s work was central to our understanding of the decline in power of the foreign service in Canada in general, it did not explore as thoroughly where that power went. This article shifts our gaze to the closed doors around the prime minister, where men such as Skelton and Bickersteth and, eventually, Gerald Butts would be invited to reside and to shape the place of Canada in the world from behind the curtain.

Mackenzie King might have complained about the level of service he was provided by his secretaries and assistants and handlers of all sorts—“no one in the office is worth a sou,” he moaned in 1927, “a shocking condition for a Prime Minister who has all the resources to draw on that I have”; a decade and a half later he described Jack Pickersgill as nothing more than an “impudent upstart”7—but he was certainly well served in his foreign policy advisors. Indeed, the trust King placed in Skelton was exceptional8 and undoubtedly provided a model in the prime minister’s search for a senior private secretary. After Bickersteth turned down the offer, unsure exactly what it entailed, Harry Baldwin began to impose some administrative order on King’s office.9 Still, the prime minister wanted something more. Something like the person Governor-General Lord Tweedsmuir suggested: a “head of the PM’s office,” who would also be an “intelligence officer, reporting to him any books he thinks which might be important,” or any press that needed to be noted or addressed, and could also, “be the PM’s principal liaison officer with all [d]epartments.” With such a person employed, “the burden of the PM would be enormously lightened,” thought the governor-general. King agreed.10

After much searching and cajoling, the person he finally found—if only temporarily—was Arnold Heeney. In accepting the position Heeney thought it wise to “describe briefly my understanding of the position.” Initially, he would be King’s principal secretary, serving “as a liaison between the Prime Minister and the other Ministers of the Crown” and assisting with the work of cabinet and that of the PMO. In time, and certainly before the next election, he would be “given the alternative of regular appointment to the permanent civil service either as Clerk of the Privy Council or First Secretary in the Department of External Affairs.”11 From the outset, then, it was clear that the tasks associated with this new position of principal secretary would be comparable to work done in the DEA, given that a formal shift into that department was a possibility, and that it was Skelton with whom Heeney would work most intimately. Indeed, the prime minister noted regularly that he spent time “going through quite a lot of mail with Heeney and Skelton.”12 Once Heeney departed to become the first clerk of the Privy Council and secretary of cabinet, the position of principal secretary was firmly established. But while subsequent holders of the office continued to work side by side with the undersecretary of state for external affairs, the foreign policy advice that the prime minister received came through the latter office, rather than from the PMO itself. The roles might be closely intertwined, but they were still possible to untangle. Perhaps most importantly, the undersecretary was a civil service appointment, whereas the principal secretary could, and was, plucked from anywhere.

On the eve of World War II, the shape of administration in Canada had coagulated into something approaching its modern form. While the DEA had long since had an undersecretary, the PMO had only just acquired a principal secretary, and, in proving to be such a demanding and emotionally draining task, this had spun off into the creation of a cabinet secretariat. There was remarkable overlap between the positions, just as, at the ministerial level, there was overlap between the office of the prime minister and that of external affairs. Even with the removal of the responsibility for external affairs from the prime minister’s portfolio in 1946, the prime minister remained both the face of Canada’s foreign policy and its articulator.13 So while King received advice both as prime minister and minister of external affairs, it was offered to him by Arnold Heeney, who occupied all three advisory positions between 1939 and 1949, and by Jack Pickersgill and Norman Robertson who occupied two of them. The tiny, intimate collection of advisors and politicians continued to trade jobs—with Undersecretary of State Lester Pearson occupying both civil service and elected roles—until well into the 1950s.14

By the time John Diefenbaker became prime minister, the DEA seemed to be so rife with Liberals, so deeply influenced by Undersecretary-then-Minister Pearson, so cosy with the previous prime minister, that it was clear changes had to be made.15 And fortuitously, the opportunity for those changes had been created by Mackenzie King when he elevated the advisory capacity of the PMO. It took some time for Diefenbaker to recognize the potential of the PMO; initially occupied by appointment secretaries and receptionists from his pre-prime ministerial days, Diefenbaker increasingly relied on Robert Bryce, another peripatetic bureaucrat who had started in Finance and had landed as clerk of the Privy Council and secretary to cabinet, for advice on the business of government.

Bryce seemed to be the only senior civil servant that Diefenbaker trusted in the early days. In Diefenbaker’s first foray into external affairs, for example—the decision to divert 15% of Canada’s trade from the United States to Britain—he avoided the DEA, or indeed any direct contact with any of the line departments. Instead, he asked the clerk to have a memo prepared explaining “the possibilities and means of diverting” trade from one country to the other; as Bryce tactfully explained, “there are serious difficulties” with such an undertaking. “You may like to think of having some study somewhat along these lines,” he continued, “that could form the basis of a detailed speech by one of your colleagues.” As far as timing, however, that was something that Parliament needed to consider.16 Bryce’s careful handling of the prime minister at the beginning was certainly part of the reason he kept his job throughout the tumultuous Diefenbaker era, but this early episode also surely indicated that Diefenbaker needed some dedicated foreign policy advice that he could trust. The clerk of the Privy Council, while behaving “loyally and helpfully”17 throughout the Diefenbaker years, could not spend his time walking the prime minister through the landmines of foreign policy.

Nor did the officers of the DEA get much of a chance to guide the new prime minister. Routinely excluded from meetings at which they had grown used to participating, diplomats and advisors alike struggled to take the measure of Diefenbaker. It seems, however, that he had already taken theirs. A preliminary meeting between the prime minister and American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles occurred bereft of bureaucrats; Canada’s assistant undersecretary had to resort to “unorthodox channels”—namely, reports from the American team—in an attempt to figure out what transpired at the meeting. Diefenbaker was clearly “unaware of the usual practices.”18 Or perhaps he was simply committed to shaking up the establishment.

That new vision for Canada was clear in Diefenbaker’s domestic policies, and clear in his initial appointments to the PMO. Offering a New National Policy of resource development on the campaign trail, the new prime minister moved quickly to appoint one of its chief architects, Saskatchewan economist Merril Menzies, to an advisory role in his office. He and the prime minister shared a world view: Menzies’ opposition to “the intermarriage of civil servants, academics, and conservative Liberal cabinet ministers” would undoubtedly have helped cement that relationship, but it was his speechwriting that earned him an invitation to join the prime minister’s personal staff.19 There was no such advisor on the foreign policy side of things, however: no one who shared Diefenbaker’s view of the American empire or the British Commonwealth, let alone anyone who could guide the new prime minister’s policy agenda. That, combined with a staggering distrust of the existing team, ended up resulting in a secret meeting with Dulles and a decision to redirect 15% of trade, hardly an auspicious opening.

The steady hand of Robert Bryce offered a solution. Surely a liaison between the DEA and the prime minister would smooth the policy process; such a person could familiarize Diefenbaker with the way things had been done and could warn the department of the way they ought to be done in the future. Bryce had just the man—Basil Robinson—in mind. And although Robinson was a member of the civil service, having entered the usual way and being paid under the usual pay grade constraints, by placing him in the PMO he could be seen to be Diefenbaker’s man rather than one of the “Pearsonalities.” How precisely Bryce came up with Robinson is unclear: the latter had never met the prime minister but had close associations with Pearson with whom he had worked during the Suez Crisis. Despite what might be seen as cause for suspicion, Robinson was offered a contract “for several months,” during which time he was “to assist the Prime Minister in the organization of his Office and the liaison between it and the Department [of External Affairs].”20 Ultimately, Robinson lasted an unprecedented five years in the Diefenbaker PMO and remained the prime minister’s chief source of independent foreign policy advice until his final year in office, in 1963, when it was far too late for advice.

Robinson’s task was complex. On the one hand, he needed to educate the other members of the PMO team about the sorts of information that would be expected to flow out of the prime minister’s orbit. When there were “doubts and difficulties as to what should be said in reply to letters,” for example, PMO staffers were reluctant to consult with the DEA about what to say and instead crafted answers out of thin air. Robinson tried to impose a practice that would see the DEA “kept more completely aware than is at present the case of the PM’s correspondence on External Affairs questions.”21 Over time, Robinson came to appreciate that the prime minister was capable, amongst those he trusted, “of serious and systematic listening and planning.”22 There were so few he trusted, however. Robinson was one of them.

By the time Pearson took over as prime minister in 1963, the members of the DEA were ready for a change of pace. While certainly not stooping to the partisan applause that later greeted the end of Stephen Harper’s government and the arrival of the Liberals once again, to have one of their own in the PMO must surely have been met with relief.23 Pearson did not return to the pre-World War II tradition of acting as his own external affairs minister but, instead, appointed Paul Martin to the post—a rival for the party leadership, but also a man who shared his liberal-internationalist perspective on Canada’s place in the world.24 The department itself was ably served, first by Norman Robertson, worn down by the Diefenbaker years and afflicted with ailments that would soon kill him, and then in 1964 by Marcel Cadieux.25 With such strong direction from both ministerial and departmental personnel, and with Pearson’s own strong external affairs credentials, there was little need for more advice from the PMO. Nevertheless, the changes that Pearson introduced to the composition of the PMO would have a lasting effect on the way that advice—on both domestic and foreign matters—was secured.

Pearson’s decision to install Tom Kent as his chief policy advisor, or “Co-ordinator of Programming,” the de facto head of an office in which there was no chief of staff, was momentous. Pearson did so in large part because he had grown dependent on Kent’s quick pen and fine eye for social policy innovation during the years in opposition, although the relationship became strained once the Liberals took office in 1963. Kent’s appointment formalized the role of the PMO in policy generation. Merril Menzies had briefly held this sort of position under Diefenbaker but found to his disappointment that he ended up being “more concerned with the tactics of politics than with the broad strategy and analysis of economic policy.”26 Kent was a key player in the design of both the political strategy of the early Pearson years and the policies that defined the administration. His focus, however, was domestic policies; interfering with Pearson on matters of foreign policy and diplomacy seemed pointless.27 But a position had been opened up in the PMO for formal advisers, not just office managers, who might keep the ship of state on an even keel. Indeed, a great number of positions opened up under Pearson, who expanded the number of people employed in the PMO from about 30 in 1962 to over 40 by 1968.28

While Pearson’s office formalized certain practices, in other ways it operated under a system of barely concealed chaos.29 Pierre Trudeau’s arrival on the scene brought order, but he also took advantage of the policy space Kent had established in the PMO and filled the office with his own collections of advisors and confidantes, henchmen, and backroom boys.30 Unlike his immediate predecessor, Trudeau needed someone in his office who could serve as his foreign policy advisor, but he wanted that person to serve as an alternative to the DEA itself, an impulse not unlike Diefenbaker’s. Under such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that the advisor tapped to take the lead on foreign policy in the Trudeau PMO was a man with next to no experience himself with the department; more remarkable was that his candidate also had next to no experience with the foreign policy issues confronting Canada in the late 1960s. Ivan Head had first come to Ottawa in 1967 as a constitutional advisor to the then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau; when he shifted to the PMO in 1968, it was as the legislative assistant, charged with liaising with the House and the Senate but also, tellingly, obtaining “information from Ministers’ offices and elsewhere respecting anticipated statements, questions of privilege, and other potential House problems.”31 Head’s influence would extend far beyond Parliament, reaching deeper into foreign affairs than any previous PMO officer,32 but it began by tapping into his speechwriting abilities. His capacity to slip into Trudeau’s mind, mimicking his speech patterns and reflecting his policy positions, was the basis for his extraordinary influence and the unusual intimacy he shared with the prime minister.33

As in other appointments, Head’s mirrored the administrative structure that was becoming popular in Nixon’s Washington. Trudeau’s principal secretary, Marc Lalonde, was already being described as a “chief of staff,” a terminology that had American roots, with a stature that exceeded previous Canadian office-holders. By the time of his death in 2004, Head was similarly described in American terms: he was Canada’s Kissinger, an advisor who, in a far more circumscribed environment, exercised power and persuasion comparable to that of the national security advisor in the United States.34 In 1968, however, Head was only a speech writer. It was in that capacity that he was tapped to join the Canadian contingent to the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London, where elements of Trudeau’s particular foreign policy concerns began to take shape. Not only concerned about Canada’s diplomatic preparedness but also that “the British were still running the show” and that the proceedings were choreographed and staid rather than intellectually rigorous, the two men returned to Canada with a shared view of what might be possible.35

Having Head in the PMO gave Trudeau the capacity for independent, occasionally secret, foreign policy advice from someone who shared his larger world view. Head’s value was quickly apparent. With a “full-scale justification of the status quo” in the works regarding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Europe, Trudeau asked Head to lead a secret “Non-Group” study into alternatives.36 Included in the briefing book for a cabinet meeting at the end of March 1969, “A Study of Defence Policy,” Trudeau noted, “had been prepared by his office but should not be regarded as a reflection of his own views.”37 The effect on the cabinet ministers was, predictably, the opposite: the document prepared by Head in the PMO was a complete rebuttal of the existing position. While not advocating a complete withdrawal from NATO, it did envision a reduction in the number of Canada’s armed forces, the end of the nuclear-strike role of the air force in Europe, and the elimination of the nuclear warheads on Canada’s NATO brigade surface-to-air missiles. The PMO alternative to the status quo was ultimately withdrawn, but not before everyone around the cabinet table, as well as the entire external affairs bureaucracy, had been made aware of the new ways of thinking about foreign and defence policy in Trudeau’s office, and the new willingness to seek advice outside the bureaucratic channels.38

Trudeau tapped into the innovations of his two predecessors in the office of the prime minister even as he set his own course in foreign policy. He used a strategy that had been devised by Diefenbaker: the use of the potential of the PMO to provide advice unsullied by departmental bureaucrats who were suspected of allegiance to a predecessor, in Diefenbaker’s case, or of intransigence and lack of imagination in Trudeau’s world. He paired that strategy with a position invented by Pearson—the PMO-based policy advisor and general fixer—to build a formidable capacity for foreign policy development within the confines of his own office. With Head having demonstrated his utility with the secret work of the “Non-Group,” his position as Trudeau’s chief advisor on foreign policy was formalized in 1970. While never again quite as covert as the convening of the alternative “Non-Group,” Head’s role in shaping Canada’s position on nuclear disarmament, the Middle East, relations with the United States, and every international junket taken by federal or provincial politicians, was as determinative as it was mysterious.39 That was the advantage of his position in the PMO—it was at the very centre of power but invisible to the broader public.

By the time Ivan Head left the PMO in 1978, the tradition had been firmly established: whenever the prime minister was dissatisfied with what was being done in external affairs, he or she could place an advisor more in tune with their thinking right there in the PMO. Prime ministers have always been inseparable from the nation’s international reputation and aspirations, even long after Mackenzie King ended the practice of the first minister serving as minister of external affairs; trustworthy advice that corresponded to prime ministerial thinking was thus imperative. That did not mean that there were not times when the DEA enjoyed the confidence of the prime minister, but having established the possibility of foreign policy advice from the unelected, non-bureaucratic PMO, there remained a loophole for those moments when the views of the first minister and external affairs officials diverged. The foreign policy advisor within the PMO effectively hobbled the department: give us the advice we want, or we will circumvent you.

Brian Mulroney’s tenure in office provides a good example of the fluidity of influence, and the ways in which the growth of the PMO since the 1930s has affected both the giving and the receiving of foreign policy advice. While much has been made of the centralization of government that seemed to occur under Mulroney, in the realm of foreign policy it is less the amassing of power that is significant than its mobility. Structural and philosophical changes that occurred in previous administrations gave the Mulroney government the opportunity to pick and choose the foreign policy advice it wanted. The previous governments had ensured there were alternative sources of advice within the PMO itself; Mulroney was able to utilize the competition between advisors to his advantage.

Mulroney’s first secretary of state, from 1984 to 1991, was former Prime Minister Joe Clark who served during a period when free trade with the United States and constitutional negotiations dominated the agenda. Mulroney left his Conservative predecessor largely in charge of international issues beyond the United States, where Mulroney’s close relationship with Ronald Reagan and his command of the free trade file were more than sufficient to set the tone. In external affairs, able officials such as Derek Burney quickly earned the trust and respect of both the minister and the prime minister and exerted considerable influence on the shape of the eventual free trade deal.40 The former lustre of external affairs slowly began to return after being side-lined for so long by the Trudeau team.

But after the conclusion of the free trade deal, when the economy refused to rebound as quickly as Mulroney had hoped and with the constitution going nowhere, the prime minister turned his attention abroad. The end of the Cold War and the reorganization of the former Eastern Bloc offered fertile opportunities for intervention. Announcing in Harare that Canada would tie foreign aid to positive human rights performance in the recipient nations and calling for assistance for the former Soviet Union and its republics at a speech at Stanford, Mulroney moved onto the world stage as his popularity and success in Canada declined.41 By this time, however, Clark had shifted to the intergovernmental affairs portfolio, and the less experienced Barbara McDougall had taken over at the DEA. “[T]he centre of gravity has moved from External Affairs to the PMO,” some observed. Many of the former senior civil servants in external affairs shifted to the PMO. Chief among these was Derek Burney, who became Mulroney’s chief of staff in 1987 and speech writer Paul Heinbecker, another foreign policy heavyweight.42 It was Heinbecker, for example, who wrote “a great deal” of the Stanford commencement speech, which initially ruffled the feathers of those in the DEA who had been caught off guard by the shift both in position and in the source of advice.43 Using the spaces created by his predecessors, Mulroney was able to shift the locus of foreign policy advice to his liking—in the DEA when it suited him, in the PMO when that seemed necessary.

In the years since Mackenzie King moaned about his need for assistance in performing his tasks as prime minister and minister of external affairs, the advisory capacity of the Canadian state has grown exponentially. The DEA has expanded, occupying the pinnacle of bureaucratic prestige in the middle years of the twentieth century, and then seen its influence decline in fits and starts from the 1950s through to the end of the twentieth century. The significance of foreign affairs itself did not decline, however; rather the authority and independence of the DEA shifted elsewhere. Not surprisingly, we find that power back where it was in the 1920s—sitting in the pocket of the prime minister. The circuitous path of that powerful advisory role can be traced through the anxieties of a trio of officeholders. Diefenbaker was suspicious of the DEA as a den of Liberals bent on humiliating him, so he cleared space in the PMO for foreign policy advice. Pearson was adrift without those government advisors when he was in opposition, so became dependent on an advisor-in-chief who was handed control of the PMO when the time came. Trudeau was wary of the inertia of the DEA, so he rattled its complacency and replicated its efforts from the intellectually stimulating environment of his own PMO. By the time Mulroney took office, the past had given him the option of taking advice from either the DEA or from the PMO, and he chose, at times, to do both.