Canada and the Pan American Union: Twenty Years On

Abstract

Two decades ago Eugene Miller decided to explore Canadian attitudes toward the fifty-eight-year-old Pan American Union, In April 1947 United States Senator Arthur Vandenberg, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, had repeated the invitation to Canada to join the Pan American Union (pau) . There had been a slight flurry of interest among Canadian politicians and diplomats. But what Miller believed to be a reaction to dose war ties with the United States and a strong Canadian commitment to the United Nations, as well as widespread public ignorance of the pau a 1947 poll by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion had shown that 70 per cent of those polled had little or no knowledge of it led to little being done.1 Canada is still not a member of the Pan American Union, or, as it became in 1948, the Organization of American States (oas).2 But there has been more than a flurry of interest in Latin America and the oas in the