“Interests but No Foreign Policy”: Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean, 1941–1966

Abstract

Canadians have long delighted in the notion of a diplomatic golden age, whose Pearsonian qualities of selfless and progressive internationalism set them apart as a chosen, if perhaps smug, people. Even today, the notion retains its potency, encouraging pundits and politicians alike to hark back to a simpler age when, in the pithy words of journalist Lawrence Martin, there some idealism around this place. We didn't kneel at the altar of militarism. (2) While historians have generally acknowledged that there was obviously more Canadian foreign policy after 1945, they have been skeptical of the idealist notions associated with a transformative golden age. Canada's postwar diplomats, argues Carleton University historian Norman Hillmer, cautious, careful in their actions, and hewed closer to the approach followed by Prime Minister W.L. Mackenzie King in the 1930s than they later confessed. (3) King's successors grasped the nature of global power, were conscious of Canada's limited means, and were inclined to shun international responsibilities. As political scientist Denis Stairs explains, they were traditional realists who owed more to Metternich than to Axworthy. (8) Recent scholarship has tended to confirm these conclusions, while pushing their critical analysis in new directions. Younger academics, more attuned to the Cold War's transitory character and the persistent challenges of the postcolonial world, have begun to explore the limited geographical reach of Canadian diplomacy in the period just after 1945. Their general conclusions are no longer surprising: the familiar North Atlantic and its safe alliance structure, where Canada's most obvious economic and political interests lay, constrained Ottawa's ability to address the emerging challenges of distant lands, torn asunder by decolonization and revolution. (5) Canada's relationship with a decolonizing Commonwealth Caribbean has not attracted much attention. Consequently, the evolution of this relationship since 1941 remains largely overlooked in the literature, which still tends to emphasize the well-documented prewar period or to offer brief, prescriptive analysis of contemporary (6) Yet Canadian-Caribbean relations after 1941 clearly deserve more study. 1964, for instance, Canada exported more to this region than it did to India, and it ranked third as a destination for exports from the Caribbean. (7) Nor can the region's later importance as a source of immigrants be overstated. This article begins to address this gap, tracing the Canadian government's reaction to political and economic changes in the Commonwealth Caribbean from the early days of the Second World War until the mid-1960s, when Canada and the area's newly independent states met to fashion a mature relationship. During this quarter-century, Canadian policymakers were often divided over the significance of Caribbean decolonization and their appropriate response. Rarely, and then only briefly, did Ottawa show any signs of developing a coherent strategic vision for its relations with the Caribbean. The result was an inconsistent and incremental approach, seeking largely to meet Canada's immediate economic and political interests. As Klaus Goldschlag, a senior Canadian diplomat, once quipped, In the Caribbean we have interests but no foreign policy. (8) By 1939, Canada's relations with the Commonwealth Caribbean were ripe for examination. The product of over two centuries of political and economic interaction, the relationship had settled into a complacent routine in which Canadian salt-fish, wheat, and flour flowed southward in exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum, all effectively subsidized by Ottawa under the terms of the 1925 Canada-British West Indies Trade Agreement. (9) As well, several of the big Canadian banks--the Bank of Montreal, the Bank of Nova Scotia, and the Royal Bank of Canada--had located in the regions in the 19th century and remained very active on the islands they served. …