The flag of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. Photo by Tony Webster/Wikimedia Commons.

“It was an extraordinary moment,” remembered Stephen Lewis, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. “I was at the UN for four glorious years. I had never seen anything like it before, and I never saw anything like it afterwards…”

On October 23, 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave an “electrifying” speech to the UN General Assembly, in which he not only denounced the evil of South African apartheid but promised Canada would to do everything in its power to end it:

At the next year’s Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, Mulroney famously faced down British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over her opposition to sanctions, pointedly asking her whether she would respond in the same way “if she was dealing with a country with a population of 25 million whites that was ruled by four million blacks.”

Less than four years after Mulroney threw down the gauntlet at the UN, South African President F.W. de Klerk, under heavy international pressure from sanctions, began to dismantle the odious edifice of apartheid, legalizing the African National Congress and releasing its leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment on February 11, 1990.

Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and Mandela went on to become South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. That did not stop the US listing him as a “terrorist” until a few days before his 90th birthday in 2013, weeks before his death.

“On the 10th anniversary of our democracy,” Mandela wrote in a personal letter to Brian Mulroney in 2004:

A few months after his release, Mandela addressed the Canadian Parliament. Introducing his guest, Mulroney recalled “with pride, the stand taken by Canada’s prime minister, John Diefenbaker, at the Commonwealth Conference of 1961, which resulted in South Africa’s withdrawal from that body”:

The opposition came principally from the UK, together with Australia and New Zealand—countries that were once collectively referred to, alongside South Africa, Canada, and Newfoundland, as the British Empire’s “White Dominions.” The US was also not happy with Canada rocking the apartheid boat, since it saw South Africa as an important ally in the global fight against communism and the ANC as dangerously pro-communist. Not for the first or the last time in American history, geopolitics trumped any moral concerns.

Both Diefenbaker and Mulroney were Conservative politicians, and Mulroney had campaigned on a platform of improving relations with the US after the tensions of the Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau years—a promise that was to give us NAFTA. But this did not stop either of them from defying the United States when they believed it was necessary. They did not regard Canada’s membership of NATO (or the “Free World”) as requiring automatic deference to Washington’s priorities, or overlooking palpable evils like apartheid in the interests of maintaining a united Western front in the Cold War.

Canada’s Liberal governments, too, agreed on the need for an independent Canadian foreign policy, and were not afraid to break with the “elephant to the south” (as Pierre Trudeau characterized the US) when called for either. This might even be seen as a hallmark of Canadian identity—an essential one, if we must sleep next to the beast.

Diefenbaker refused to station US nuclear warheads on Canadian soil and gave only lukewarm backing to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. Lester Pearson criticized America’s Vietnam War (allegedly leading Lyndon B. Johnson to grab him by the lapels and yell “Don’t you come into my house and piss on my rug!”) and Pierre Trudeau provided sanctuary to American draft dodgers. Jean Chrétien declined to follow the US-led “Coalition of the Willing” into the Iraq War without approval by the UN.

This is not to say that Canada’s conduct on the world stage was above criticism. As Yves Engler and others have pointed out, Canada is a settler colony whose treatment of its Indigenous population—now as well as then—leaves much to be desired. Canada’s pivot to opposing apartheid in South Africa came late in the day, and its enforcement of sanctions was half-hearted. Thousands of Canadians were allowed to enlist in the US military and fought in Vietnam, while Canadian governments of both parties provided the US with multiple forms of covert support even while not officially joining the war effort.

All the same, there is a yawning moral gulf between Canadian policies then and now.

The guiding principle of Canadian foreign policy during the latter part of the twentieth century was multilateralism. Governments of both parties portrayed Canada’s role in the world as advancing universal human rights rather than defending narrowly conceived national interests. Their preferred self-image was of Canada as a global peacemaker.

At times—as in the........

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