The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Hungarian and Canadian Perspectives

11. "An Unselfish Interest?": Canada and the Hungarian Revolution, 1954-1957

11. “An Unselfish Interest?”: Canada and the Hungarian Revolution, 1954–1957 Greg Donaghy As he left his office in the Woods Building on a grey November afternoon, soon after Soviet troops had re-entered the Hungarian capital of Budapest, Earl McCarthy, the new chief of movement and control for Canada’s Department of Immigration, was hailed by his deputy minister, Colonel Laval Fortier. “How,” the stately colonel demanded, “can we get these poor Hungarians, who are streaming out of their country under Russian oppression, to Canada as quickly as possible?” Though shaken by this sudden encounter with his distant chief, McCarthy, with a can-do attitude that promised to slash through red tape, burst out in reply, “Fly them over!”1 These bold words amply illustrate the main motifs of the celebrated national myth that has grown up around Canada’s response to the Hungarian crisis: it was swift, unorthodox, and generous. Freda Hawkins, one of the leading authorities on Canadian immigration, elegantly describes it as “a brief moment of splendour.”2 There are grounds for a strong sense of self-satisfaction in the Canadian reaction to the Central European crisis of November 1956. Of the 200,000 or so refugees that spilled out of Hungary into Austria, Yugoslavia, and Italy in the wake of Moscow’s decision to crush the Hungarian revolt, Canada welcomed almost 40,000—the largest contingent received by any country and a number disproportionate to Canada’s size. The arrival of these migrants, as well as their lasting significance for Canada’s immigration and refugee policy, has 256 The 1956 Hungarian Revolution: Canadian and Hungarian Perspectives naturally dominated the discussion of the Canadian role during the revolution. The inaccessibility of government records for the period and the overriding importance to Canada of the Suez Crisis, which erupted simultaneously, has reinforced this tendency to focus on Canada as a haven for refugees. Canada’s response to the Hungarian crisis was more complex and its implications further reaching than this narrow perspective suggests. Though the refugees and their significance for Canadian immigration policy remain central in any retelling of this story, the documentary record suggests a less triumphant view of Ottawa’s handling of the Hungarian exodus, with policy in the hands of an uncertain and hesitant government. Moreover, the Hungarian revolution had important implications for Canadian foreign policy. This paper explores Canada’s nuanced diplomatic reaction to the crisis against the backdrop of Ottawa’s evolving attitudes toward the Soviet Union after the death of its dictator, Joseph Stalin. The moderation in Canada’s Soviet policy beginning in 1954 conditioned the country’s response to the Soviet challenge in Hungary and defined Ottawa’s long-term relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe, despite the dramatic events of November 1956. The prospects for peace and security in Europe appeared better in January 1956 than they had since the end of World War II. For almost a decade, relations between the totalitarian Soviet Union and the American-led Western democracies, including Canada, had been gripped in the rigid and dangerous Cold War. Bilateral contact had virtually ceased by 1947, while multilateral exchanges at the new United Nations (UN) were largely reduced to bitter volleys of ill-tempered recriminations in an endless search for propaganda advantage. It was worse in Asia. There the two sides and their proxies traded bombs and bullets in a series of vicious post-colonial struggles that often flirted with atomic annihilation. Stalin’s death in 1953, the Geneva Conference on the Korean War and Southeast Asia in the spring of 1954, and the July 1955 summit in Geneva, where Western leaders met with their Soviet counterparts for the first time since 1945, seemed to herald a period of reduced global tensions. In Ottawa, Robert Ford, who had become head of the European division of the Department of External Affairs in April 1954, was responsible for making sense of these developments and charting Canadian policy toward Moscow and Donaghy “An Unselfish Interest?”: Canada and the Hungarian Revolution, 1954–1957 257 the Communist bloc. Ford was admirably equipped for the job. Educated at the universities of Western Ontario and Cornell, where he studied Russian history and language, he joined Canada’s small foreign ministry in 1940. After serving in the Soviet Union in 1946–1947, he returned to Moscow in March 1951 as chargé d’affaires and head of the Canadian embassy. A...