O.D. Skelton: The Work of the World, 1923–1941 ed. by Norman Hillmer (review)

O.D. Skelton is perhaps Canada’s most famous figure from the era of the great mandarins. He was the man who professionalized External Affairs, served as Mackenzie King’s most trusted civil servant, and whose passionate views on nationalism helped shape the interwar years in Canadian foreign policy. Despite this influence and that his ideas, marriage, and foreign policy have all been written about, Skelton nonetheless remains somewhat of an opaque figure.

Hillmer’s work at least partly remedies this situation in two ways. First, he has compiled a collection of documents that goes beyond the normal External Affairs memoranda to look at foreign policy specifically through Skelton’s writings. His frequently interrupted diary and his correspondence with his wife as well as official and draft memoranda allow the reader to blend the civil servant and the individual. The real contribution of the work, though, is the fifty-five page introduction. Here we begin to see Skelton’s complex intelligence, obstinacy, sense of duty, and personal ambition emerge. The portrait that Hillmer develops is far from hagiographic and, if anything, the Skelton who is portrayed here reveals a man continuing to fight a battle that had already been decided while unable fully to accept the implications of a newer and greater threat.

The battle he never stopped fighting was, of course, imperial control versus Canadian independence in foreign policy. Skelton was an ardent nationalist, determined that Canada needed to press to a conclusion the precedents set in and after the First World War. Beginning with King’s appointment of him as an advisor to the 1923 Imperial Conference, Skelton took on a central role arguing persistently with thorough and often brilliant analyses of the risks that imperial presumptions presented to Canada’s evolution as a nation. There is no doubt his incisiveness did much to balance King’s fuzziness and therefore ensured that the British and others received the message on the direction of Canadian government thinking. As early as 1926 and the Balfour Report, it could be argued though, the issue had been largely decided. Whatever happened in the future in foreign policy would be up to Canada.

The trouble was that Skelton never trusted either the British or, for that matter, Canadian public sentiment. As new dangers appeared in the rising dictatorships of Germany, Italy, and Japan, Skelton was somewhat adrift. He recognized the dangers of “one European dictator dreaming he is Caesar and another certain he is God” (389), yet he could not help but view European aggression through the prism of Canadian autonomy. This forced him into a North American isolationism while denying he was an isolationist and into blaming the British for being too passive while arguing that they should avoid war. As war approached, he grew increasingly bitter, complaining during the Sudetenland crisis of “fourteen years work wasted” (41). It was a strangely parochial perspective from a man who was often so perceptive. The contradictions between the coolly analytical mind and the visceral anti-imperialist only piled up in the final few months before the war. As Hillmer nicely puts it, “Skelton was wrong about so much in 1939” (49). It also put him at odds with his boss, the prime minister who, for all his failures, recognized the limits of what Senator Raoul Dandurand once termed the “fireproof house.”

The differences between Skelton and King burst into the open only occasionally, and the civil servant ultimately deferred to the elected politician. Nonetheless, the gap between them reveals much. Skeltorís views, for all his influence, ultimately lay outside the mainstream of public opinion. Given that, it is unfortunate that Hillmer barely touches on the origins of this extreme form of anti-British-imperialism. There is a passing argument that Skelton was reacting against the imperialism of both his father and of Queerís where he taught. The former is intriguing but...