Authors: Michael Harris
Although Trudeau’s closest diplomatic confidant in those days was Robert Fowler, he turned to Paul Heinbecker to prepare his last speech on the so-called Peace Initiative in October 1983. It was in the jittery days of the Cold War, with the United States and the Soviet Union involved in an arms race. Disarmament talks in Vienna had broken down and Trudeau, nearing the end of his career, wanted to initiate a “cooling down” period between the world’s twitchy superpowers.
The attempt to de-escalate the Russo-American standoff had become urgent on August 30, 1983, when the Soviets shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing everyone on board, including ten Canadians. The prime minister chose to see the tragedy as an accident rather than a hostile act demanding a military response. Only through diplomacy, Trudeau believed, could the world shake free of the Cold War and all of its apocalyptic risks. Heinbecker wrote the speech that the PM planned to use “to civilize the dialogue” in an increasingly confrontational world. “Without referring to notes, Trudeau questioned me closely on the content, citing actual pages. You had to know your stuff when you met him because he knew his stuff. And if he could question you without a copy of the speech in front of him, you had better be able to look him in the eye and answer his questions the same way.”
Working with Trudeau had its lighter moments. After the two men reworked the speech together, the prime minister continued to press Heinbecker for more words. The speech writer was puzzled. They had covered all the agreed-upon points in detail. Trudeau finally explained the need for prolixity. If he spoke from noon until 1 p.m., there would be a break before Question Period; that way, the PM wouldn’t have to listen to the response to his
speech from Opposition leader Brian Mulroney, the man soon to become the second prime minister of Paul Heinbecker’s career.
Brian Mulroney may not have had Pierre Trudeau’s charisma, intellectual gravitas, or string of celebrity girlfriends, but when he went on a charm offensive, there was no public figure quite like him. Heinbecker got to know the Progressive Conservative prime minister much better than he, or anyone else, ever got to know the enigmatic Trudeau. Following the adage that the beginning of wisdom is the suspension of judgment, Heinbecker saw Mulroney’s flaws but he also saw through them to a better side: “I liked him. He had all the virtues and vices of a human being. He was personable to an extent that few other politicians are.”
Heinbecker was well regarded in the Mulroney administration, though never a member of the inner circle. He lived through four chiefs of staff—Stanley Hart, Norman Spector, Hugh Segal, and David McLaughlin. Even though Heinbecker didn’t enjoy the access to Mulroney that was shown to confidants such as Dr. Fred Doucet, the prime minister had an uncanny way of reaching out to staff at moments of personal distress. It made people feel special. It also forged a personal loyalty to Mulroney that a mere working relationship never could—a phenomenon rare in the Harper PMO. There, as an insider told me, everyone serves at, but not necessarily with, pleasure.
Mulroney took an intense interest in his staff. When Heinbecker’s daughter Céline had to undergo surgery after she slipped off a slide and fell face-first into a wooden plank, the prime minister called during the child’s operation for a report. He called again when Heinbecker’s mother was involved in a lengthy cancer surgery; and, finally, when Bob Graver, a fellow PMO staffer, died of a heart attack in the office, Mulroney had Heinbecker paged at Pearson airport. He wanted to break the
news personally before Heinbecker heard about his colleague’s sudden death in the media.
While Mulroney’s well-ploughed sins and misdemeanors in domestic politics eventually destroyed his government, his party, and to some degree his reputation, his contributions internationally were epic and enduring. As for the diplomatic corps, the man who sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with Ronald Reagan was a dream prime minister to work under.
While many of Mulroney’s own citizens disliked what they took to be his obsequious fawning over figures such as the US president, world leaders responded to his personal charm, whereas Pierre Trudeau’s relentless rationality had frequently left them cold. One of Trudeau’s greatest attractions was that he never held membership in any old boys’ club; Mulroney’s principal strength was that he did, enjoying a string of corporate connections running back to his days as president of the Iron Ore Company of Canada. In the end, where Trudeau’s intellectual rigour and aloofness made tepid friends and passionate enemies, Mulroney’s personality and networking got some very big things done.
Under Mulroney, Canada was instrumental in keeping up the economic pressure to end apartheid in South Africa. Canadian businessmen and world leaders alike were pressuring him to ease sanctions in order to do more business with the racist but wealthy state. They argued that the government of Willem de Klerk was making progress on human rights and that sanctions, as Margaret Thatcher a little disingenuously observed, “only hurt the poor.”
Mulroney asked Canadian diplomat Lucie Edwards to make contact with the still-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. On behalf of the prime minister, she asked the legendary ANC leader if the sanctions should be lifted. Mandela told her that they were still important and should remain in place. That was enough for Brian Mulroney. As he told Heinbecker, by then his chief foreign policy
advisor, “If Mandela thinks the sanctions should remain, our decision is that they remain.”
It was easier said than done. Behind the scenes, another Brian Mulroney, unrecognizable as the smarmy schmoozer on the nightly news, went to work against a wall of opposition. He stood up to and eventually won over three powerful world leaders who wanted sanctions against South Africa relaxed—German chancellor Helmut Kohl, US president Ronald Reagan, and the Iron Lady herself, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. When Thatcher’s press secretary later made a public statement at odds with Thatcher’s commitment to keeping tough sanctions in place, Mulroney snapped the British delegation back into line with a withering comment: “Where I come from, you don’t make a deal at five o’clock and then disavow it at six.”
Years later, after Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, he and Mulroney found themselves visiting Germany at the same time. Paul Heinbecker was Canada’s ambassador in Bonn, and Mandela asked him to set up a meeting with his former advocate. The ambassador obliged. At the end of their meeting, Mandela asked Mulroney to lend financial support to the African National Congress. Knowing that the organization had a militant wing, Mulroney was wary of appearing to support terrorism. In the end, he pledged a modest sum of money to his old friend. As Mandela left the room, he turned to Mulroney and said, “And Brian, make sure your donation is in American dollars.”
In his two terms in office, successive majorities, Mulroney had a string of foreign policy accomplishments unrivalled in Canadian history: the Acid Rain Treaty with the United States; the Canada– United States Free Trade Agreement; the North American Free Trade Agreement; tough sanctions against apartheid in South Africa; a pivotal role in the reunification of the two Germanys; and foundational work on international responsibility for famine.
As Heinbecker reflected, “Under Mulroney, Canada came down on the right side of history on apartheid and a good many other international issues.”
As professionally satisfying as Heinbecker’s Mulroney years were, more solid accomplishments lay ahead of him. Canada’s diplomats remained busy under the government of Heinbecker’s third prime minister, Jean Chrétien. During Chrétien’s tenure, Canada was instrumental in bringing forward the international ban on land mines and in creating the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Canadian diplomats were in the vanguard of a UN initiative to impose sanctions against trade in “blood diamonds” (diamonds mined and sold to finance a warlord). When the sanctions were flouted, it was Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler who headed up an investigation into how to put an end to the blooddiamond trade. As a result of his work, countries trading in blood diamonds were “named and shamed,” and the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme was put into place. That process prevented blood diamonds from entering the world’s rough diamond market, thereby cutting off funds for armed conflicts in war-torn places such as Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sierra Leone.
Heinbecker himself had a defining career moment serving under Chrétien. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the seasoned diplomat was Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations. Every day in the UN, the drumbeat of war came from the US side in the person of John Negroponte, the permanent representative to the United Nations under President George W. Bush.
The more diligently Ambassador Heinbecker worked behind the scenes to gain more time for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to search for weapons of mass destruction inside Iraq, the angrier Negroponte became. Heinbecker was accused of “obstructing US diplomacy”—code for impeding the Bush administration’s march to war. Negroponte
summoned Heinbecker and proceeded to dress him down over the Canadian position at the UN. When Heinbecker persisted in his efforts to avert a shooting war, Negroponte expressed his displeasure by asking Canada’s ambassador a pointed question: just how big a fight did he want with the US government anyway? “They actually sent me a threatening email,” Heinbecker disclosed. “If I’d kept that email, I could have dined out for the rest of my life on that exchange.”
After being raked over the coals by Negroponte, Heinbecker alerted Ottawa to what was happening in New York. He told the PMO and the PCO that the Americans were livid that Canadian diplomacy was blocking a more “direct” way of dealing with the regime of Saddam Hussein. The reply from the prime minister was vintage Chrétien: “Paul, you’re a big boy; do what big boys do. Tell them to go to hell.”
As the geopolitical clock ticked down to the witching hour of war, Prime Minister Chrétien had to decide whether to throw his lot in with President Bush, or to face the consequences of opting out of a dubious and perhaps illegal invasion badly wanted by Washington. It was one of the big decisions that Chrétien’s government had to get right. Jim Wright of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development played a role in the deliberations, but Chrétien’s final decision on the Iraq war—not to get involved—was crafted by three people: foreign policy advisor Claude Laverdure, senior political advisor Eddie Goldenberg, and Ambassador Paul Heinbecker. “Of the three of us,” Heinbecker confided in me, “my advice had the biggest influence.”
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By diplomatic standards, Heinbecker had hit a tape-measure home run: he had kept his country out of a war, and better yet, a war triggered by false intelligence and in violation of international law. The decision to stay on the sidelines of the Iraq War in the absence of approval for the mission from the Security Council
remains one of the enduring accomplishments of Jean Chrétien’s tenure as prime minister. As a legacy issue it was not inconsequential, given that the Quebec ad sponsorship scandal tarnished Chrétien’s record at the end.
Chrétien’s respect for the UN, for his own diplomats, and for international law stood in stark contrast to Stephen Harper’s mantra of damn the Security Council and full speed ahead. As leader of the Opposition, Harper famously wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
that it was a “serious mistake” for Canada not to have gone to war in Iraq. Much later, during a televised election debate, Harper reluctantly admitted that the serious mistake had been his, not Jean Chrétien’s, in accepting the bogus claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as justification for war.
In Heinbecker’s judgment, and seen against the accomplishments of the prime minister’s predecessors, Stephen Harper has left fifty years of Canadian diplomacy in tatters, seriously damaging the country’s international reputation. As a politician, this prime minister seems to look out from a kind of intellectual suburbia onto a cosmopolitan world that is poorly understood, uninteresting, and perhaps even unimportant to him except in terms of the economic opportunities it provides. It is his instinctive position. When Harper was a Reform Party MP, Preston Manning tried to broaden his acolyte’s horizons by introducing him to the virgin territory of foreign affairs. Harper balked. “One thing that did surprise me about Stephen as an MP. He had no interest in international stuff,” Manning told me. “We simply couldn’t get him to travel.”
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Perhaps it was Harper’s parochial bent; perhaps it was a deeply ingrained mistrust of international politics, diplomacy, or leaders with different views than himself. Whatever the reason, soon after winning his majority government in 2011, Stephen Harper became the proverbial skunk at the diplomatic garden party.
Harper’s support for the Likud government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had always been unconditional. But armed now with his new majority, the prime minister took a deep stride into international isolation in May 2011 at the G8 Summit in Deauville, France. Like many of his fellow veteran diplomats, Heinbecker was stunned by what the prime minister did: “He took the unbelievable decision to block President Obama’s statement in the draft communiqué from the G-8 that the starting point for Israeli/Palestinian peace negotiations would be the 1967 borders. We vetoed that. It may have gone down well in Tel Aviv. It didn’t go down well in Washington.”
Seven months later, the prime minister used the power afforded by his majority to take a contrarian position on what is arguably the greatest issue of the age: global warming and climate change. Despite the scientific evidence calling for a concerted global effort to reduce carbon emissions before planetary warming becomes irreversible, Canada became the first country in the world to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto was a legally binding international agreement signed and ratified by Canada that committed industrialized countries to reducing their carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Canadian politicians, NGOs, and diplomats including Heinbecker had been deeply involved in crafting the original agreement. The Harper government left their work in pieces. The entire climate change division within Foreign Affairs was axed. In the words of Green Party leader Elizabeth May, Stephen Harper was turning Canada into “the North Korea of the Environment.”