"Punching Above Our Weight" A History of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade

King and Skelton: 1921-30

The election of a Liberal government under William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1921 brought a change in the direction of Canadian foreign policy. Whereas Borden had sought to advance Canadian interests by playing an active role within the British Empire, King, alarmed by the domestic divisions created by the imperial connection during the First World War, was determined to obtain more room to manoeuvre and to seek greater autonomy for Canada.

Suspicious of Christie's close Conservative connections, King froze the legal adviser out of any substantive role in foreign policy until he resigned in disgust in 1923. King also ignored the aging Joseph Pope, and cast about for someone who could build him a proper foreign ministry. He knew that he had found the right man as early as 1922 when he attended a lecture on "Canada and Foreign Policy" by O.D. Skelton, a political scientist (and Dean of Arts) at Queen's University. After serving as King's adviser at the Imperial Conference of 1923, and as a member of the Canadian delegation to the League of Nations in 1924, Skelton became under-secretary in 1925.

Skelton's first objective was to build a Department that could function as a true foreign ministry and support the prime minister's priority to seek a more autonomous role for Canada abroad. As well, Skelton came to fill Christie's role as chief adviser on foreign affairs and, indeed, eventually became King's trusted confidant in all areas of government business. Both his capacity and his appetite for work were legendary.

Skelton began by appointing Jean Désy from the Université de Montréal as the first senior francophone officer at headquarters. In January 1925, King's government opened an office in Geneva under Walter Riddell to deal with the International Labour Office and the League of Nations. However, King's precarious position as head of a minority government made him unwilling to court criticism by expanding his own department too rapidly.

That constraint was removed when King's Liberal party won a majority in the September 1926 federal election. Later that fall, at the Imperial Conference in London, Canada and the other Dominions won the right, later enshrined in the Statute of Westminster, to establish diplomatic missions abroad. King quickly appointed Vincent Massey as the first Canadian minister in Washington. Following this appointment, the office in Paris was raised to legation status and a legation was opened in Tokyo. Although the missions abroad were headed by political appointees, Skelton set about creating a modern foreign service based on merit.

From 1927, recruits entered the Department-with occasional exceptions-on the basis of competitive examination. Skelton wanted, and obtained, well-qualified officers with postgraduate degrees who could immediately undertake important duties. Among those who entered the Department in the late 1920s were such future luminaries as Lester Pearson, Norman Robertson, and Hugh Keenleyside.

By 1930, the Department's officer staff at home and abroad numbered 16, of whom a third were francophone, although the working language of the Department, like that of the civil service generally, was English. Too small to afford specialists, the Department favoured generalists, a preference that it was to sustain for many years. King was pleased with what he now considered "the most conspicuous and in some respects the most important department of government."

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