The Sterling Public Servant: A Global Tribute to Sylvia Ostry

Graeme S. Mount is a professor of history at Laurentian University. He
is the author of Canada’s Enemies: Spies and Spying in the Peaceable
Kingdom, Chile and the Nazis, and The Diplomacy of War: The Case of
Korea.

During her career as a civil servant, Sylvia Ostry became a deputy
minister. Later she spent four years as Canada’s representative at the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. She served both
the Trudeau and Mulroney governments, then—as a distinguished
economist—held positions at Canadian universities. As she turned 75,
twenty of her friends and colleagues wrote essays in her honour. Each
author is a distinguished personage in his or her own right.

A few of the writers deal with Ostry herself, such as former Liberal
cabinet minister Marc Lalonde and Hiroshi Kitamura, a Japanese diplomat
who met her in New York. Most, however, do not. Allan Gotlieb, who was
Canada’s ambassador in Washington during the Reagan years, offers a
brief review of “Canadian Diplomacy: Past and Present.” Another
former Liberal cabinet minister, Allan MacEachen, discusses the 1982
GATT Ministerial. There are articles on Canada– U.S. relations, modern
Europe, and globalization. Gordon Smith predicts the type of world
Canadians will experience in the not-too-distant future. In other words,
the essays are eclectic.

Some are very brief. Gordon Robertson, an adviser to prime ministers,
gave an exciting title to his submission: “Some Problems of Summitry
and Advising Prime Ministers”; alas, the article covered all of two
pages and 10 lines. But every topic is worthy of attention, and the
essays on diplomacy and economics are interesting.