Towards a Francophone Community: Canada's Relations with France and French Africa, 1945–1968

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.

Robin Gendron argues that since the early 1960s, Canada’s track record
in French-speaking Africa has weakened the federal government’s
position and strengthened Quebec’s. The Quebec government was
establishing an international profile, and in 1967 de Gaulle called for
Quebec independence. In 1968, Pearson’s government suspended
diplomatic relations with tiny Gabon, which had invited the government
of Quebec to a conference of francophone nations. Gabon had exceeded the
limits of Canadian tolerance, warned Pearson, and it must pay a price
lest others follow its lead.

With sources from Ottawa, Saskatoon (Diefenbaker’s archives), Quebec
City, and Paris (but no African countries), Gendron explains why Quebec
could compete with Ottawa for the affection of France’s former African
colonies. Before Jean Lesage’s government (1960–1966) established a
Department of Intergovernmental Affairs and French African countries
achieved independence (1956–1962), Quebec politicians had little
interest in Africa. When Ottawa had the field of foreign relations to
itself, it thought of French-speaking Africa almost exclusively in terms
of relations between Canada and France. During World War II, Mackenzie
King worried that fighting between the Free French and the Vichy French
(who fought each other in Africa) might lead to conflict between the
United Kingdom and Vichy. That, in turn, might create a crisis of
national unity within Canada. From November 1942, Algiers was important
to Ottawa as the capital of liberated France. On principle, U.S.
authorities opposed European colonization of other continents, but
Winston Churchill and his successors valued the British Empire. As King
strongly believed that Anglo-American harmony served Canadian interests,
he feared that promotion of African independence anywhere might inflame
a touchy relationship. In the early years of the Cold War (under St.
Laurent and Diefenbaker), good relations with France and France’s
membership in NATO trumped African sensitivities.

African opinion mattered because each country had a vote at the United
Nations and in La Francophonie. Some French politicians with influence
in Africa supported Quebec independence, and successive Quebec
governments sought an increased international role. Gendron explains the
ebb and flow of Ottawa–Quebec rivalry until 1968 and the relevance of
Africans to that rivalry.