The Ambiguous Champion: Canada and South Africa in the Trudeau and Mulroney Years

D.M.L. Farr is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University,
where he taught Canadian political history and the history of Canada’s
external relations.

Over the years Canadians have congratulated themselves that their
country led the international struggle against the apartheid regime in
South Africa. The Ambiguous Champion rebuts this view. In 300 pages of
densely packed text and another 100 pages of references, Linda Freeman
draws together evidence that shows that Canadian policies towards the
white-supremacy governments in South Africa were at best mixed, at worst
compromised and contradictory. Her book is the first full-length
critical study of Canada and South Africa. It is based on Canadian
government publications, material from the Commonwealth and the United
Nations, and a wide range of secondary material, much of it emanating
from the long and angry domestic debate over how Canada should deal with
the ugly spectacle of apartheid.

Freeman, a member of the Political Science Department at Carleton
University, gives credit to John Diefenbaker for seeing that apartheid
South Africa could not remain a member of a multiracial Commonwealth.
But she faults Diefenbaker for not going further and enforcing sanctions
on South Africa. She is critical of Lester Pearson for focusing on the
problem of white rule in Rhodesia and ignoring Canada’s economic
relations with South Africa. She berates Pierre Trudeau for being
inconsistent. “We should either stop trading or stop condemning,” he
said, but his government continued to do both. Brian Mulroney took a
strong stand against the apartheid regime, restricting Canada’s
economic tie even though he believed in free trade, and breaking with
his natural ally Margaret Thatcher in urging stronger action against a
racist state. Yet even Mulroney’s vigorous stand was briefly held and
after 1990 he lapsed into a less-assertive posture. Freeman posits high
standards, even standards approaching perfection, in assessing
international policies towards South Africa and apartheid. Canadian
leaders, as well as most world leaders, do not meet her standards.

This is not an easy book to read. It is plodding in places and given to
overarching views. It makes much of bringing into its analysis
nongovernmental forces and actors. Surely historians have known all
along that foreign policy is made by more than governments. It
occasionally resorts to social science jargon—“a counter-hegemonic
discourse”—which is unhelpful for the general reader. Its reference
notes are so voluminous that they are overpowering: a full page of notes
for one page of text, for instance. There are 12 pages of illustrations
portraying the principal actors in the drama, and a well-constructed
index. The Ambiguous Champion is a solid work of reference, a worthy
study of an important topic in recent Canadian external policy.