Trudeau’s Secretary of State for External Affairs at the time, Mark MacGuigan, described the Prime Minister’s actions.

"Vance arrived in Ottawa," MacGuigan wrote, "just after the abortive American attempt to forcibly rescue the besieged American diplomats at their embassy in Teheran, and in time for a full morning of meetings with me before a luncheon at the prime minister’s residence. At lunch, Trudeau harangued him at length about the dangers implicit in further U.S. attempts to rescue the American diplomats confined in Teheran by the revolutionary Iranian mob."

MacGuigan then continued. “Unbeknownst to Canada’s prime minister, Vance was shortly to resign because he too disagreed with Carter’s rescue mission,” he wrote. “Out of loyalty and respect for his president, however, Vance had agreed not to announce it until after the mission was over.” Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.