Future Prime Minister John Napier Turner, then a leading minister in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s first cabinet, was in Toronto on this date in 1971 to deliver an address to the storied Empire Club. It was a tense time in Canadian-American relations and Turner reassured his audience that relations with our southern neighbour were, in fact, on the right track.
“Your government is not anti-American. If you were to ask me, anti-Americanism is bad politics in Canada,” he said frankly. “I believe there is too much community of interest, too many family ties, too much shared experience, to tolerate any permanent breach in our relationship with the U.S… Broadening our links with China and the Soviet Union is not anti-American. It makes sense to us in the cause of peace. It makes sense to us in the interest of trade. Mr. Trudeau was a pacemaker and Mr. Nixon is on the trail. He will go to Peking. He will go to Moscow. Protection of our Arctic waters from pollution is not anti-American. We have a right to protect our environment and a duty to the world to co-operate in saving the seas from either oil or nuclear pollution.
Turner forcefully continued. “Insisting upon a national rather than a continental energy policy is not anti-American,” he said. “It is protection of our birthright. Resisting a continental resources policy is legitimate self-interest in any country that wants to find jobs for its people. A national water policy is not anti-American; it is a careful husbanding of our future. Resisting a landlord-tenant confrontation on this continent is inherent in our national self-respect.”
Almost 20-years-later, in 1988, Turner would famously lead the national opposition to the Free Trade Agreement with the United States negotiated by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Tories.
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.