On this date in 2009 former Prime Minister and Secretary of State for External Affairs, the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark, was in Antigonish, Nova Scotia to deliver a major foreign policy address.
“A sense of international vocation has helped define Canadian national identity since at least the end of the first Great War,” he said that night at St. Francis Xavier University. “It has been expressed through our soldiers, our development programs, our foreign policies, our instinctive and generous response to tsunamis or famine and most of all, through the legions of Canadian missionaries and teachers and entrepreneurs who routinely change lives around the world. We should treat that international vocation as an asset just as we treat our energy resources as an asset, or our literacy as an asset, or our ingenuity as an asset, or our diversity as an asset. That would provide both a resonant instrument of Canadian identity and a substantial contribution to a turbulent and needy world.”
You can read the 16th Prime Minister’s lecture in full at this link: https://www.stfx.ca/department/political-science/foreign-policy-canadian-act
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.