Oscar D. Skelton was one of the most important Canadian public figures of the early twentieth century. Skelton, a Queen’s University academic and celebrated biographer of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, became an informal advisor to Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King after the First World War and, from 1925 until his death in 1941, undersecretary of state for external affairs.
It is often said that Canada won its independence on the killing fields of the Western Front during the First World War. But no one was sure of how, in the war’s aftermath, to go about untethering Ottawa from London without losing all the celebrated shared bonds of culture, history, and politics with the British Empire. Skelton acted as the primary advisor to the cautious and suspicious King, and he sought to guide Canada along a new path towards continental solidarity. In Skelton’s words, he wished to see Canadians develop a “North American mind.” For many Canadians who cherished the links to Britain, he was a man with dangerous ideas.
Norman Hillmer, a master historian from Carleton University, has been studying Skelton’s life and his impact on Canada for the better part of forty years. The author of twenty-nine books and edited collections, the supervisor to dozens of graduate students, mentor to thousands of undergraduates, and an acknowledged expert on Canada and foreign affairs, Hillmer has unravelled nearly every aspect of Skelton’s public life. One is always cheered when an important historical figure finds the right historian to tell his story with superb insight, deft wit, cautious reserve, and a wide understanding of the interplay between character, circumstance, and society.
This important book is part of the work of the venerated Champlain Society and contains the bare-bones documents, letters, and diary entries of Skelton’s official and unofficial archives documenting his public life.
Skelton’s briefing notes were minor works of art. His diary entries were poignant and sharp. For all of these documents, Hillmer sets the context in a crisply written fiftyfive- page introduction. He then allows the Skelton archives to provide deep insight into nearly every major event of the era involving Canada, the British Empire, and Canadian- American relations. There are new revelations into the 1923 and 1926 Imperial Conferences, foreign policy in the R.B. Bennett years (1930–35), the Abyssinian Affair of 1935–36, Hitler’s rearmament and provocations in the late 1930s, and Canada’s preparation for and actions during the early years of the Second World War.
Skelton’s writing also provides a window into domestic politics, with nuances to be gleaned regarding King and Bennett as well as the inner workings of the Department of External Affairs. Skelton was not always right in his predictions or advice, or in his desire to keep King from committing the nation to action as Hitler intimidated and gobbled up his neighbours in 1938 and 1939; but his work was always performed with the goal of allowing Canada to decide its own fate, rather than letting it be dictated by others across the Atlantic or south of the border.
For many Canadians in the interwar period, with their deep attachment to the British Empire, Skelton’s message of attempting to divert Canada away from Britain and towardsa greater independence of action would have been viewed with apprehension, even danger — but he was, of course, on the right side of history.
— Tim Cook (Read bio)
Tim Cook is a member of the Order of Canada and the author of eight history books, including Fight to the Finish: Canadians and the Second World War.