by Keith Spicer

As late monsoon rains swept old Colombo in January 1950, seven anxious Commonwealth leaders met in then-Ceylon’s capital. Their goal: to create the Colombo Plan, an unprecedented international framework for East-West solidarity. Grouping Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, and Pakistan, it would become a Marshall Plan to rescue Asia both from poverty and from irreversible communist conquest.

Star attendees included British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Canadian External Affairs Minister Lester Pearson, and Australian External Affairs Minister Percy Spender. As alumni of British parliamentary and university traditions, they met as familiars, almost like schoolboys at a reunion.

But the times were tense, and studded with momentous events. The Second World War that had ended five years earlier had bled Britain dry. And it was steadily losing its major Asian possessions. In India, Gandhi’s peaceful self-reliance movement had lit a raging anti-colonial fire, exciting all of Asia. By 1947, Nehru’s Congress Party had finally led India to independence from Britain. Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka in 1972) achieved independence a year later. Gandhi and Nehru had become world-thrilling heroes.

Everywhere, communism was on the march. The defection to Canada of Ottawa-based Soviet cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko in 1945 highlighted Moscow’s spy infiltrations throughout the West. Communists in France and Italy held more than a quarter of parliamentary seats in the immediate postwar years. Soviet subversion led to a communist coup in Prague in 1948.

In April 1949, a frightened West founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with strong Canadian urging and tangible support. Western fears of communism continued to grow as more cases of Soviet spying were revealed. Klaus Fuchs, a German communist who worked for a while at Canada’s Chalk River nuclear establishment, passed atomic bomb secrets to Moscow. In Britain, the Cambridge Five — a ring of well-educated British-born communists — infiltrated that country’s counter-espionage establishment.

Most spectacularly, Mao Zedong’s Communist Party trumpeted its conquest of China on October 1, 1949. In impoverished Asia, communist propaganda noisily backed anti-colonial sentiment. Marxism seemed the natural ally of liberation: The theme of an international proletariat fighting off greedy foreign looters seduced many Asian minds, and indeed fit many facts. Japan’s wartime propaganda had whipped up further anger against “white oppressors,” extending the ideology of class oppression to the even more inflammatory matter of race.

Meanwhile, a communist “emergency” threatened Malaya from 1948 to 1960. And postwar France, trying to seize back colonial Indochina, stumbled into a nine-year bloodbath, leaving America to leap into its own Vietnam morass in 1955.

Commonwealth leaders meeting in Ceylon were clear about their motivations for the Colombo Plan. They believed that by accelerating the economic development of Asia they could somehow prevent the spread of communism, thus removing a massive geopolitical threat to the West. They hoped that infrastructure aid in the form of dams, electricity grids, roads, and airports, as well as food aid, technical assistance, and low-interest loans, could rival, or even eclipse, the seductions of Marxism.

Pearson expressed the need for action when he briefed the House of Commons about the Colombo Plan on February 22, 1950: “It seemed to all of us at the conference that if the tide of totalitarian expansionism should flow over this general area, not only will the new nations lose the national independence which they have secured so recently, but the forces of the Free World will have been driven off all but a relatively small bit of the great Eurasian land mass.”

Other ideas also moved Colombo forward. The fast-evolving ideal of a colour-blind Commonwealth of equals smoothly replaced imperial illusions, even among many British aristocrats. (Let’s except a grumpy Winston Churchill, who termed Mahatma Gandhi a “half-naked fakir.”) Lady Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of the last viceroy of India, certainly did her bit for interracial understanding: Jawaharlal Nehru, having slept in British jails, came at least very close to sleeping with her. Lady Mountbatten gamely used her infatuation to try, unsuccessfully, to send Nehru to the United Nations to accept a referendum over Pakistan-contested Kashmir.

In Canada, the notion of a new, egalitarian Commonwealth soon became a theme of foreign policy. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker invoked it in 1961 to spearhead a move to expel apartheid-era South Africa from the Commonwealth. That same year, the first sixteen young Canadian Overseas Volunteers (today’s CUSO-VSO) went abroad to India, Ceylon, and Sarawak.

Asian leaders were publicly grateful for the help, but they privately viewed the massive aid package as reparations for colonial pillaging. They were also seduced by leftist political philosophy. A generation of Indian leaders, including Nehru, were in thrall to dazzling young Marxist (but not Leninist) professor Harold Laski of the London School of Economics. As a result, state ownership and economic planning would hobble major Asian economies, such as India and Pakistan, up to the brink of the twenty-first century.

An inevitable result of loving the state was hating the resulting bureaucracy. Well into the 1960s, the still-revered Indian Civil Service grew into a “babucracy” — a musty body overlain with the Hindu caste system, post-colonial nostalgia for top dogs, and the fawning before every minor paper-pusher by several lower-ranking paper-pushers — babus. The babus skilfully made endless cups of tea to be drunk among mountains of never-read, ribbon-encircled files. Work speed was slow, stop, or reverse. Senior civil servants were often brilliant; but a major obstacle to Colombo aid was administrative weakness at middle and lower levels — the levels of execution.

No wonder that a constant refrain — and aid-refusing pretext —of donors was recipients’ inadequate “absorptive capacity.” Any good idea of aid had to begin with: “Fine, but can the recipient really run this?” That’s partly why Canada’s aid program, like others, quickly split into two operational parts: capital aid to build infrastructure and technical assistance, especially in the form of training.

Capital aid first went to big dams and electricity systems. I remember as a student watching Nehru’s warm smile up close as he shook hands with Canadian engineers at the giant Kundah

Dam near Chennai in Tamil Nadu, India. He made a speech in English, which was translated into half a dozen local languages. He explained India’s great diversity and Canada’s remarkable friendship — both faraway ideas for many of the thousands of listening peasants.

Big projects like Kundah often led to picturesque encounters between easygoing local workers and eager-to-finish Canadian engineers. In the oppressive heat, cursing one’s workers, and even threats of mild physical violence, often moved things along. One Canadian in Dhaka, Bangladesh, told me he regularly “biffed” his “lazy” workers. At the time, local authorities didn’t much seem to mind as long as the job got done. Today, of course, it would be another matter.

The Cold War offered irresistible opportunities to play the West against Moscow. It also showed that giving aid was like riding a tiger — once mounted, your options are invidious, and the results unpredictable.

An especially fraught initiative that came out of the Colombo Plan was the Canada-India Reactor, built near Mumbai (formerly Bombay) between 1955 and 1960 on Canada’s initiative and expertise. In 1960, I interviewed the chief Indian nuclear scientist, Dr. Homi J. Bhabha, who emphasized India’s unshakable intention never to abuse Canada’s aid for military purposes. Much later, Pakistan made the same commitment.

Yet both countries went nuclear. India exploded its first A-bomb in 1974 using material from its Canadian-designed CIRUS reactor. Canada suspended nuclear co-operation with India in 1974 and with Pakistan in 1976. The latter conducted its first nuclear weapons tests in 1998. To this day, India and Pakistan have refused foreign inspections of their nuclear facilities, except for a few Canadian-supplied fuel rods.

Was Canada incautious in offering its nuclear aid to India? One can assume that if Canada had not shared its nuclear know-how with India and Pakistan they would have found other eager donors — especially the Soviets. In India’s case, the Cold War offered irresistible opportunities to play the West against Moscow. It also showed that giving aid was like riding a tiger — once mounted, your options are invidious, and the results unpredictable. Even an innocent gift of three Otter aircraft to Indonesia for inter-island travel ended up being used by Jakarta’s air force to support Malaysian rebels.

Canada also strengthened Asian budgets with direct and indirect financial aid, often via its trademark food aid. A key device was known as a counterpart fund. This was a locally managed account created in a non-convertible local currency to pay for Canadian commodity gifts. Like most creative accounting, these funds were mainly a way to allow politicians at both ends to pretend that, somehow, gifts of food were building economies as well as feeding stomachs.

Perhaps the single most significant value of Canada’s start in the large-scale aid business was the interaction of thousands of Canadian engineers, technicians, and other experts with local populations. Overnight, Canadians become familiar overseas faces.

Most of the Canadians offering technical assistance (a term soon re-baptized as “cooperation”) were quiet, devoted, hard-working people. In an era that invented the pangs and follies of culture shock, they did pretty well, rarely discrediting their homeland, and doing quite a bit of good. They also built enduring friendships that still make the Asian Commonwealth not quite foreign to us.

Were they boring? Hardly. Old hands of the Colombo Plan’s early years can tell tales echoing exotic Asian short stories by Somerset Maugham. I remember hearing of a Canadian engineer nicknamed Harry the Horse who rode his steed into Deane’s Hotel in Peshawar, Pakistan, to prove that the food there was unfit for man or beast. Other expats told me of a love triangle where a Canadian got caught in flagrante delicto with another’s wife — leaving compatriots gleefully to recall that his engineering specialty was “heat injection.”

The Colombo Plan was many such colourful people — not just those far-seeing 1950 worthies in Sri Lanka’s capital who talked of saving the “great Eurasian land mass.” The large-scale mingling of so many aidserving Canadians with previously faraway new friends contributed incalculably to Canada’s postwar growing up. Not as much as our wartime contributions, of course. But the Colombo Plan opened Canadian minds and hearts to the world in ways that still make Canada and Canadians part of a much wider world. For our aid recipients, it made memories that made us — and still make us — worth talking to.

Colombo aid brought thousands of non-white faces — and minds — into Canadian universities, laboratories, and offices. Canadians found charm and excitement in welcoming a diversity of fellow Commonwealth nationalities. Over time, this made Canadians more open to increasingly multiracial immigration — leading ultimately to today’s multicultural Canadian society.

Two other factors broadened the aid movement.

In the 1960s, Quebec intellectuals, spurred by Le Devoir’s passionate pan-Latin editorialist Jean-Marc Leger, demanded a geographic and cultural extension of Colombo-style aid to the Frenchspeaking world, and indeed to Latin America. At the same time, the post-1960 liberation of many African (and later Caribbean) countries caused Ottawa to start substantial aid to Africa.

Canada launched its Special Commonwealth Africa Aid Program in 1960. Focusing heavily on communications, health, and especially resource-seeking aerial surveys — the latter being a Canadian specialty — Canada quickly became a significant player in Africa. This annoyed Paris, which resented Canada’s “invading” the chasse gardee of its neo-colonial Françafrique — code for the interlocking corruptions of French politicians and post-colonial African strongmen.

The Colombo Plan triggered an astonishing array of changes — not only in Canada’s foreign policy, but in Canadian society as a whole. Surprisingly, at the time, large infusions of English-speaking Commonwealth immigrants brought Quebec to overcome its distrust of immigrants in general and to lobby for francophone ones to help keep its linguistic edge.

Hence, today we see a Montreal with vigorous Indochinese and North African communities, and an even livelier one of Haitian taxi drivers and Governors General.

To the chagrin of old-school revenge-of-the-cradle patriotes, these fine overseas francophones know nothing of Quebec’s pure laine history, culture, and world views. With few exceptions, they fail to swell separatist or even nationalist ranks.

Reshaping Quebec into a multicultural society almost like the rest of Canada, they make the case for a unique-Quebec separatism sound archaic, especially to more tolerant, cosmopolitan youth.

The cozy, old boys’ Colombo Plan conceived in 1950 did much to kick-start a new Third World development era. Close, sustained political and economic engagement kept Asia from tilting into the communist camp. That was the big hope, and it worked.

The surprise now is that Asia — and later recipient societies — changed their benefactors’ countries almost as much as we changed theirs. Immigration has become a growing and divisive issue in Europe. Blunt rejections of “multiculturalism” by the leaders of aid-giving Germany, France, and Britain confirm this.

Canada, a significant Colombo Plan donor until it pulled out in 1992, has so far managed its multicultural challenge more smoothly. Whatever the outcome, there is a splendid unintended consequence here: Much of today’s internationally engaged, domestically tolerant Canada began sixty-two years ago in Colombo.

Keith Spicer, an academic, public servant, and writer, is the author of A Samaritan State? External Aid in Canada’s Foreign Policy (1966). This article originally appeared in the February-March issue of Canada's History.