Lester B. Pearson

Prime minister of Canada (1963-1968)

• Born: April 23, 1897
• Birthplace: Newtonbrook (now part of Toronto), Ontario, Canada
• Died: December 27, 1972
• Place of death: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Before becoming Canadian prime minister, Pearson was a major organizer of the United Nations force that took over occupation of the Suez Canal in 1956, an achievement for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. As prime minister he secured worldwide recognition for Canada as a leading middle-sized developed nation. He was instrumental in instituting the maple-leaf flag for Canada and in introducing both government-paid health care and a national pension plan.

Early Life

Born in Newtonbrook, Canada, Lester B. Pearson was the second son of a Methodist minister. Educated in a variety of local schools in Ontario as his father was assigned to a variety of parishes he attended the University of Toronto from 1913 to 1915. He enlisted in the Canadian army in 1915, early in World War I, and was assigned to serve as a medical corpsman in Salonika. He was sent to officer training in England in 1917, but following an auto accident returned to Canada in 1918.

Pearson reentered the University of Toronto and graduated in 1919. He then won a scholarship to Oxford University in 1921, and spent two years there. He returned to Canada in 1923 to begin teaching history at Toronto.

Life’s Work

Pearson was persuaded in 1928 to take the civil service examination for the department of external affairs, Canada’s state department. He served as a civil servant in Ottawa until 1935, when he was reassigned to Canada’s mission in London. He remained there until 1941, returned briefly to Ottawa, and was then sent to Washington, D.C., as Canada’s ambassador to the United States. As ambassador, he participated in some of the organizing sessions for the new United Nations and became a devoted believer in collective security as the best way to maintain peace.

Pearson returned in 1946 to external affairs in Ottawa after serving his term as ambassador to the United States. Then, in 1948, when Liberal prime ministerLouis St. Laurent took over the Canadian government, Pearson reluctantly abandoned his civil service career and became a politician to serve in the St. Laurent government as the secretary of external affairs, or foreign secretary.

Despite his initial reluctance, Pearson had a brilliant career as Canada’s foreign secretary. He participated actively in the search for a peaceful solution to the Korean War through United Nations diplomacy. He was very active in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization he considered the most adequate for helping to preserve peace in the Western world. During the late 1940’s, disputes with the Soviet Union and its satellite nations developed into the Cold War and lasted another forty-plus years. In 1952-1953, Pearson served as president of the U.N. General Assembly. In 1956, working closely with U.N. general-secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, he helped broker a U.N. peacekeeping force for the Suez Canal, which had been seized by Israel, France, and Great Britain after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser had taken over the canal from the private corporation that had run it since 1888. Before the canal crisis, the United Nations had yet to sponsor a peacekeeping force, but beginning in 1956 the arrangement was used with increasing frequency. For his role in organizing the U.N. force to quell the unrest in the canal region, Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957.

Prime Minister St. Laurent retired in 1957, and Pearson was chosen the next Liberal Party leader. St. Laurent, a Liberal, had been backed by a Liberal majority in the Canadian parliament’s House of Commons. Anchored in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, the Liberals had secured a majority by winning votes in Ontario, Quebec, and the eastern provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. However, the Conservatives dominated the western part of the country under the leadership of John Diefenbaker, Canada’s prime minister. In the election that immediately followed the resignation of St. Laurent, the Liberals, under Pearson, suffered a humiliating defeat, forcing Pearson to spend his first six years as the opposition-party leader in Parliament. Though he engaged vigorously in parliamentary debate with the Conservatives, Pearson came to realize that he was not a “natural-born” politician. The Conservatives under Diefenbaker, however, so mismanaged the government that in 1963, the Liberals were nevertheless returned to power as a minority government, and Pearson became prime minister of Canada on April 22, 1963.

Although Pearson’s term as prime minister was comparatively brief (for Canada), lasting just five years, he had a number of memorable accomplishments. He set up the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1963, hoping to reassure the French-speaking residents of Quebec that they, along with their language and culture, were integral to Canadian unity. The commission had two chairs, one from Quebec (a francophone, or Quebecer) and one from Ontario (an anglophone). The commission also had two members with Slavic backgrounds. Pearson required the use of French and English in all official government activities throughout Canada. Before this time, only Parliament and the courts had this bilingual requirement. Although an imaginative approach, bilingualism did not forestall the heated Quebec sovereignist movement that grew in strength in the years after Pearson’s time in office.

In another effort to emphasize Canadian unity and to de-emphasize the British influence on the country, Pearson succeeded in his efforts to create a new flag for Canada the well-known maple-leaf flag, which was a radical change from the previous Canadian flag based on Britain’s union jack symbol. The new flag, presented at a ceremony on February 15, 1965, helped to secure Canada’s image as an independent nation and not simply a former British colony. Although sovereign, Canada remains part of the British Commonwealth.

Pearson and his government introduced two new measures that improved the welfare of all Canadians: a national health plan and a national pension plan, both instituted in 1966. The pension plan illustrated Pearson’s delicate attempt to bridge the provincial differences facing Canada by providing that any province could opt out of the national plan and set up its own pension plan. Only Quebec elected to opt out. To finance these important social-security initiatives Pearson revised the revenue-sharing arrangements so that a much larger portion of federal tax revenues were returned to the provinces, adding to local control beyond the traditional education sector.

A dominant concern of all Canadian political leaders throughout the period following World War II was Canada’s relationship with its southern neighbor, the United States. Canada’s population has remained about 10 percent of that of the United States, and most Canadians live along or close to the 3,000-mile border with the United States that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These factors, in part, have affected Canada’s national identity and the country’s economy.

Many of the companies exploiting Canada’s bountiful natural resources were financed largely by American companies, and the Canadian government in Ottawa struggled to formulate rules that would ensure that the companies that drove the Canadian economy were actually Canadian. One of Pearson’s major achievements was negotiating Autopact (signed by him in January, 1965) while visiting U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch. Autopact allowed for the transfer of automobile parts across the Canadian-U.S. border without the payment of duties, an arrangement that facilitated the spread of American auto-assembly plants into Canada, notably Ontario.

Pierre Trudeau’s appearance on the scene of Liberal politics made it possible for Pearson to hand off the leadership of the Liberals to Trudeau in 1968. Trudeau, who, unlike Pearson, was bilingual, also had an ability to mesmerize in political speeches and to evoke an emotional attachment to Canada never achieved by Pearson. At heart a diplomat, Pearson was an appropriate, if not an inspired, leader of Canada who served between two francophone politicians whose bilingual skills helped hold the nation together.

Significance

As prime minister, Pearson sponsored many critical national initiatives, namely health care, a pension plan, relaxed trade with the United States, and the adoption of a new Canadian flag. Pearson’s other major legacy is his diplomatic skill, which ensured that Canada appeared on the world stage as a formidable economic power with historical ties to but independent of the United Kingdom. He believed in collective global security, especially as it was implemented through the United Nations, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize because of his work to ensure peaceful solutions to a world in conflict.

Bibliography

Bothwell, Robert, Ian Drummond, and John English. Canada Since 1945. Rev. ed. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1989. One of the best of the general accounts of Canadian history since World War II. Contains a section devoted entirely to Pearson’s ministry.

Hillmer, Norman, ed. Pearson: The Unlikely Gladiator. Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Contains articles by a number of former associates of Pearson, not altogether complimentary, but nevertheless valid, assessments. Examines his role in Canadian national security.

McRoberts, Kenneth. Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. This book contextualizes the issue of Quebec sovereignty, showing how Pearson’s attempts to maintain national unity were simply preliminaries.

Pearson, Geoffrey. Seize the Day: Lester B. Pearson and Crisis Diplomacy. Ottawa, Ont.: Carleton University Press, 1993. This book, by Pearson’s son, provides considerable insight into his father’s personality.

Pearson, Lester B. Memoirs. 3 vols. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1972-1975. Pearson’s thoughtful, well-written memoirs, left unfinished at his death in late 1972. Completed by two close associates under the supervision of his son, Geoffrey.