Canada in the Cold War

• 1. Introduction

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  Canada in the Cold War began with a defection. In February 1946, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk in Ottawa, defected and exposed a Soviet spy ring operating inside the country. Historians have marked the Gouzenko Affair as the moment the Cold War era began for Canada. In the decades that followed, Canada navigated that conflict with considerable independence. An ally that helped shape the western military architecture, it nonetheless kept diplomatic channels open where the Americans closed theirs. It refused wars the United States fought, and it pursued dialogues Washington judged too dangerous. Quietly, through an unlikely political friendship, Canada would help spark the Soviet reforms that brought the entire standoff to a close.

• 2. The Nation Canada Became

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  Over a million Canadians wore a uniform by the end of the Second World War. Canada's surface fleet ranked fifth in the world; its air force ranked fourth. Six years of supplying the Allied war effort had transformed the country from a largely agricultural dominion into a sovereign industrial nation. Its economy now centered on resource extraction, heavy manufacturing, and high-technology research. Almost immediately after the fighting stopped, the Canadian military ran Operation Muskox. This was a massive deployment across the Canadian Arctic, designed partly to rehearse for a potential ground and air war in the region. Canadian observers were dispatched to India and Palestine for the United Nations in 1947 and 1948. Canada had also sat with the Allied powers at the Yalta Conference in 1945, working out the reorganization of postwar Europe. That work laid the groundwork for the divisions the Cold War would harden into permanent threat.

• 3. Collective Defense

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  Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent was a chief architect of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Canada joined as a founding member in 1949. St. Laurent pressed, largely without success, to expand NATO beyond a military alliance into an economic and cultural body as well. The ambition reflected a characteristically Canadian instinct: to anchor security in shared institutions rather than deterrence alone. Through the 1950s, Canada and the United States built the North American Aerospace Defense Command, known as NORAD. It created a joint air-defense system spanning the continent. In the far north, the Distant Early Warning Line gave advance notice of any Soviet bombers approaching over the North Pole. Two other networks filled the gaps: the Mid-Canada Line ran through the country's interior, and the Pinetree Line followed the 50th parallel north. Canadian military facilities were also maintained in Bermuda, France, and the United Kingdom. Long postings were established at CFB Baden-Soellingen and CFB Lahr in the Black Forest region of West Germany. From the early 1960s, Canadian forces operated platforms armed with nuclear-tipped air-to-air rockets and surface-to-air missiles. High-yield gravity bombs were also deployed, primarily in Western Europe but also inside Canada itself.

• 4. Creating Peacekeeping

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  The Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry made notable contributions at the Battle of Kapyong during the Korean War. The moderately sized Canadian contingent that served alongside United Nations forces in Korea did so with distinction. The larger contribution came during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Britain, France, Israel, and Egypt were locked in a conflict that quickly became a flashpoint between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets stated they were willing to use "all types of modern weapons of destruction" on London and Paris. This was an overt nuclear threat directed at two of Europe's largest cities. Canadian diplomat Lester B. Pearson reached back to an idea first raised at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in June 1945. Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Secretary of State Louis St. Laurent had proposed a standing UN military force at that conference. The idea was not adopted at the time. Pearson reintroduced the concept as the United Nations Emergency Force. UNEF was designed to intercede between the combatants, enforce a ceasefire, and form a buffer zone between opposing sides. It became the first peacekeeping force in history. Subsequent deployments followed: to the Congo in 1960, Cyprus in 1964, the Sinai in 1973, Lebanon in 1978, and Namibia in 1989-1990. Canada also served in Vietnam with the International Control Commission and contributed forces to the Golan Heights.

• 5. Friction at Home and Abroad

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  On the 4th of April 1957, E. Herbert Norman, Canada's Ambassador to Egypt, died in Cairo after leaping from a building. Norman had been cleared twice. The RCMP had first cleared him in 1950, and the Minister of External Affairs, Lester B. Pearson, had cleared him again. The United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security had released a record of a prior hearing to the press. It portrayed Norman as a spy and traitor. The only evidence of disloyalty was that Norman had once participated in a Marxist study group as a student at Cambridge and Harvard. Pearson, still serving as External Affairs Minister, sent a formal note to the US government. He threatened to cut off the sharing of security intelligence on Canadian citizens until Washington guaranteed the information would remain within the executive branch. Outrage spread across Canada.

  The Communist Party of Canada had not been outlawed since 1935, when Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King repealed Section 98. Canada's approach to domestic anti-communism was notably more moderate than Washington's. The United States pressed Canada to purge its trade unions; Ottawa left that task to the AFL-CIO itself. American officials were especially concerned about sailors on Great Lakes freight vessels. By 1951, Canada had added them to those already covered by its secret anti-communist screening program. Despite this moderation, the Canadian state was not passive. A top-secret government plan called PROFUNC prepared to identify and detain Communist sympathizers if tensions ever reached a critical threshold.

• 6. The Nuclear Dilemma

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  John Diefenbaker had committed Canada to purchasing the BOMARC missile system from the Americans. Without nuclear warheads, the BOMARC was significantly less effective, and Diefenbaker knew this. Yet he refused to permit nuclear weapons onto Canadian soil. The concern was shared across Parliament. As long as the American president retained absolute control of the warheads, Canadian forces could be ordered into nuclear missions without Ottawa's consent. That anxiety reached a peak during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Canada was expected to place its military on immediate war alert. Diefenbaker refused, calling instead for United Nations intervention. Only after a direct phone call between President John F. Kennedy and Diefenbaker did Canada's armed forces begin preparing for "immediate enemy attack." Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev ultimately resolved the crisis through diplomatic talks. But the governing party's disarray over the nuclear question in the months that followed proved more damaging than the crisis itself. In the 1963 Canadian election, Diefenbaker was replaced by Lester B. Pearson, who accepted the nuclear warheads. The weapons Pearson accepted would remain on Canadian soil for two more decades. The last nuclear arms based in Canada were removed in 1984.

• 7. Reform's Unlikely Catalyst

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  At Temple University in Philadelphia, Lester B. Pearson stood before an audience and criticized the American role in the Vietnam War. For a sitting Canadian prime minister, openly rebuking the United States in one of its own cities was a significant step. His successor, Pierre Trudeau, carried that independence much further. Trudeau formally recognized the People's Republic of China and established a personal friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. He reduced the number of Canadian troops stationed at NATO bases in Europe. He also declined to join the Organization of American States, objecting to its Cold War tolerance of dictators. Canada argued it was not soft on Communism but pursuing "constructive engagement," seeking to shape Communist states through sustained contact rather than isolation. The Nixon shock of 1971, a set of new American economic policies and tariffs, deepened the strain. By 1972, in a speech in Ottawa, President Nixon declared the "special relationship" between Canada and the United States dead.

  In the mid-1970s, Alexander Yakovlev arrived as Soviet Ambassador to Canada, a posting he would hold for a decade. During that time, he and Trudeau became close friends. In the early 1980s, Yakovlev accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev on a tour of Canadian farms and agricultural institutions. Gorbachev was at that time the Soviet official in charge of agriculture. The stated purpose was to study farming methods that might be adapted in the Soviet Union. The two men began talking, tentatively at first, about the need for liberalization within the Soviet system. Yakovlev eventually returned to Moscow and would come to be called the "godfather of glasnost," the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reform program.

• 8. Arctic Watch and After

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  Canada's 1987 White Paper on Defence had been long awaited. It expressed Canada's intent to reassert sovereignty over its Arctic waters. The specific concern was that Soviet submarines were operating inside Canada's Arctic Archipelago. Two programs responded to that threat. Project Spinnaker was a joint Canada-United States venture, secret in purpose, designed to deploy acoustic listening posts on the Arctic seafloor. The goal was to monitor submarine traffic in Canadian Arctic waters. Achieving this required a vehicle that did not yet exist: a large autonomous underwater vehicle capable of operating in permanently ice-covered waters. The vehicle built for the purpose was named Theseus. In the spring of 1996, Theseus was transported to CFS Alert on the northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island. Launched from an ice camp, Theseus laid 180 kilometres of fibre optic cable on the seafloor. The cable reached an acoustic array at the edge of the Continental Shelf.

  In 1994, the last active American military base on Canadian soil was decommissioned. Naval Station Argentia in Newfoundland was handed to the Canadian government. The station had stored the Mk 101 Lulu and B57 nuclear bombs. It had also served as a key node in the US Navy's SOSUS network for tracking Soviet submarines. By then, Canadian forces had already withdrawn from their NATO commitments in Germany. Military spending was cut. Air raid sirens were removed across the country. The Diefenbunkers, Canada's military fallout shelters designed to ensure the continuity of government, were decommissioned. Canada would eventually deploy to Afghanistan, its longest-running war. The force that went there was shaped by the peacekeeping-oriented military the Cold War had produced.