Lloyd Axworthy, My Life in Politics

By Lloyd Axworthy

Sutherland House/October 2024

Reviewed by Jeremy Kinsman

October 20, 2024

Full disclosure: The author of this book is a friend, and one I worked for during his very successful effort to lift Canada’s game in a troubled world.

But Lloyd Axworthy’s new memoir is about a lot more than the half-decade during the 90s (he was foreign minister from 1996-2000) when Axworthy steered a Canada-led endeavour to make concern for human security a new imperative for the nations of the world, to supersede the prerogatives of sovereign states to act as they pleased.

The narrative of My Life in Politics is mostly about how a politically liberal conviction politician fought for decades for greater inclusion and justice in Canadian society. Lloyd spent more years in social portfolios than as foreign minister – immersion and exposure that informed his advocacy for the “human security concept” behind the success of the Ottawa Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction, more commonly known as the Ottawa Treaty thanks to his stewardship.

In this book, Axworthy reaches a crescendo of righteousness over what he calls Canada’s “subjugation of the rights of Indigenous people.” He urgently calls for an Act of Reconciliation to extend to Canada’s 1.87 million indigenous people the status of founding partnership in Canada along with the French and English designers of our confederation.

He also seeks reform of our political process. An advocate of “deliberative democracy,” that engages citizens in the formulation of policy choices affecting them, Lloyd made real consultation with civil society obligatory in his portfolios, including in foreign affairs. Internationally, he promoted the design and use of a Human Security Network with humanitarian NGOs as partners to drive change from the paralyzed United Nations community of states.

Lloyd believes that morally sound character counts in politics. His case for the morally right course of action was slow-walked throughout his career by ministers and senior officials who preferred the most fiscally convenient solutions instead, or, in foreign affairs, those least likely to ruffle Washington. Powerful men I worked for sneered at Lloyd’s moral invocations, snidely calling him “the reverend Axworthy.” But Lloyd was never ideological or doctrinaire about inherent responsibility of the state to do the moral thing. He was a real liberal among Liberals who believed in Pearsonian foundations of foreign policy in justice, and Pierre Trudeau’s commitment to a “Just Society”. He argued for consistency.

But Lloyd became an experienced politician who knew early in his career that politics is about winning, and winning is often about pragmatism. Still, soft-spoken as he generally was, he was a fighter when his instincts persuaded him he had a shot at prompting a just outcome. It entailed some risks, which cautious senior bureaucrats reflexively argued against, reinforcing his reliance on parallel outside advice. Prime Minister Jean Chretien was in his own way a bird of similar feather and supported Lloyd’s advocacy most of the time.

Most successful democratic political leaders I have known have personal engine rooms fired by a mix of propellants. Most project optimism, while also carrying some underlying anger at something, a chip on the shoulder, that energizes their drive. Lloyd’s zone of frustration amid his reformer’s optimism was the too-evident tolerance of injustice. He became canny in taking it on.

History, and back stories, shape leaders. Lloyd was a child of the Second World War whose absent Dad and uncles (some were lost) fought the war. Some in our generation, like Lloyd (and myself) became inspired by Lester Pearson’s interpretation of a humanistic Canadian international role to prevent conflict. Lloyd carried these impulses into PhD scholarship at an elite Ivy League university (where I was concurrently an undergraduate).  John Kennedy, whom Lloyd believed “would have promoted nuclear disarmament,” had he lived past 1963, was a shared inspiration. Lloyd joined the US civil rights cause, even going into the Deep South to support the freedom riders from our generation of committed Americans.

The outcome of those US university years was often ambivalent for our Canadian cohort, sustained by subsequent experience: an abiding affection for American society’s vitality, and for lifelong American friendships, but a horror of US in-built racism, and wariness of the strong core of security professionals who saw the world through the distorting lens of exalted US national interests only, that incidentally seldom acknowledged Canada at all.

Pearson had pretty much the same impression. Pierre Trudeau exceptionally had no particular feeling for the US (which the Reagan people found incomprehensible and inherently untrustworthy). Mulroney did, but also stuck up for Canada in different ways. Lloyd seems still unconvinced by NAFTA, having opposed it in the 1988 election as a move toward “unfettered market policies,” and a giveaway of Canadian sovereignty.

Like Liberal Leader John Turner, who had brought him initially to Ottawa as his executive assistant in 1968, Lloyd feared that Canada risked losing its social inclusivity and even identity by greater integration with the US. (On identity, as the federal ADM for culture and broadcasting 1985-89, I attest that the Mulroney government, in feeling the pressure from Turner and cultural nationalists, became a more generous and creative partner of Canada’s cultural producers, creators, and enterprises than any government before or since, demanding from the US a “cultural exemption” for differentiated treatment of cultural industries under free trade).

During the opposition years of Progressive Conservative government, Lloyd was a very active Liberal critic on foreign affairs. Visiting the battlegrounds of Central America, he first came across the ravages caused to civilians by land mines. He supported Joe Clark’s effort to create a constructive Canadian role to attenuate the US-supported suppression of leftist revolutions against autocrats. He pursued with Conservative (John Bosley) and NDP (Bill Blaikie) MP colleagues an explicit role for Canada in supporting democratization. Clark and Mulroney were avidly doing that, in the Commonwealth and especially regarding South Africa. Canada then could still speak with one voice on issues of right and wrong, and Lloyd’s voice was heard.

Most successful democratic political leaders I have known have personal engine rooms fired by a mix of propellants … Lloyd’s zone of frustration amid his reformer’s optimism was the too-evident tolerance of injustice

But on the defining foreign intervention of the time, the 1990 assembly at the UN of a US-led coalition to counter Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Lloyd opposed the recourse to force, influenced in part by the Democrats in the US House of Representatives who anticipated a flood of US body bags. In deference to concerns in Parliament, Joe Clark undertook top-level soundings in the Middle East to determine if a diplomatic solution was available.

Even Saddam Hussein made it clear it wasn’t. Lloyd hung in there, trying a hostage-release mission to Baghdad late in the day that failed. In the end, the Gulf War successfully defended the essential post-World War Two normative prohibition of invasion and occupation (now shattered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) The end of the Cold War set the UN to work as its creators intended in 1945-46, and Lloyd “believed deeply that Canada had a distinctive international vocation, especially in the post-Berlin Wall world.”

But once back in office in 1993, the Chretien Liberals (Lloyd had supported Jean Chretien as leader in 1990) were mostly preoccupied by two domestic imperatives: austerity, to slash massive budget deficits, and the separatist threat from Quebec, now super-charged by Lucien Bouchard. The Liberals’ “Red Book” policy outline prepared under Paul Martin and Chaviva Hosek for the blowout 1993 campaign offered little room for foreign affairs, in what Lloyd describes as its essentially rightward policy tilt.

For whatever political reasons, Lloyd was not appointed foreign minister, but placed in charge of human resources, drawing from his extensive experience and interest in urban renewal, and especially housing, as well as in the reform of unemployment insurance. He faced pushback from ministers, and premiers from provinces where old ways played well, and from austerity-driven Finance. Seeing there was no short-term probability of designing a reformed socioeconomic system – though he had published a far-seeing Green Paper documenting its merits – he was pleased at last to become foreign minister in 1996.

He soon ignited Canada’s emblematic human security promotion campaign, from a working blueprint-in-development in his new department to pursue the banning of anti-personnel land mines. It became what Lloyd called his “Everest” achievement as a politician. His account should be read, because its telling collects together all the strands that were needed to convince the world of the necessity of a new paradigm, to focus on the security of people and not just on that of states. Wariness and outright opposition from the senior bureaucracy and the military, especially in the US, as well as passive resistance from members of the Security Council, protecting their presumed monopoly over disarmament issues, did not daunt him.

Lloyd determined to ‘short-circuit” the system, to operate outside the UN via a core group of middle-size nations, accompanied by international NGOs. Civil society became full-time partners.

He sums up the Nobel Peace Prize-winning campaign as “a guiding framework for our foreign policy” that earned recognition and status on the world stage.

It became Canada’s calling card, a winning one. In 2002, President of the EU Commission Romano Prodi told me on my arrival as Canada’s ambassador to the EU – in a comment meant above all for his great friend Jean Chretien – that Canada’s leadership work on human security, including the creation of the International Criminal Court, the emerging doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and our support for the Kyoto treaty on climate change showed essential leadership. The EU would in consequence designate Canada as an EU “strategic partner”, joining the US, China, Russia, India, and Japan. “Good job,” for Lloyd, and for Jean Chretien, and for the Foreign Service personnel who helped in the global human security campaign to make it happen.

The story of the ICC’s adoption is dramatic. I was with Lloyd when he took a last-minute call in Rome from Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who had become by then a trusted friend. Albright was seeking more concessions to the US so Washington could sign on. Lloyd told her the factual truth that the world was behind the existing draft Treaty; there was no more give available. It passed 121 countries in favour, seven against.

Similarly, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine emerged from the horrible massacres in Rwanda (1994) and Srebrenica (1995) when inadequate UN forces helplessly stood by. Axworthy developed, with Norwegian Foreign Minister Knut Vollebæk, a new coalition to build up the concept and practice of enabling UN intervention in time of obvious need to protect innocent lives.

Unfortunately, the horrible attacks of 9/11 had the effect of changing the primary conversation to anti-terrorism. The R2P doctrine was adopted by the UN but was misused in 2011 to bomb Libya into chaos. Since then, statist national sovereignty has made a comeback, as has autocracy.

After 21 years in Parliament and a lifetime in politics, Lloyd quit in 2000, with the acquiescence of Chretien who had been a generous, accessible, and wholly supportive leader.

After an academic sojourn at UBC, a lot of foreign election oversight, and important board positions (Human Rights Watch, the MacArthur Foundation), Lloyd finally proved there is indeed life after politics, with a great decade as President of the University of Winnipeg. He lifted his hometown university, making its outreach to, and inclusion of, Indigenous Canadians a nationally significant asset.

On this subject – the place and role of Indigenous peoples – Lloyd Axworthy believes Canada needs “a kick in the pants,” calling for:

• a Third Pillar to include indigenous peoples as a partner of Canada’s two “founding” communities;
• electoral change to grant dispersed Indigenous people more proportional representation in our parliaments;
• “deliberative democracy” to make citizens real participants in policy-making.

Lloyd doesn’t hide his scorn for the PMO’s all-powerful but misfiring top-down role in everything. Political parties, which were once fora for real debate have become mere electoral machines. Regional ministers no longer exist. Nor do annual or other consultations with NGOs on foreign policy. The celebratory claim of 2015, “Canada’s back,” has gone sour, as our government tries whenever possible to “huddle in with America,” yet ducking Washington’s call for help on Haiti because our degraded and demoralized military isn’t up to it.

That’s sort of emblematic, and partly explains our failure to win election to the Security Council.

Lloyd concludes this necessary book with his “Reckonings,” a coda to a life in service, with its highs and lows. He worries that confederation is becoming a sequence of side-deals that undermine national purpose.

But this memoir from an optimist provides for Canadians an essential remedial service in itself. And it’s a good read from a good man.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s Ambassador to Russia, Italy and the European Union and as High Commissioner to the UK. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.