Granatstein’s The Ottawa Men is at once a history of the emergence of the modern professional civil service in Canada under the long rule of the King government (and most especially in the area of foreign policy), and of the emergence of the ideal of that service as a non-partisan, politically neutral, and circumspect source of advice and information for the government in power. They were, Granatstein argues, “an extraordinary group of civil servants who collectively had great power in Ottawa from the Depression through to the late 1950s.”
They were “public servants in the best sense of that term, men who changed the way government operated and whose overall influence and impact were positive in the extreme” (xi). Granatstein’s book should be read as a significant contribution to the debates about the role of patronage in the Canadian state and about the role of Canadian foreign policy in the early Cold War. Although a masterful work for its time, its ahistorical preoccupations with the ideal civil servant and its failure to move beyond the twin spheres of foreign policy and Liberal politics limit the book’s significance beyond those debates.
This is couched in the form of a series of career biographies of the “mandarins” who came to the fore in the civil service through their personal connections to the first modern civil service managers: Clifford Clark at Finance and O.D. Skelton at External Affairs. These were men like Hume Wrong, Norman Robertson, Lester (Mike) Pearson, Escott Reid, Dana Wilgress, Graham Towers, Loring Christie, Jack Pickersgill, and, at the close of the era, Robert Bryce.
The “mandarinate” thus defined was not simply united by their similar offices, Granatstein emphasizes. They were a small group who knew each other well. They were drawn from a similar background: not necessarily from birth (though most were the sons of urban professionals and clergymen), but by education: almost all of them studied at Queen’s University, the University of Toronto, or at Oxford, and usually at more than one of these fine institutions. They were an elite, if a meritocratic one, sharing “more traits with each other than with the majority of their countrymen” (p. 18). And they formed “conceivably the very best [public service] in the western world” (p. 18), he suggests, although he does not include any comparative analysis on which to rest this assertion. The “very best,” in this case, was assuredly not democratic: it was a rule of influence by the intellectual elite, who were carefully insulated from the general public and saw little need to consult them on the great issues of the day.
The evocation is in part a nostalgic one. Not just the mandarins but the age of the mandarins has passed, Granatstein feels. They rose to prominence in the 1930s as the King government opened a space for a civil service staffed by highly educated academics and businessmen outside of the traditional circles of political patronage. Those who first defined the core of the group died or retired during and after the War, or left the civil service to enter Liberal Party politics, like Pearson and Pickersgill. These intimate connections with the Liberal Party made the senior echelons of the civil service a target of Diefenbaker’s Conservatives, who suspected them of partisan loyalties. As a result, a new generation of mandarins never arose to take the place of the old -- not even under Pearson, the famed former civil servant himself, after 1963. By the 1980s, Granatstein reflected somberly, government had grown too large, and too pessimistic about the problems it faced, for there to be room left for mandarins.
It’s interesting, nevertheless, to note that this mandarinate was the historical moment at which the great process of centralization within the Canadian government began, and that it was driven by civil servants rather than politicians. Today that centralization has continued in the absence of the bureaucrats, so that it is the party staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, rather than the mandarins in the Privy Council Office, the Department of Finance, and the Department of Foreign Affairs, who are now pulling the strings. It would be interesting to know how Granatstein would write this book today, if he could put himself back into his mindset of the early 1980s and simultaneously gaze upon the steady partisan centralization of power which, we are frequently told, has been underway since the time of Trudeau. Given Granatstein’s respect for the educational background of the mandarins, I can’t imagine he would think much of the new political mandarins of today: young men and women whose university backgrounds are largely limited to the intellectually decrepit confines of the public policy schools at places like the University of Calgary, Carleton University, and Trinity Western University, rather than the more hallowed halls of history and political economy at the “élite” old-school universities.
It is not always easy in this book to separate the historical civil servant from Granatstein’s ideal civil servant. Unfortunately, this is particularly grating because part of Granatstein’s purpose here is the thesis that the period of the 1930s through the 1950s marked the emergence of that very ideal. Prior to the King period, he argues, the civil service was an incompetent, inefficient, and wasteful bureaucracy, the dumping ground for all manner of dubiously competent political patronage appointees. This reflects a longstanding debate in the history of the Canadian state; for its traditional counterargument, see the first chapter of Planners and Politicians
by Penny Bryden (amongst other sources), which suggests that patronage was an indispensable tool for maintaining regional support and national unity in the early Canadian state. Not hardly, suggests Granatstein: “patronage inevitably led to poor appointments, and promoted the undeserving” (p. 23). It took Borden and then King to replace the legacy of “polished dullards” (p. 26) with something more and better.But what makes it better? Granatstein cannot escape his own biases in this respect. There is no single definition of the civil service ideal in this work, but again and again we hit upon a concept of public service which Granatstein not only discusses as a historical construct but rather extols as a contemporary virtue. Civil servants are bright and sharp-minded, able to summon grand ideas for national policy when called upon to do so, but also always deferent to their political masters (who are often of much smaller minds). Their job is to support the government and its policies, and to be seen to support the government, without being actually “political.” These are powerful tensions, still unresolved in theoretical discussion about public service today. Granatstein does make some effort to explore the contradictions, but more could be said in this respect. Did Pearson and Pickersgill cross a line in openly supporting political programs of the government in power? Perhaps, says Granatstein. Was Diefenbaker right to mistrust a civil service which was largely the creation of the Liberal Party and whose elites had demonstrated such a disturbing penchant for making the leap into Liberal politics? Certainly not, Granatstein insists, but one wonders.
To that end, more might have been said about the extent to which the civil service ideal was (or was not) mainly a Liberal construction. It’s not necessarily that Granatstein is wrong in this respect. But can the Conservatives really be dismissed so easily – reform-minded but unable to put their ideas into practice under Borden, paranoid under Diefenbaker? Granatstein is, again, a product of his time in this respect. In 1982, when this book was published, the Liberal Party had been the dominant political party for 70 years. Writing the history of the twentieth-century Canadian state as a project of Liberal rule was more forgivable in 1982 than it would be today.
A more serious failing is the general inability of Granatstein to escape the admittedly exciting confines of diplomatic history. Of nine chapters, four are clearly about the Department of External Affairs and the limited foreign and international trade policy activities of other bureaucrats -- as are large portions of two more chapters. The first two are essentially ethnographic descriptions of the mandarinate, and the final chapter is about the fall of the mandarins under Diefenbaker. This means that the contributions of the mandarins outside of foreign affairs are confined to some relatively brief discussion of Graham Towers’s advocacy at the Bank of Canada (which could not convince King that the Bank could be the centrepiece for an overhauling of Canadian federalism before the country was swept up by war in 1939), and some important but unfinished analysis of the ways in which the wartime Economic Advisory Committee paved the way for the postwar compromise and national economic management.
Reading The Ottawa Men as a more limited study in diplomatic history clearly moves us away from what Granatstein wanted this book to be, but it also allows us to read it as a focused contribution to an admittedly narrower field of inquiry. Granatstein lays out what has now become a fairly conventional interpretation of the late war years as the origins of Canadian foreign policy as an articulation of the middle power ideal, beginning with Hume Wrong’s more limited functional principle – that Canada should be consulted in areas of international policy in which it made a meaningful contribution, and should have influence and status commensurate with the scale of that contribution. Once the death of Skelton freed the younger generation to craft a more energetic and aggressive foreign policy, Canada started to “act like other states, making threats and possibly even meaning them,” engaging in “tough bargaining” and experiencing some success as a result (p. 131). This put Canada at the centre of the formation of many key mid-century international institutions, including the Bretton Woods institutions and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
In retrospect, this position has been seriously undermined by Adam Chapnick’s recent work (for instance, The Middle Power Project). For the most part, those gains Canada did achieve in the wartime era were limited to symbolic questions of presence (i.e. seats on boards) rather than questions of real influence. Canada won positions on the Combined Boards for food, munitions, and supplies through hard effort, but these Boards ultimately were of little consequence to the war effort. Granatstein insists that Louis Rasminsky played a critical role in mediating between the divergent positions of the British Keynes and American White at Bretton Woods, but the compromise in question – an American-style stabilization fund rather than a Keynesian world central bank, but with a larger startup pile of cash than initially envisaged by the Americans – is neither so radically divergent from either position, nor so surprisingly independent from the increasingly hegemonic Americans’ preference, that London and Washington could not eventually have hammered out a largely similar arrangement without Canada’s assistance.
His claim that Escott Reid anticipated the formation of NATO by calling for a Western alliance against the Soviet bloc falls prey to a similar but even stronger criticism: there is little evidence that Reid’s ideas were consciously drawn upon by the negotiators of the North Atlantic Treaty, and the Berlin Blockade rather than Canadian fretting probably figured most prominently in the Washington talks of 1949. The other facet of NATO which is typically regarded as quintessentially a Canadian achievement, the clause which commits member countries to cultural and economic cooperation, seems to have gone the way of all the other sops to middle powerdom which Canada managed to get inserted into the great international charters of the period: inspiring but cheap rhetoric which failed to amount to anything meaningful. Canada also “crept up the middle” in the Chicago civil aviation talk of 1944, Granatstein avers (p. 131), but these are not discussed in detail, so it is difficult to tell whether Chicago represented a rare victory for the diplomatic service or simply more of the same.
My own experience with Granatstein has mainly been limited to his recent military historical work, and his grumping at the rise of social history in his memorable polemic Who Killed Canadian History, so The Ottawa Men was really quite an unexpected read for me. And it was even less painful to get through than one might expect, given the subject matter, although that’s probably because my current research project also involves in some ways a writing of civil service history -- and thus also is surely relegated to the same historiographical backwater in which The Ottawa Men now lurks, dusty and long out of print.
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