Lester B. Pearson's Influence on Our National Identity

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University Degree Social studies

Department of History

Lester B. Pearson’s Influence on

Our National Identity

Krista Quinn

#100642198

For: M. Bellamy

HIST 1300

March 25, 2005

Lester B. Pearson’s Influence on Our National Identity

        What defines us as Canadians?  If you asked people today to identify the elements that make us distinctly Canadian, they might tell you about our bilingual and multicultural society, our tolerance and humanitarianism, our international role as peacekeepers, our maple leaf  flag that even Americans put on their backpacks when travelling abroad, and universal health care.  Each one of these things, though very different, has one thing in common – Lester B. Pearson who was Canada’s 14th Prime Minister.  In just five years of minority government, Pearson left all of these lasting stamps on our nation and defined how we see ourselves and how we are seen on the international stage even now nearly forty years after his term as Prime Minister.  Pearson was like a father to modern Canada, and with his nurturing guidance, the nation saw it’s coming of age and found a distinct identity.

        In 1956 came what is considered by many to be Canada’s greatest contribution on the world stage.  On July 26 of 1956, Egyptian President Nasser seized the Suez Canal which had been controlled mainly by the English and French.  As negotiations failed the English, French and Israelis secretly agreed to attack Egypt in late October.  With the horrors of the Second World War fresh in people’s memories, there was a great fear that the dispute over the area could escalate to a similar level if there wasn’t intervention of some sort.  Pearson was Secretary of State for External Affairs and proposed to his colleagues at the United Nations that they create a neutral United Nations force to maintain the peace in the region, offering Canadian troops to serve in such a force, which would allow France, Britain and Israel to withdraw.  This was the birth of peacekeeping as we know it.  His efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957, the only Canadian to win that honour.  In naming him, the Nobel committee said that he had “saved the world.”  When hearing that he had won the award, he said simply “gosh.”  In 1988 the Nobel Prize was given to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces, which grew out of Pearson’s original proposal thirty-two years earlier.  Because of Pearson’s involvement in the birth of the Peacekeeping Forces, Canadians tend to regard the troops with a sense of ownership and patriotism and has become another important thread in the fabric of our national story since its inception.  In a speech honouring the establishment of the Lester B. Pearson Chair of International Relations at Oxford University, Prime Minister Chretien said:

We have excellent peacekeepers, and not simply because they are highly trained professionals. It is also because those Canadian qualities of tolerance and respect for different points of view are precisely the qualities the world needs most in its peacekeepers… This is something that Canada does very well, a special vocation that weaves its way through our foreign policy.

Internationally, Canadians are still seen synonymously with the peacekeeping forces.  The diplomacy that we learned from Pearson is something that is still with us today, and can be seen in decisions such as deciding to stay out of the war in Iraq or the Canadian government’s recent decision to not join the “Star Wars” missile defence program.

Pearson is the reason why Canada has its distinctive maple leaf flag and not the Red Ensign or the Union Jack.  The Red Ensign was a flag derived from the British Merchant Marine flag, but was not distinctly Canadian.  It was a throwback to the days of British colonialism and no longer seemed to fit with a modern Canada which was emerging as its own nation on the international stage.  Pearson began speaking openly about the need for a distinctly Canadian flag. He raised the issue in 1960 as leader of the opposition and in 1963 he promised Canadians that if elected, he would ensure Canada would have its own distinct flag.  His views seem to have been strengthened by the objections that the Canadian ground troops faced in Egypt during their peacekeeping during the Suez crisis.  With the British look and feel of the flag, many felt it felt like there was too much of a British presence and that the Canadian peacekeepers could not be impartial.  By 1964, his first moves to start the process of finding a flag were met with howls of outrage from many, including the Canadian Legion.  In May of that year, just as the Flag Debate was about to begin in the House of Commons, Pearson addressed a room full of veterans at an annual legion convention in Winnipeg:  

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I had as comrades in my section, men whose name were: Cameron, Kimora, English, Gleidenstien, de Chapin, O’Shaughnessy.  We didn’t fall in or fall out as Irish Canadians, French Canadians, Dutch Canadians, Japanese Canadians.  We wore the same uniform, with the same maple leaf badge, and we were proud to be known as Canadians, to serve as Canadians and to die, if it had to be, as Canadians…What we need is that soldierly pride in Canada, that confident, passionate pride in Canada, that men who had wore the uniform with the maple leaf badge on it.  What we also ...

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Lester B. Pearson's Influence on Our National Identity
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