John Gelder Horler Halstead (27 January 1922 – 9 February 1998) was a Canadian diplomat and academic.
Early career Halstead was born in Vancouver into a middle-class family. In 1943, he graduated from the University of British Columbia, and joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve, serving as a lieutenant for the next three years until his honorable discharge in 1946. In 1943–45, Halstead was stationed in London, where he worked in naval intelligence. In 1946, he joined the Department of External Affairs while studying at the London School of Economics between 1948 and 1950, where he was awarded a BsC in 1950. From 1952 to 1955, he worked in the NATO department of the External Affairs. In 1953 he married Jean McAllister, having two children, Ian and Christopher. During his diplomatic career, he had postings at the United Nations in New York, Tokyo, Paris and London.
A Diplomat in Paris From 1961 to 1966, Halstead served as the counselor (number two official) at the Canadian embassy in Paris. In October 1963, Halstad reported from the embassy in Paris: ""Relations between Canada and France have traditionally been based on sentiment rather than interest." Halstad went on to argue that France's historical connection to Canada going back to the 16th century and the experience of the two world wars have provided "a fund of mutual goodwill and an easy assumption (perhaps too easy) that we should share the same interests". Halstead argued that what was missing was "the translation of the ties of history...into contemporary links of mutual knowledge and interest". He ended by arguing that was needed were closer Franco-Canadian ties as the Quiet Revolution in Quebec created a need to respond to "the growth of a dynamic modern society in the province of Quebec and the accompanying development of a more assertive French-Canadian personality". Besides for a way to manage the changes caused by the Quiet Revolution, Halstead argued that closer Franco-Canadian ties was a way to counterbalance the United States. Halstead argued that the success of the European Economic Community (EEC) as the European Union was then called, of which France was at the center of, provided an opportunity to build a connection to a new power bloc which would allow Canada greater independence from the United States.
However, the Premier of Quebec, Jean Lesage, was a federalist, but also a French-Canadian nationalist who started to develop ties with France on his own, a policy that was continued by his successor, Daniel Johnson Sr. The tendency of Quebec to carry out its own foreign policy was encouraged by the French president Charles de Gaulle, much to the displeasure of Ottawa, who saw this as French interference in Canadian domestic affairs. Halstead wanted closer ties with France, but would not countenance what he saw as French meddling in Canadian internal affairs. In November 1966, Jean Marchand, the federal minister of manpower and immigration, visited Paris, and de Gaulle refused to meet him under the grounds that he did not represent Quebec, a statement that enraged Marcel Cadieux, the undersecretary at External Affairs, who pointed out that de Gaulle had just met several visiting Quebec cabinet ministers. In December 1966, Halstead as the chief of the European Division of External Affairs had a stormy meeting with de Gaulle at the Elysée Palace, saying for the French president to "receive Quebec ministers because they were French-Canadians but fail receive French-Canadians because they were Federal ministers was the equivalent to saying that the Quebec government and not the Federal government represented French-Canadians. To foster such an impression would cause serious difficulties and would have the effect of interfering in our domestic affairs". In 1966, Halstead suggested the snowflake design for the new Order of Canada, advice which ended up being accepted.
Adviser to the Prime Minister In 1965, while serving at the Canadian embassy in Paris, he first met a rising Liberal MP named Pierre Trudeau whom he forged a friendship with, though he felt that Trudeau was an intelligent, but superficial intellectual. After Trudeau became Prime Minister in February 1968, Halstead became one of his leading advisers on foreign policy with a special focus on relations with Europe. Much of the Trudeau's Foreign Policy for Canadians white paper issued in April 1968 was based upon a document that Halstead had written in 1967. Halstead felt that Canadian foreign policy should be "rebalanced" with Canada seeking closer ties with the states of Western Europe to counterbalance the United States, a thesis that Trudeau accepted. However, Halstead also felt that Canada should remain active in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as the western European states placed a great emphasis on NATO, advice that Trudeau did not favor as the prime minister saw defense spending as wasteful. For a time in 1968–1969, Trudeau seriously considered pulling Canada out of NATO, and only elected to remain in NATO because pulling out would damage relations too much with the United States and the western European states. Halstead stated in a 1988 interview that Trudeau was intelligent and well travelled, but was "naïve" on foreign policy and "totally ignorant about diplomacy". From 1971 to 1975, Halstead served as Deputy Under-Secretary in the Department of External Affairs. As Under-Secretary, Halstead handled nation-to-nation relations and international security questions.
In the 1972 election, the Liberals under Trudeau won a minority government and to stay in power, the Liberals won a promise of support from the New Democratic Party under David Lewis. During the minority Trudeau government, Canadian foreign policy moved sharply to the left with the House of Commons voting on January 4, 1973, to pass a resolution condemning the American Christmas bombings against North Vietnam between 18 and 29 December 1972 as a war crime. One of the MPs who voted for the resolution was Trudeau. As a consequence, Canadian-American relations which were already strained because of the mutual loathing between President Richard Nixon and Trudeau, reached a post-war nadir. Though the resolution was only symbolic, the mere fact that it passed caused much annoyance in Washington, and Nixon refused to see the Canadian ambassador in Washington for months afterward. Only the fact that Nixon wanted Canada to remain on the International Control Commission, which supervised the implantation of the Geneva Accords of 1954, prevented him from taking a more punitive approach to Canada. Halstead who had a considerable influence at External Affairs, pressed very strongly for an economic "rebalancing", arguing that Canada should seek closer ties with the EEC, to reduce American economic leverage over Canada. In October 1973, Halstaed went with Trudeau for a visit to Brussels to meet François-Xavier Ortoli, the president of the European Commission (the body that controlled the EEC). Ortoli rebuffed Trudeau's request for a free trade agreement with the EEC, but indicated that the EEC would was willing to seek closer economic ties with Canada. A major problem with Halstead's economic "rebalancing" concept was that the Canadians were far more desirous of a free trade agreement with the EEC than vice versa.
In 1974, the United Nations General Assembly invited Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to speak about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which posed a quandary for Canada. On the same day Arafat was due to speak, the External Affairs minister Allan MacEachen was also due to speak before the General Assembly, and many expected him to say something about the Middle East as a result. Public opinion in Canada tended to be pro-Israel and to see the PLO as a terrorist group. As many Canadian Jews tended to vote Liberal, the government was loath to offend a generally pro-Liberal voting bloc. But in the aftermath of the Arab oil shock of October 1973-March 1974 which had thrown the economies of the West into a steep recession, few wanted to offend King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who was the driving force behind the Arab oil embargo.
The Arab oil embargo, which lasted from 17 October 1973 – 17 March 1974 ended the "long summer" of prosperity for the West that began in 1945, causing the steepest economic contraction since the Great Depression. The end of the "long summer" of prosperity, which many people in the West had assumed would last forever, caused considerable angst at the time. A famous headline in the Financial Times in December 1973 declared "The Future Will Be Subject To Delay". As a consequence, the Palestinian-Israeli dispute had been raised to the forefront of international politics as King Faisal, who was hailed at a conference of Third World leaders in February 1974 as "the mightiest Arab since the Prophet Mohammad", made it clear that he wanted a resolution of the long-standing dispute in favor of the Palestinians. The oil shock caused a major realignment in international relations as leaders of Western nations such as Britain and France were forced to court the favor of Middle Eastern leaders such as King Faisal and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, and even the American secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, declared the United States would henceforward be "even-handed" with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. At the same time, there was much anger in the West at the Arab nations-which had just thrown their economies into a steep recession, caused a spiraling inflation, and led to major line-ups at gas stations-and in many quarters Arab became a common term of abuse. From the viewpoint of the Trudeau government, making an excessively pro-Arab statement at the UN would be politically unwise.
In a memo of 2 October 1974 addressed to MacEachen, Halstead advocated that the Canadian delegation at the UN deliver a statement with "an implicit reference to a Palestinian personality". Halstead argued that such a statement would acknowledge the existence of a sense of Palestinian nationalism without however explicitly saying so; would align Canadian policies on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute with those of the western European states; and offer hope to moderate Palestinian nationalists that the world was not ignoring them. Halstead's memo influenced MacEachen to deliver a statement before the UN General Assembly speaking about Israel's "legitimate" security concerns while also admitting to "the concept of a distinct Palestinian entity and personality". MacEachen ended with the offer that Canada was willing to serve as an honest broker to work for peace in the Middle East. Though MacEachen's speech had no impact on international affairs with his offer of mediation being ignored by both sides, it satisfied the Trudeau's foreign and domestic objectives, being seen as sufficiently pro-Israeli to keep the favor of those supportive of Zionism while at the same time being sufficiently pro-Palestinian to avoid angering the Arab states.
Ambassador in Bonn He served as the Canadian ambassador to West Germany from 1975 to 1980 and as the Canadian representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization council in Brussels from 1980 to 1982. During his time in Bonn, the Germanophile Halstead sought to develop closer cultural links between the Federal Republic and Canada. Halstead help found the Gesellschaft für Kanada-Studien, set up the annual Grainau conference between Canadian and German academics, and encouraged German universities to establish Canadian studies programs.