Canada's Far Eastern Policy

IT IS NECESSARY only to set down the title of this article, inevitably inviting comparison with Bisson's America's Far Eastern Policy' and Moore's Soviet Far Eastern Policy.2 to realize that Canada cannot properly be said to have a positive Far Eastern policy. This is not surprising, since the Canadian people and government have had other preoccupations in their task of creating a civilized community in the harsh northern half of North America. Their relations with the Pacific have been relatively few and tenuous. Yet not only has the twentieth century enabled Canada to develop the material structure of its civilization to near-maturity; the great wars of the century have enormously accelerated that development and forced a somewhat unprepared Canada to participate in world affairs. In consequence a Canadian Far Eastern policy must develop, and is, indeed, in the process of doing so. To understand present developments in Canadian policy in the Far East, one must keep in mind certain fundamentals of Canadian external policy which arise out of the history of the country and the present composition and interests of its people. In contrast with that of the United States, the history of Canada is distinguished by its traditional orientation towards Europe. Even the French-Canadian community, whose political ties with Europe were forcibly broken, has maintained religious and, to a lesser degree, cultural ties with Europe which may increasingly affect Canadian external policy. Of this European orientation the colonial bond was only one manifestation. The orientation arose, too, out of the nature of the Canadian economy, whose great export staples usually found their principal markets in Europe and, especially, the British Isles. The pattern was set in the colonial period by the conservative and counter-revolutionary character of the early Canadian immigrants, by fear of absorption by the United States in the era of Manifest Destiny, and by continued