Bill Graham
Encyclopedia
William Carvel "Bill" Graham, PC
QC
(born March 17, 1939) is a former Canadian politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of National Defence, and Leader of the Opposition and interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
and Vancouver
, and was educated at Upper Canada College
, Trinity College at the University of Toronto
, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law
(where he was an editor of the Law Review and the gold medalist of 1964), and the University of Paris
. As a student, he traveled in the Middle East and Europe. He married the former Catherine Curry in 1962, and they have a daughter, Katherine ("Katy", born in 1964) and a son, the freelance writer Patrick Graham (born in 1965).
He also became active in civic affairs, particularly the promotion of bilingualism. He served as a Director and, from 1979 to 1987, President, of Alliance Francaise de Toronto. In 1975 Graham was appointed by Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry to an advisory committee on the implementation of bilingualism in Provincial courts.
He moved from the practice of law to academe in 1981, when he took a faculty position at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, teaching EEC law; public international law; and international trade law until 1993. Graham also held visiting lectureships at McGill University and the Université de Montréal. In 1999, he endowed a chair in international law at the law school.
Graham twice sought election to the House of Commons unsuccessfully as a Liberal in the riding of the Toronto Centre-Rosedale, losing in 1984 to the Conservative incumbent, former Toronto Mayor David Crombie, and in 1988 to Conservative candidate David MacDonald. He defeated MacDonald in the 1993 federal election, and was reelected in 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006.
He served as a member, and for six years as Chair, of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Law (SCFAIT). Under his chairmanship, SCFAIT produced public reports on the role of nuclear weapons in world politics; Canada and the circumpolar world; the future of the World Trade Organization (WTO); the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); hemispheric free trade; and Canadian relations with Europe and the Muslim world. Graham also promoted "parliamentary diplomacy", and was active in the creation or operation of many international fora for parliamentarians, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which he was Treasurer, and the Canada-US Parliamentary Association. He was also the Liberal Party of Canada's representative to Liberal International (of which he was Treasurer), and the first elected Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas.
While his attention as an MP was directed largely to foreign affairs, in domestic politics he strongly promoted same-sex rights. This issue was of considerable importance to his riding, which contains Canada's largest gay neighbourhood. He supported same-sex pensions and the admission to Canada of gay refugees facing persecution for their sexual identity, and was an early proponent of legal recognition of same-sex marriage. He was voted Toronto's best MP several times by the readers of the city's 'Now' Magazine, and in 2007 was the recipient of Pride Toronto's lifetime achievement award.
In January 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
appointed Graham Minister of Foreign Affairs. His tenure was largely dominated by the changes to world affairs flowing from the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks and the increased unilateralism of American foreign policy. In the months leading up to the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, Chrétien and Graham articulated a position of opposition to military action without either an unambiguous authorizing resolution by the United Nations Security Council or clear evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime was in violation of the obligations to disarm it had accepted after the 1991 Gulf War. A Canadian compromise allowing additional time for weapons inspections, but with a firm deadline for Iraqi compliance, elicited strong American opposition and little enthusiasm from other Security Council members. After a resolution sponsored by the US, the UK, and Spain that explicitly authorized military action was withdrawn in the face of likely failure, Canada declined to take part in the subsequent invasion.
Canada did support important elements of the US-led War on Terror, and Canadian troops participated in the UN-sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime in October 2001. In the summer of 2003, Chrétien and Graham committed Canada to assume the lead role in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO mission in Afghanistan. ISAF was initially responsible for securing Kabul and its environs, but an October 2003 Security Council resolution authorized its extension through much of the country.
Some aspects of Canadian-American cooperation in the War on Terror worked smoothly, but there were instances of misunderstanding or miscommunication. Perhaps the most widely noticed came after American authorities deported a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured, apparently on the basis of intelligence quietly relayed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Unable to get RCMP support for Arar's release, Graham urged Prime Minister Chrétien to intervene. Following Chrétien's representations, Arar was released and a judicial inquiry conducted into his case. Graham testified that he was unaware at the time that the RCMP had passed information to the American authorities. Graham also unsuccessfully urged his American counterpart, Colin Powell
to consent to the release of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national taken prisoner by American forces in Afghanistan while a minor and held at the US facility at Guantanamo Bay. Despite these differences, Graham and Powell had good relations and cooperated effectively on a number of issues, including the despatch of 500 Canadian Forces personnel to Haiti as a short-term stabilization force, after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
.
When Graham's onetime law school classmate Paul Martin
succeeded Chrétien as Prime Minister in December 2003, he left Graham at Foreign Affairs, but after an election in June 2004 reduced the Liberals to a minority, moved him to National Defence. This would normally be regarded as a demotion, but Martin had promised during the election campaign to increase defence spending, and indicated to Graham that he would enjoy prime ministerial backing in his efforts to rebuild the Canadian military after the economies resulting from the deficit reduction program Martin had implemented in the early 1990s as Minister of Finance.
In Graham's first months as Defence Minister, one of the most pressing issues was the Canadian response to the George W. Bush
administration's invitation to take part in its Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) program. Graham offered qualified support to Canadian participation, in part because he feared nonparticipation would marginalize the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) within continental defence arrangements. But opposition to BMD and Bush administration policies generally was strong in Canada, and Martin did not provide energetic backing for Graham's efforts to convince his Cabinet and Caucus colleagues. In February 2005 Graham informed his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld
, that Canadian participation was politically impossible.
In July 2005, as part of a tour of Canada's arctic defense installations, Graham visited Hans Island, the sovereignty of which was disputed by Canada and Denmark. Denmark publicly protested the visit, but subsequently entered into negotiations to settle the island's status.
Perhaps Graham's biggest success as Defence Minister was implementing a new doctrinal and budgetary framework for Canadian defence policy. He persuaded Martin and Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to accept a $13 billion increase in defence spending, the largest in a generation, as part of the 2005 budget. This entailed significant capital expenditures, including the acquisition of Hercules aircraft to provide the Canadian Forces (CF) with tactical airlift capability. In addition, the CF command structure was overhauled to improve the capacity to respond to either domestic disaster or terrorist threat, including the creation of a new Canada Command.
Graham and General Rick Hillier, whose 2005 appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) he recommended, sought to transform the CF into a more mobile force, capable of conducting armed "peacemaking" and humanitarian interventions. This broke with both the Cold War emphasis on preparation for large-scale conventional hostilities across defined international borders, and the recent Canadian tradition of lightly armed peacekeeping under UN auspices. Restoring security and order to the failed or failing states that sevred as bases for terrorists was placed at the centre of CF doctrine. This conception of the CF's future role was set out in a Defence Policy Statement that fed into the Martin government's broader review of Canadian foreign policy.
Graham and Hillier persuaded Martin to make Afghanistan a laboratory for the new doctrine; in the spring of 2005 the Canadian government announced that the 1,200 Canadian troops in Kabul would be transferred to Kandahar province. Canada assumed a major role in Southern Afghanistan, with 2,300 personnel there by early 2006. Graham and Hillier supported a "3D" or "whole of government" approach, based on the concept of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), in which diplomats, military, police, development and reconstruction specialists work together to provide security and rebuild societal institutions. During Graham's tenure as Defence Minister, Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) provided emergency relief to Sri Lanka after the 2005 tsunami.
In the weeks leading up to the January 2006 federal election, Graham oversaw the negotiations of an agreement, signed by Hiller and the Afghan Defence Minister, governing the treatment of Afghan detainees captured by Canadian personnel and turned over to Afghan authorities. After revelations in 2010 that some detainees had been tortured, Graham appeared before a parliamentary committee investigating the matter. He conceded that the agreement had been imperfect, lacking as it did a mechanism for monitoring the treatment of prisoners after they were placed in Afghan custody, but pointed out that its omissions were more readily apparent in retrospect than they were at the time, and that it had been developed on the best available advice to meet unprecedented circumstances.
After the Liberals were defeated in the 2006 election, and the Conservatives formed a minority government under Stephen Harper
, Graham served as interim Leader of the Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition, until the December 2006 leadership convention that elected Stéphane Dion as Leader. Two highly charged issues debated in the House of Commons during his leadership were the recognition of Quebec as a "nation" and the extension of the mission in Afghanistan until 2011. Graham was neutral in the race to choose a new leader. On February 22, 2007, he announced he would not be a candidate for reelection in the next federal election. On June 19, he announced he was stepping down as an MP, effective July 2. This freed up the seat for former Ontario Premier and leadership contender Bob Rae
to run as the Liberal candidate in the resulting byelection.
.
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Queen's Privy Council for Canada
The Queen's Privy Council for Canada ), sometimes called Her Majesty's Privy Council for Canada or simply the Privy Council, is the full group of personal consultants to the monarch of Canada on state and constitutional affairs, though responsible government requires the sovereign or her viceroy,...
QC
Queen's Counsel
Queen's Counsel , known as King's Counsel during the reign of a male sovereign, are lawyers appointed by letters patent to be one of Her [or His] Majesty's Counsel learned in the law...
(born March 17, 1939) is a former Canadian politician, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of National Defence, and Leader of the Opposition and interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.
Personal life
Graham grew up in MontrealMontreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
and Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, and was educated at Upper Canada College
Upper Canada College
Upper Canada College , located in midtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is an independent elementary and secondary school for boys between Senior Kindergarten and Grade Twelve, operating under the International Baccalaureate program. The secondary school segment is divided into ten houses; eight are...
, Trinity College at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law
University of Toronto Faculty of Law
Established in 1887, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is one of the oldest professional faculties at the University of Toronto. The Faculty of Law is particularly renowned in the areas of corporate law, international law, law and economics, and legal theory.The law school has been...
(where he was an editor of the Law Review and the gold medalist of 1964), and the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
. As a student, he traveled in the Middle East and Europe. He married the former Catherine Curry in 1962, and they have a daughter, Katherine ("Katy", born in 1964) and a son, the freelance writer Patrick Graham (born in 1965).
Early career
After his graduation from law school, Graham went to Paris to pursue a doctorate of laws, with a focus on international law, as well as to improve his French. He also represented the Toronto law firm, Fasken's (where he had articled) in Europe. Upon returning to Toronto in 1968, Graham remained at Fasken's with a practice devoted largely to international trade and commercial law.He also became active in civic affairs, particularly the promotion of bilingualism. He served as a Director and, from 1979 to 1987, President, of Alliance Francaise de Toronto. In 1975 Graham was appointed by Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry to an advisory committee on the implementation of bilingualism in Provincial courts.
He moved from the practice of law to academe in 1981, when he took a faculty position at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, teaching EEC law; public international law; and international trade law until 1993. Graham also held visiting lectureships at McGill University and the Université de Montréal. In 1999, he endowed a chair in international law at the law school.
Political career
He served as a member, and for six years as Chair, of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Law (SCFAIT). Under his chairmanship, SCFAIT produced public reports on the role of nuclear weapons in world politics; Canada and the circumpolar world; the future of the World Trade Organization (WTO); the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI); hemispheric free trade; and Canadian relations with Europe and the Muslim world. Graham also promoted "parliamentary diplomacy", and was active in the creation or operation of many international fora for parliamentarians, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which he was Treasurer, and the Canada-US Parliamentary Association. He was also the Liberal Party of Canada's representative to Liberal International (of which he was Treasurer), and the first elected Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas.
While his attention as an MP was directed largely to foreign affairs, in domestic politics he strongly promoted same-sex rights. This issue was of considerable importance to his riding, which contains Canada's largest gay neighbourhood. He supported same-sex pensions and the admission to Canada of gay refugees facing persecution for their sexual identity, and was an early proponent of legal recognition of same-sex marriage. He was voted Toronto's best MP several times by the readers of the city's 'Now' Magazine, and in 2007 was the recipient of Pride Toronto's lifetime achievement award.
In January 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
Jean Chrétien
Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien , known commonly as Jean Chrétien is a former Canadian politician who was the 20th Prime Minister of Canada. He served in the position for over ten years, from November 4, 1993 to December 12, 2003....
appointed Graham Minister of Foreign Affairs. His tenure was largely dominated by the changes to world affairs flowing from the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks and the increased unilateralism of American foreign policy. In the months leading up to the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, Chrétien and Graham articulated a position of opposition to military action without either an unambiguous authorizing resolution by the United Nations Security Council or clear evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime was in violation of the obligations to disarm it had accepted after the 1991 Gulf War. A Canadian compromise allowing additional time for weapons inspections, but with a firm deadline for Iraqi compliance, elicited strong American opposition and little enthusiasm from other Security Council members. After a resolution sponsored by the US, the UK, and Spain that explicitly authorized military action was withdrawn in the face of likely failure, Canada declined to take part in the subsequent invasion.
Canada did support important elements of the US-led War on Terror, and Canadian troops participated in the UN-sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime in October 2001. In the summer of 2003, Chrétien and Graham committed Canada to assume the lead role in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO mission in Afghanistan. ISAF was initially responsible for securing Kabul and its environs, but an October 2003 Security Council resolution authorized its extension through much of the country.
Some aspects of Canadian-American cooperation in the War on Terror worked smoothly, but there were instances of misunderstanding or miscommunication. Perhaps the most widely noticed came after American authorities deported a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured, apparently on the basis of intelligence quietly relayed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Unable to get RCMP support for Arar's release, Graham urged Prime Minister Chrétien to intervene. Following Chrétien's representations, Arar was released and a judicial inquiry conducted into his case. Graham testified that he was unaware at the time that the RCMP had passed information to the American authorities. Graham also unsuccessfully urged his American counterpart, Colin Powell
Colin Powell
Colin Luther Powell is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military...
to consent to the release of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national taken prisoner by American forces in Afghanistan while a minor and held at the US facility at Guantanamo Bay. Despite these differences, Graham and Powell had good relations and cooperated effectively on a number of issues, including the despatch of 500 Canadian Forces personnel to Haiti as a short-term stabilization force, after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Catholic priest and politician who served as Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies...
.
When Graham's onetime law school classmate Paul Martin
Paul Martin
Paul Edgar Philippe Martin, PC , also known as Paul Martin, Jr. is a Canadian politician who was the 21st Prime Minister of Canada, as well as leader of the Liberal Party of Canada....
succeeded Chrétien as Prime Minister in December 2003, he left Graham at Foreign Affairs, but after an election in June 2004 reduced the Liberals to a minority, moved him to National Defence. This would normally be regarded as a demotion, but Martin had promised during the election campaign to increase defence spending, and indicated to Graham that he would enjoy prime ministerial backing in his efforts to rebuild the Canadian military after the economies resulting from the deficit reduction program Martin had implemented in the early 1990s as Minister of Finance.
In Graham's first months as Defence Minister, one of the most pressing issues was the Canadian response to the George W. Bush
George W. Bush
George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....
administration's invitation to take part in its Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) program. Graham offered qualified support to Canadian participation, in part because he feared nonparticipation would marginalize the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) within continental defence arrangements. But opposition to BMD and Bush administration policies generally was strong in Canada, and Martin did not provide energetic backing for Graham's efforts to convince his Cabinet and Caucus colleagues. In February 2005 Graham informed his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Rumsfeld
Donald Henry Rumsfeld is an American politician and businessman. Rumsfeld served as the 13th Secretary of Defense from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford, and as the 21st Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 under President George W. Bush. He is both the youngest and the oldest person to...
, that Canadian participation was politically impossible.
In July 2005, as part of a tour of Canada's arctic defense installations, Graham visited Hans Island, the sovereignty of which was disputed by Canada and Denmark. Denmark publicly protested the visit, but subsequently entered into negotiations to settle the island's status.
Perhaps Graham's biggest success as Defence Minister was implementing a new doctrinal and budgetary framework for Canadian defence policy. He persuaded Martin and Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to accept a $13 billion increase in defence spending, the largest in a generation, as part of the 2005 budget. This entailed significant capital expenditures, including the acquisition of Hercules aircraft to provide the Canadian Forces (CF) with tactical airlift capability. In addition, the CF command structure was overhauled to improve the capacity to respond to either domestic disaster or terrorist threat, including the creation of a new Canada Command.
Graham and General Rick Hillier, whose 2005 appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) he recommended, sought to transform the CF into a more mobile force, capable of conducting armed "peacemaking" and humanitarian interventions. This broke with both the Cold War emphasis on preparation for large-scale conventional hostilities across defined international borders, and the recent Canadian tradition of lightly armed peacekeeping under UN auspices. Restoring security and order to the failed or failing states that sevred as bases for terrorists was placed at the centre of CF doctrine. This conception of the CF's future role was set out in a Defence Policy Statement that fed into the Martin government's broader review of Canadian foreign policy.
Graham and Hillier persuaded Martin to make Afghanistan a laboratory for the new doctrine; in the spring of 2005 the Canadian government announced that the 1,200 Canadian troops in Kabul would be transferred to Kandahar province. Canada assumed a major role in Southern Afghanistan, with 2,300 personnel there by early 2006. Graham and Hillier supported a "3D" or "whole of government" approach, based on the concept of the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), in which diplomats, military, police, development and reconstruction specialists work together to provide security and rebuild societal institutions. During Graham's tenure as Defence Minister, Canada's Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) provided emergency relief to Sri Lanka after the 2005 tsunami.
In the weeks leading up to the January 2006 federal election, Graham oversaw the negotiations of an agreement, signed by Hiller and the Afghan Defence Minister, governing the treatment of Afghan detainees captured by Canadian personnel and turned over to Afghan authorities. After revelations in 2010 that some detainees had been tortured, Graham appeared before a parliamentary committee investigating the matter. He conceded that the agreement had been imperfect, lacking as it did a mechanism for monitoring the treatment of prisoners after they were placed in Afghan custody, but pointed out that its omissions were more readily apparent in retrospect than they were at the time, and that it had been developed on the best available advice to meet unprecedented circumstances.
After the Liberals were defeated in the 2006 election, and the Conservatives formed a minority government under Stephen Harper
Stephen Harper
Stephen Joseph Harper is the 22nd and current Prime Minister of Canada and leader of the Conservative Party. Harper became prime minister when his party formed a minority government after the 2006 federal election...
, Graham served as interim Leader of the Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition, until the December 2006 leadership convention that elected Stéphane Dion as Leader. Two highly charged issues debated in the House of Commons during his leadership were the recognition of Quebec as a "nation" and the extension of the mission in Afghanistan until 2011. Graham was neutral in the race to choose a new leader. On February 22, 2007, he announced he would not be a candidate for reelection in the next federal election. On June 19, he announced he was stepping down as an MP, effective July 2. This freed up the seat for former Ontario Premier and leadership contender Bob Rae
Bob Rae
Robert Keith "Bob" Rae, PC, OC, OOnt, QC, MP is a Canadian politician. He is the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada....
to run as the Liberal candidate in the resulting byelection.
After politics
Since his departure from electoral politics, Graham has been active in a number of organizations and business concerns. In 2007, he was elected Chancellor at Trinity College, University of Toronto. He is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College and Visitor at Green College. He is also Chair of the Atlantic Council of Canada, Co-Vice-Chair of the Canadian International Council, and a member of the Trilateral Commission. He is Honourary Lieutenant-Colonel of the Governor General's Horse Guards, and in 2010 received an honourary doctorate from the Royal Military College of Canada. As a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada since 2002, Graham is entitled to use the pre-nominal "The Honourable" and the post-nominal "PC" for life. He has received various honours for his services to the French language and culture in Ontario, including appointment as Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and Chevalier d'Ordre de la Pleiade.Portrait
Graham was the subject of a bronze authorized portrait medallion created for his 70th birthday as commissioned by Catherine Graham and sculpted by preeminent Canadian sculptor Christian Cardell CorbetChristian Cardell Corbet
Christian Cardell Corbet is a Canadian sculptor, painter and designer. He co-founded and was first President of the Canadian Portrait Academy.- Quotes :...
.
External links
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