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Prologue
"Eddie, cancel this morning’s meeting. Something else has come up that is much more urgent.”

It was about 9:15 a.m. on March 17, 2003, and from the tone of Jean Chrétien’s voice, I knew this was something serious. At 9:45, we had a meeting scheduled at 24 Sussex Drive, the prime minister’s official residence, to discuss controversial proposed legislation to prohibit corporate bankrolling of Canadian political parties. I had been standing in my corner office on the second floor of the Langevin Building, which houses the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Privy Council Office (PCO), gathering documents to take to the meeting when the phone rang. The prime minister, as always, got right to the point. He had just learned from his foreign policy adviser, Claude Laverdure, that the British government had contacted the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs with four questions, which he proceeded to read to me.

“Will Canada provide political support for military action against Iraq?”

“What military capabilities will Canada contribute to such an action?”

“Is Canada prepared to make its position on this public?”

“What support will Canada provide to humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in Iraq?”

Worst of all, he added, “The British say that they and the Americans need an answer before noon — today. I want you to work right away with Claude to make recommendations on how we should respond.”

I left my office at once, darted upstairs, and crossed into the connecting building that housed the foreign policy and defence secretariat of the Privy Council Office. Claude Laverdure, who headed the secretariat, was waiting for me in his office. On the walls were some souvenir photographs of Claude’s long and distinguished career in the Canadian foreign service. On his desk were family photographs. In one corner — where we would spend most of the next three hours — was a standard-­issue government conference table where we could sit, review documents, and write. From his window, I could see across Wellington Street to the Parliament Buildings and pick out the windows of the prime minister’s own office, where the drama of the day would play out a few hours later.

Claude and I took as our starting point the fact that for months the prime minister had insisted publicly and privately that Canada would not participate in a war in Iraq without the approval of the United Nations (UN). So step one was to call Paul Heinbecker, the Canadian ambassador to the UN, to get an update from him as to what was happening there. We put him on the speaker phone and discussed for about twenty minutes the situation in New York. The ambassador told us that after weeks of debate and high-­stakes drama on the international stage, it was now absolutely clear that there was no way that the UN Security Council would pass any resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq.

For months, all of our discussions about Iraq had dealt with hypothetical situations. We now faced the ugly reality that Canada had moments earlier been confronted with an ultimatum by the United States and the United Kingdom, our two oldest allies. We were very surprised and puzzled that the Americans — who would lead the war effort — had not made a direct request to Canada for military assistance, but instead had used the British as an intermediary. But the surprising — and somewhat insulting — way they asked Canada ­didn’t influence our decision. The bottom line was that the United States was going to war against Iraq, and wanted Canada to be part of it. The prime minister would have to make a final decision as to whether Canada would participate, and we were there to advise him. Now that the clock was ticking so fast, there was no time for more debate or broad consultation, no time for the prime minister to call a meeting of caucus or Cabinet. The British and the Americans had asked for an answer by noon, less than two hours away, and Parliament would be sitting for question period soon after that.

Heinbecker, Laverdure, and I had the same reaction to the demand for an answer by noon. Regardless of the deadline our friends and allies were trying to impose on us, we believed that Parliament should be informed ahead of foreign governments of a decision as to whether Canada would go to war. I pressed “0” on the telephone and asked the PMO switchboard operator to put us through to the prime minister. Within a minute, Chrétien was on the line, and I told him that I would put him on the speaker phone because I was with Claude. It was a brief conversation. Claude and I reminded him that there is no constitutional requirement to inform Parliament first, but our view was that as the House of Commons was sitting, it was the right place in which to provide the Canadian response to a request to go to war. We therefore recommended that he announce Canada’s position at the beginning of the daily question period in the House of Commons, before our diplomats communicated it to Great Britain and the United States.

Chrétien agreed, saying, “We will be highly criticized in Parliament if the announcement of Canada’s position leaks out of Washington or London before it is made public in Canada. I want to announce our decision in the House of Commons first.” He instructed us to ask the Department of Foreign Affairs to inform the representatives of Great Britain and the United States in Ottawa that he would be responding first in the House of Commons at 2:15 p.m. Then he told Claude that the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Gaëten Lavertu, should arrange a meeting in the Lester B. Pearson Building, home of the Department of Foreign Affairs, with British and American representatives for a formal government-­to-­government response immediately after question period. Much later, some who disagreed with the decision not to participate in the war, including American ambassador Paul Cellucci, criticized Chrétien for the way in which he communicated with the United States at that moment. I have no doubt that they would not have been at all critical of first announcing the news to the House of Commons if the decision had been to go to war.

As the moments ticked away, Laverdure and I spoke again several times with Paul Heinbecker. We understood the gravity of a decision where Canada would be saying no to the United States on a matter of particularly high national security importance to the president, but Heinbecker was unequivocal that Canada should not participate. After reflecting on the principles that the prime minister and the government had articulated over the preceding weeks and months, the three of us agreed to recommend to the prime minister that our country not participate in the Iraq War.

Laverdure and I, and sometimes Michael Kergin, the Canadian ambassador to the United States, had been present at the weekly Tuesday-­morning Cabinet meetings as the issue of Iraq was discussed in the months before any final decision had to be made. The first item on the agenda at each Chrétien Cabinet meeting was “general discussion.” The prime minister often used this opportunity to express his initial thoughts and then get some reaction from other ministers on evolving policy issues that did not necessarily require immediate decisions. For months, the situation in Iraq was one of those issues discussed at length.

Claude and I were therefore well aware of the thinking of ministers and the prime minister.

Around noon we telephoned the prime minister again and gave him our recommendation not to participate in the war. He listened carefully and said that he, too, had come to the same conclusion. Then he said, “Eddie, prepare a statement for me for the House today. I will use it to reply to the first question from the Leader of the Opposition.” I had been crafting statements for Jean Chrétien for thirty years, since the time I was a law student at McGill University and he was a young Cabinet minister in the Trudeau government. Some of the statements I wrote over the years ­weren’t always as important as I liked to think they were. This one was, and I knew this time that I had to get the words just right.