Barbara McDougall

Canada is fortunate to have on its international front line a diplomatic team of exceptional individuals: highly intelligent, well-educated men and women, devoted to their country and willing to live just about anywhere. But diplomatic life, seen from the outside as full of glamour and excitement, usually is not. Despite the rounds of luncheons, cocktail…

On a wintry day in the mid 1990s, Brian Mulroney and I lunched in the Mount Royal Club, an imposing pile of grey stone on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal. Sharing lunch with Brian was for me a rare occurrence but always a welcome one. It was the period of his purgatory following his resignation from office, after the publication of a scathing book by an author carrying a…

Haiti is a poor little place that tugs at the heartstrings. Countless other countries—in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central America—are also poverty stricken, violent and fragile; their misery blurs across our television screens every day and many hands are briefly wrung. Haiti, on the other hand, is less known to Canadians—at least outside Montreal. But for those who have had occasion to take an…

Perhaps, dear reader, it had not come to your attention that I have never written a memoir. May I be struck with lightning for saying so, but political memoirs—in Canada at least—are almost always disappointing, at least to me, and it is very difficult to produce a successful one. That, it strikes me, is a good excuse to stay out of the memoir…

Throughout its history Canada has been fortunate to have had a handful of public servants who profoundly influenced international institutions and earned lasting international stature. Dr. Sylvia Ostry, statistician, economist, trade negotiator, is one of them. Now in her eighth decade, Sylvia remains one of the country’s (and the world’s) leading policy experts, despite the brain aneurysm that nearly destroyed her in September …