End of The Cold War
Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan had a close relationship, but the 1980s also saw widespread protests against American testing of cruise missiles in Canada's north.
When the Cold War ended, Canada, like the rest of the west, was delighted. The Canadian Forces were withdrawn from their NATO commitments in Germany, military spending was cut, and the air raid sirens were removed in Ottawa. The Diefenbunkers, Canada's military-operated fallout shelters designed to ensure continuity of government, were decommissioned. Canada continues to participate in Cold War institutions such as NORAD and NATO, but they have been given new missions and priorities.
In addition, Canada may have played a small role in helping to bring about glasnost and perestroika. In the mid-1970s, Alexander Yakovlev was appointed as ambassador to Canada remaining at that post for a decade. During this time, he and Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau became close friends. Trudeau's second son, Alexandre Trudeau, was given the Russian nickname "Sacha" after Yakovlev's.
In the early 1980s, Yakovlev accompanied Mikhail Gorbachev, who at the time was the Soviet official in charge of agriculture on his tour of Canada. The purpose of the visit was to tour Canadian farms and agricultural institutions in the hopes of taking lessons that could be applied in the Soviet Union, however, the two began, tentatively at first, to discuss the need for liberalisation in the Soviet Union. Yakovlev then returned to Moscow, and would eventually be called the "godfather of glasnost", the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reform program.
Read more about this topic: Canada In The Cold War
Famous quotes containing the words cold and/or war:
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theater business, management of men.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)