History
Ministers holding the External Affairs and Foreign Affairs portfolios have sometimes played prominent international roles:
- Lester B. Pearson (a future Prime Minister) defused the Suez Crisis and established the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces and as a result received the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize.
- Joe Clark (a former Prime Minister) led opposition to South Africa's Apartheid system in the Commonwealth of Nations, against initial resistance from the British government of Margaret Thatcher and the United States government.
- Lloyd Axworthy brought about the Ottawa Treaty, banning anti-personnel landmines in most countries of the world.
As in Pearson's case (and that of Louis St. Laurent, his predecessor), the portfolio can be a final stepping stone to the Prime Minister's Office. Until 1946, it was customary for the office to be held by the sitting Prime Minister. John Diefenbaker would hold the portfolio on two subsequent occasions.
Read more about this topic: Minister Of Foreign Affairs (Canada)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Attributed to Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The basic idea which runs right through modern history and modern liberalism is that the public has got to be marginalized. The general public are viewed as no more than ignorant and meddlesome outsiders, a bewildered herd.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)