Bill Graham (Canadian politician)


William Carvel "Bill" Graham is a Canadian lawyer, law professor, former politician, and Chancellor of Trinity College at the University of Toronto. Graham served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of National Defence, Leader of the Opposition and interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. He was recently a member of the Minister's Advisory Panel for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, providing expertise and advice for the Government of Canada's Defence Review. Graham has recently authored an autobiography, titled Call of the World: A Political Memoir.

Personal life

Graham grew up in Montreal, Quebec and Vancouver, British Columbia, in a wealthy family; his father, F.R. Graham, was a business magnate, and Bill is a product of the second marriages of both parents. He was educated at Upper Canada College, Trinity College at the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, obtaining his commission as a Sub-Lieutenant in 1960.
He married the former Catherine Curry in 1962, and they have a daughter, Katherine and a son, the freelance writer Patrick Graham.

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 received his Docteur de l"universite in 1970. He also represented a Toronto law firm, Fasken and Calvin , in Europe. Upon returning to Toronto in 1968, Graham remained at Faskens until 1982 working with Walter Williston in litigation and on his own in an international trade and commercial law practice.
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.

Professor

He moved from the practice of law to academia 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

Graham twice sought election unsuccessfully to the House of Commons as a Liberal in the riding of Toronto Centre-Rosedale, losing in 1984 to the Progressive Conservative incumbent, former Toronto Mayor David Crombie, and very narrowly in 1988 to Progressive 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. 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, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, 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, of which he was Treasurer, and the Canada-US Parliamentary Association. He was also the Liberal Party of Canada's representative to Liberal International 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 in 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 he 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 he was the recipient of Pride Toronto's lifetime achievement award in 2007.

Joins Cabinet, Minister of Foreign Affairs

In January 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Graham as 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 that 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 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, 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 Guantanamo Bay detention camp. 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.

Minister of National Defence

When Graham's former law school classmate Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as Prime Minister in December 2003, Martin left Graham at Foreign Affairs, but after an election in June 2004 reduced the Liberals to a minority, Martin 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 he 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 that 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 program. Graham offered qualified support to Canadian participation, in part because he feared that nonparticipation would marginalize the North American Air Defence Command 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 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 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 served 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, 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 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.

Interim Liberal leader

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 that 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 by-election.

Electoral history

Toronto Centre—Rosedale, 1996–2003

Note: Canadian Alliance vote is compared to the Reform vote in 1997 election.

Rosedale, 1993–1996

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, Toronto. He is Visitor at Green College, where he is also an Honorary Life Fellow. He was also the Chair of the Atlantic Council of Canada from 2007-2012, is Chair of the Canadian International Council, and a member of the Trilateral Commission. He was the Honorary Colonel of the Governor General's Horse Guards from 2009-2018, and received an honorary doctorate from the Royal Military College of Canada in 2010. In 2018, he was appointed Honorary Colonel of Canadian Special Forces Operations Command. From 2012-2018, he was Co-Chair of the Advisory Board of the Creative Destruction Lab. As a member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada since 2002, Graham is entitled to use the style of "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 by the French government as Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and Chevalier of the Order of the Pleiade. He is a recipient of the Jean-Baptiste Rousseau Prize, and the Doctoral Ring of Siena, and a Patron of Liberal International. In 2015, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. In 2014 he received the St. Laurent Award from the NATO Association of Canada, and 2016 the Global Citizen Award from the United Nations Association of Canada. In 2017, he was awarded the Vimy Award by the Conference of Defence Associations. In 2011, he endowed the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, and sits on its Advisory Board. The Centre is associated with Trinity College and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. It seeks to promote the study of contemporary events from a historical perspective, and to bring together the worlds of the policymaker and the scholar.
Graham participated in the Government of Canada's Defence Review, as one of four members of a Minister's Advisory Panel, providing input for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. The review aimed to consult with Canadians across the country in order to develop a future road map for Canada's defence policy. In June 2017, it was released as "Strong, Secure, Engaged."
In 2016 Graham published an autobiography, Call of the World: A Political Memoir, reprinted in paperback in 2018.

Honours


RibbonDescriptionNotes
Order of Canada
  • Member
  • 8 May 2015
Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal
  • 2002
  • Canadian Version of this Medal
    • Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal
  • 2012
  • Canadian Version of this Medal
    • Legion of Honour
  • Chevalier
    • Order of La Pléiade
  • Chevalier

    • Scholastic

    ; University Degrees
    ; Chancellor, visitor, governor, rector and fellowships
    ;Honorary Degrees

    Appointments

    Honorary military appointments