Keith MacLellan

Keith William MacLellan (1920–29 September 1998) was a soldier, scholar and Canadian diplomat who helped to shape Canada’s post war multi-lateral foreign policy and championed the cause of a federal, united, Canada.

He subsequently reapplied to rejoin External Affairs, where after a time of wearing “sackcloth and ashes” in Ottawa, he was posted as Ambassador to first Jordan and then to Syria before formally retiring in 1985.

While accounts vary as to the length of the delay before Canadian uranium and expertise were replaced by domestic product, with some sources stating that the impact as little as two years, prior to the sanction Pakistan had initially projected having a working device by the early-mid 1980s, whereas it actually only detonated its first device in 1998 .

Responding to this challenge was, he felt, a “call of duty” that could not be ignored. As a result, despite holding the post of Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, he formally asked for “leave of absence” in 1979 from External Affairs in order to stand for Parliament and help with the 1980 Quebec Referendum. When this permission was refused, he resigned from External Affairs, thus effectively ending his career. He returned to his native Montreal to stand as Conservative Party candidate in the riding of Lasalle, a Liberal Party stronghold, and also to help to mobilise the Federalist “No” vote in Quebec.

Keith MacLellan left external affairs in order to pursue a career in politics, first standing for parliament as a Conservative Candidate in the riding of Lasalle in 1979 and then again in 1988 in Westmount St Henri.

As a result, the threat of Canadian sanctions on the KANNUP reactor were less of an ultimate deterrent than was believed at the time. Consequently, negotiations between Keith MacLellan and Prime Minister Bhutto finally broke down in 1976 and despite a State Visit to Ottawa by Bhutto, Canada withdrew its support for the reactor. This action however only resulted in a delay rather than a cessation of Pakistan’s nuclear programme.

It was however in Pakistan that Keith MacLellan faced his greatest diplomatic challenge, namely to try to get Pakistan and its then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and abandon its aim of manufacturing a nuclear bomb in response to India having exploded their own device, Smiling Buddha, on 18 May 1974.

Unfortunately, both Canada and the West had seriously underestimated Bhutto’s determination to develop Pakistan’s own bomb and the sacrifices that it was prepared to pay in order to do so. In fact, unknown to them, Bhutto had formally launched Pakistan’s nuclear programme within 3 months of being elected Prime Minister in 1972 and subsequently accelerated the programme in 1974 by launching Project-706, which was later described by Time Magazine as “Pakistan’s equivalent of the U.S.’s Manhattan Project” . Part of this project involved developing the technology and expertise to produce and refine uranium from other sources than Canada.

Keith MacLellan’s career covered a number of countries that were undergoing “interesting times”, most notably: Laos in 1965–1966 when it was in some turmoil, including the Civil War, as a result of the conflict in neighbouring Vietnam; Pakistan in 1974–1977 when the then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was deposed; and in Afghanistan, in the same period, when a series of coups eventually led to the Soviet invasion. Finally, he witnessed the beginning of the unravelling of Yugoslavia in 1979 when President Josip Broz Tito’s illness, and subsequent death in 1980, was creating a power vacuum that would end in ethnic divisions and civil war.

He subsequently returned to Canada, first working at Imperial Oil and then joining Canada’s Department of External Affairs as a diplomat in 1950. It was as a Canadian diplomat that he represented his country around the world and helped to shape Canada’s foreign policy in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. He rose to the rank of ambassador before leaving in order to pursue a career in politics, first standing for parliament as a Conservative Candidate in the riding of Lasalle in 1979 and then again in 1988 in Westmount St Henri.

Keith MacLellan joined External Affairs in 1950 and was part of the small group of Canadian Foreign Service officers who helped to shape Canada’s post war diplomatic efforts and policy in a critical time in Canada’s history.

Post war, he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at New College, Oxford, obtaining his MA in 1947. In this time, he both rowed for his college and was a contemporary with political and literary figures such as Tony Wedgewood Benn and the organisers of the Oxford Manifesto of 1947.

He subsequently joined the army and served during World War II as one of only two Canadians in the British Special Air Service (1st SAS), where he operated behind German lines. It was in this period that he first met and then married on 11 September 1946, his wife, Comtesse Marie Antoinette LeGrelle, daughter of Comte Adelin Le Grelle and Rosalie de Swert, from Antwerp, Belgium; whose uncle, Comte Jacques Legrelle (aka “Jérôme”), helped to organise and run the Comet (or Comète) Line, which was Europe’s largest and most successful underground escape line during World War II; and whose niece, Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz became First Lady of France in 2007.

It was during the liberation of Antwerp in 1944, that he first met Comtesse Marie Antoinette LeGrelle whom he married after the war as a student at Oxford.

He grew up in Montreal and first studied at McGill University where in 1942 he helped John Sutherland and his sister found the First Statement, a Canadian literary anthology.

Of Canadian pioneering stock, Keith MacLellan was born on 30 November 1920 in Aylmer, Quebec, the son of William David MacLellan and Edith Olmsted. He was a direct descendant of Philemon Wright, the founder of Hull, Quebec now called Gatineau.