First Panel Discussion

CANADIAN SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EXTERNALAFFAIRS

THE program for this morning calls for a discussion: "What Are the Great Issues in the ACA Community?" Issue has many meanings, but the one I like best is the one that indicates that issue represents a situation in which persons are at variance. Issues will have to do with dollars and cents and with pounds and shillings and pence, but there will be further considerations beyond matters of finance, I hope. I like the definition of great issues as set forth in the description of the Great Issues Course of Dartmouth College: A great issue has a moral core as well as historical depth, wit meaning for the present and projection into the future. ing in mind that description of great issues, one can readily appreciate the value, the importance, the significance o t is convocation.

ACA- Anglo-Canadian-American. I now use the authority of the chairman, and I rule that the first A, which means Anglo, includes not only the English but also the Scotch and the Welsh. I would like to hear an argument as to whether Anglo embraces Irish, and so Ido not make a ruling in a regard as yet.

ACA - as I thought of this last night, it seemed to me it might be a headache remedy and we'd have a broadcast over the air, or a showing on TV, with respect to this new headache remedy, ACA. But it may be that ACA as a headache remedy isn't inept. I would express the hope, as you do, members of the panel and members of the convocation, that we may be able to prescribe, or at least suggest, some remedies for some of our headaches.

I liked Mr. Douglas's figure of speech last night with respect to ACA, when he talked of it as a triangle. Triangulation is a good surveying technique. To triangulate is to get one's bearings. . . .

I would make this observation: I trust that we will seek for facts and the relation of the facts to our contemporary scene. It is a fact that at the present we are seeing the playing of an old game, or the indulging in an old sport. Some of us, any of us who read history, will recall what fun it was to pull the hairs out of the Lion's tail some years ago. And now there is a similar enjoyment in plucking feathers out of the Eagle's tail. That is the price of world leadership and world power.

May I plead again, with Mr. Douglas, for a lack of platitudes, of pretty platitudes. Mr. Jensen at dinner last night said that indeed if anyone talked of the four thousand miles of undefended border between the United States and Canada, he would get up and object. That's a good example of a pretty platitude. Indeed the department of geography at the University of Toronto says it's not a distance of four thousand miles - and I look at my notes - it's actually 3,986.8 miles. And so I rule that out this morning.

We all talk the same language. Mr. Douglas suggested last night that that would help us in our discussion. I don't know. George Bernard Shaw wrote that the United States and Great Britain are divided by a common language. If you understand the language of the man with whom you are conversing, you are likely to be more sensitive to slights.

Now in terms of frankness, I would pick up a note that was uttered last night by Mr. Douglas. I as a Canadian would say that during the past ten years there have been more pin pricks and annoyances and controverted, if not contentious, issues between the United States and Canada than I ever would have contemplated fifteen or twenty years ago. I am not pessimistic about that, and I'm sure that restraint, understanding, discussion and better knowledge of one another will eradicate many if not all of these controversial or contentious issues. . . .

This is not a discussion in which points will be scored. We are here in serious business, and I think, Mr. Douglas, that the thing that impressed me most last night in your eloquent and incisive address was your feeling of moral intensity with respect to the consideration and solution of problems among the three countries in the triangle, and what we do here. Despite the note of levity that I may have struck in these opening remarks, I am thinking with you of the farmer in Binscarth, Manitoba in my own country.