Georges Vanier - Diplomatic Career

Diplomatic Career

For four years beginning in 1921, Vanier acted as aide-de-camp to Governor General the Viscount Byng of Vimy, leaving this post when he was promoted to the rank of lieutant colonel and took command of the Royal 22e Régiment at La Citadelle. Vanier occupied that position for only one year before again becoming aide-de-camp for Byng's viceregal successor, the Marquess of Willingdon.

In 1928, Vanier was appointed to Canada's military delegation for disarmament to the League of Nations and, in 1930, was named secretary to the High Commission of Canada in London, remaining at that post for nearly a decade—approximately half of which he spent serving the man who would eventually immediately precede him as governor general of Canada, Vincent Massey. It was also during that period, in the tumultuous year of 1936, that King George V died and his son, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, acceded and then abdicated in favour of his younger brother, Prince Albert, Duke of York. On May 12, 1937, Vanier, along with his son, Jean, watched from the roof of Canada House the coronation parade of their new king, George VI. In the procession below, Vanier would have seen one of the future governors general of Canada, Harold Alexander, who was then the personal aide-de-camp to the King.

In 1939, Vanier was elevated to the position of the King's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to France. However, with the outbreak of Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Vanier and his wife fled to the United Kingdom and then back to Canada in 1941, where he was commissioned as commander of the military district of Quebec and began an early policy of bilingualism in the army. The next year Vanier was promoted to the rank of major general and then made the Canadian Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia, as well as the representative of the Canadian government to the Free French and later the Conseil National de la Résistance, all of which were governments in exile. Throughout this time, Vanier attempted to convey to officials in Canada the seriousness of the situation in Europe, especially regarding refugees from the Nazi regime. To the frustration of the Vaniers, these efforts were met predominantly with indifference and even anger, and Vanier's letters to the prime minister at the time, William Lyon Mackenzie King, failed to induce a change in Canada's immigration policies.

Following the fall of Vichy France in 1944 to the Allied Forces, Vanier was posted as Canada's first ambassador to France. While serving in that role, as well as acting as Canada's representative to the United Nations, he toured in 1945 the just liberated Buchenwald concentration camp and, on a return trip to Canada, delivered via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation a speech expressing his shame over Canada's inaction, saying: "How deaf we were then, to cruelty and the cries of pain which came to our ears, grim forerunners of the mass torture and murders which were to follow." Back in Paris, he and his wife continued to help the refugees who arrived at the embassy, arranging for them food and temporary shelter. The couple, with the assistance of numerous others, eventually pushed the government of Canada to revise the regulations of immigration and more than 186,000 European refugees settled in Canada between 1947 and 1953.

It was in 1953 that Vanier retired from diplomatic service and returned to Montreal, though he and his wife continued social work there. Vanier simultaneously sat as a director of the Bank of Montreal, the Credit Foncier Franco-Canadien, and the Standard Life Assurance Company, and served on the Canada Council for the Arts.