From the Times Literary Review --
"In 1880, it was decided that the representative of government of Canada in London should be called a High Commissioner. As a result, Nigeria today sends a High Commissioner to New Delhi.
The High Commissioner was initially a business agent concerned with railway financing and promoting emigration. The principal channel of communication between Ottawa and Westminister was the Governor-General. The position evolved with the evolution of Empire into Commonwealth; until the hundreds of high commissioners sent from one Commonwealth nation to another now are scarcely distinguishable from ambassadors.
Roy MacLaren, a former Liberal Cabinet minister, was Canada's High Commissioner in London from 1996 to 2000. He has written an at times wryly humourous and nostalgic history of the Canadian High Commission in London up to the eve of Britain's entry into the Common Market. He presents a vast amount of diverting political, social and biographical information, but two themes dominate.
There was constant concern for how Britain and the Dominions could work together in the wider world, which reached its effective high point in the Imperial War Cabinet established in 1915 and attended by the High Commissioner when Canada's Prime Minister was not in London. This trend was reversed by the paranoia of Mackenzie King, the Liberal Prime Minister of Canada for twenty-one years between 1921 and 1948, which saw British readiness to talk to high commissioners and keep them informed as an effort to exercise imperial control over the Dominions. Vincent Massey, High Commissioner from 1935 to 1946, was reduced to meeting British officials on the sly.
Schemes for imperial trade preferences generally foundered on British attachment to free trade and Canadian protectionism. The results were enough, however, that George Drew, a former Conservative opposition leader and High Commissioner from 1957 to 1964, engaged in a very public campaign against Britain's first bid to join the Common Market, concerned for the loss of Canada's slightly privileged access to the British market. MacLaren ends with the diplomat and diarist Charles Ritchie, High Commissioner from 1967 to 1971, writing: 'There remained the bonds of the past, but our future is no longer any concern of theirs.'"
- John Pepall
