The Thin Raiment of the North Atlantic Triangle: Canada and the Decision for War, 1938-1939

The concept of a North Atlantic triangle was perhaps never as appealing as during the decades surrounding the Second World War when John Bartlet Brebner formulated the idea in a book with that title, published in 1945. However, even then the theme expressed greater Canadian ex-patriot idealism than it served as a guide to practical realities in the conduct of national affairs in any of the three countries involved, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. From the larger Canadian perspective, the North Atlantic Triangle idea constituted a thin raiment that influenced the country’s international economic agreements during the 1930s but was largely invisible when it came to a decision for war. The agonising over entering the European hostilities in support of the UK so complicated policy formulation and poisoned personal relationships in government that some hoped for a more broadly based foreign policy to follow the war’s end. If a North Atlantic triangle had ever really sufficed as more than a generalised popular sentiment difficult to pin down, one might have expected to see it expressed in the policy decisions surrounding Canada’s first declaration of war in 1939. The examination of those decisions and the ways in which they were reached reveal the North Atlantic Triangle conception to have been far less important than the political significance of French Canadians in the Liberal Cabinet of William Lyon Mackenzie King or the loyalties of Canada’s anglophone population, the majority of whom were descendants of immigrants from the British Isles.