The Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK, according to its website, “was established in 1975 to support teaching, research and publishing about Canada in the United Kingdom, and to promote academic links and student exchanges between Canadian and British universities…The Foundation, although operating entirely separately, co-operates with the Canadian High Commission, London, and thereby collaborates with the Government of Canada”.
On 2 December, Gordon Campbell, the Canadian High Commissioner to the UK, wrote to the board that he believed “the Foundation has the potential to do more to inform and educate the British public with respect to the strength of the Canada-UK relationship”.
In return for “additional resources”, he continued, the High Commission was exercising its right to “appoint four Board members with full voting rights”. Three turned out to be commission employees.
One then proposed a motion to remove long-standing board member Rachel Killick, emeritus professor of Quebec studies and 19th-century French studies at the University of Leeds, on the grounds that “she does not support the fundamental vision regarding the Foundation’s future direction”. This was passed at an emergency meeting on 13 February.
Her treatment, and wider concerns about the intended “future direction” of the foundation, led four other board members to resign in quick succession.
These included historian Margaret MacMillan, warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and Steve Hewitt, senior lecturer in American and Canadian studies at the University of Birmingham, leaving only one academic on the board.
In her resignation letter, Professor MacMillan said she was “shocked and dismayed” by plans to remove a board member who had “worked so hard and conscientiously”.
It was also clear, Professor MacMillan added, that “the High Commission intends effectively to take the Foundation over and use its funds for the promotion of Canada’s interests as defined by it”.
In an outspoken open letter, Dr Hewitt expressed his fears that the changes afoot would lead to the foundation becoming “the funder of neo-liberal talking shops on the part of London-based business elites”.
“There has always been a tension between the business and academic members of the board, ” he explained to Times Higher Education, “but the tension has never erupted in the way it has now”.
