William Carvel Graham (March 17, 1939 – August 7, 2022) was a Canadian lawyer, academic and politician. Graham served as the minister of foreign affairs, minister of national defence, leader of the opposition and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada. After leaving politics, he was the chancellor of Trinity College at the University of Toronto.

Early life According to his birth certificate, Graham was born on March 17, 1939, in Montreal, Quebec, to Loring and Helen (née White) Bailey. He was the youngest of four siblings: Arthur, Loring Jr and Helen. His parents divorced five months before he was born. On June 9, 1940, his mother married Francis Ronald Graham Sr, a wealthy widower over twenty years her senior with ten children of his own. Shortly after the wedding, his mother and stepfather moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, and Bill and Helen were raised by their maternal grandparents in Toronto, Ontario. In 1943, when Bill was four, he joined his mother and stepfather in Vancouver. Graham Sr. died in 1963; at his funeral, Graham learned that his stepfather was actually his biological father. His paternal grandparents were Protestant Irish immigrants.

He was educated at Upper Canada College, Trinity College at the University of Toronto, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (where he was an editor of the Law Review and the gold medalist of 1964), and the University of Paris. As a student, he travelled in the Middle East and Europe. While at university, he served in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve under the University Naval Training Division (UNTD), obtaining his commission as a Sub-Lieutenant in 1960.

He married the former Catherine Curry in 1962, and they have a daughter, Katherine, and a son, the journalist and screenwriter Patrick Graham.

Early career After his graduation from law school, Graham went to Paris to pursue a doctorate of laws, with a focus on international law, as well as to improve his French. He received his Docteur de l'université (DU) in 1970.Sylvia Fraser, "The Private Life of Bill Graham", Toronto Life, May 2003, pp. 83–92. (Article mentioned) He also represented a Toronto law firm, Fasken and Calvin (known as Faskens) (where he had articled), in Europe. Upon returning to Toronto in 1968, Graham remained at Faskens until 1982 working with Walter Williston in litigation and on his own in an international trade and commercial law practice.Kyer, C. Ian, 'Lawyers, Families and Businesses: The Shaping of a Bay Street Law Firm, Faskens 1863–1963', Irwin Law, 2013, pp. 232, 243.

He also became active in civic affairs, particularly the promotion of bilingualism. He served as a director and, from 1979 to 1987, president of Alliance Francaise de Toronto. In 1975, Graham was appointed by Ontario Attorney General Roy McMurtry to an advisory committee on the implementation of bilingualism in provincial courts.

Professor Graham moved from the practice of law to academia in 1981, when he took a faculty position at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, teaching EEC law, public international law, and international trade law until 1993. Graham became president of the University of Toronto Faculty Association, where he was strongly critical of Joseph Rotman's donation to the then-Faculty of Management in 1995. The donor agreement included several clauses that could limit the university and faculty of management's academic freedom. The agreement required that “U of T [rank] the faculty of management as one of its ‘highest priorities’ for the allocation of university funding, ensuring to its ‘best efforts’ that business education receives continuing focus.” Graham noted “the unqualified support for the ‘vision,’ and it talked about non-qualified support for and commitment to the values and principles underlying the ‘vision’ by the members of the faculty of management, as well as the central administration". As a result, the donation agreement underwent some substantial revisions.

Graham also held visiting lectureships at McGill University and the Université de Montréal. In 1999, he endowed a chair in international law at the law school.

Political career

Graham twice sought election unsuccessfully to the House of Commons as a Liberal in the riding of Toronto Centre-Rosedale, losing in 1984 to the Progressive Conservative incumbent, former Toronto Mayor David Crombie, and very narrowly (by 80 votes) in 1988 to Progressive Conservative candidate David MacDonald. He defeated MacDonald in the 1993 federal election, and was reelected in 1997, 2000, 2004 and 2006.

He served as a member, and for six years as chair, of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT). Under his chairmanship, SCFAIT produced public reports on the role of nuclear weapons in world politics, Canada and the circumpolar world, the future of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), hemispheric free trade, and Canadian relations with Europe and the Muslim world. Graham also promoted "parliamentary diplomacy" and was active in the creation or operation of many international fora for parliamentarians, including the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), of which he was Treasurer, and the Canada-US Parliamentary Association. He was also the Liberal Party of Canada's representative to Liberal International (of which he was Treasurer) and the first elected Chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Forum of the Americas.

While his attention as an MP was directed largely to foreign affairs, in domestic politics he strongly promoted same-sex rights. This issue was of considerable importance in his riding, which contains Canada's largest gay neighbourhood. He supported same-sex pensions and the admission to Canada of gay refugees facing persecution for their sexual identity, and he was an early proponent of legal recognition of same-sex marriage. He was voted Toronto's best MP several times by the readers of the city's 'Now' Magazine, and he was the recipient of Pride Toronto's lifetime achievement award in 2007.

Minister of Foreign Affairs In January 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Graham as Minister of Foreign Affairs. His tenure was largely dominated by the changes to world affairs flowing from the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the increased unilateralism of American foreign policy. In the months leading up to the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, Chrétien and Graham articulated a position of opposition to military action without either an unambiguous authorizing resolution by the United Nations Security Council or clear evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime was in violation of the obligations to disarm that it had accepted after the 1991 Gulf War. A Canadian compromise allowing additional time for weapons inspections, but with a firm deadline for Iraqi compliance, elicited strong American opposition and little enthusiasm from other Security Council members. After a resolution (sponsored by the US, the UK, and Spain) that explicitly authorized military action was withdrawn in the face of likely failure, Canada declined to take part in the subsequent invasion.

Canada did support important elements of the US-led war on terror, and Canadian troops participated in the UN-sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime in October 2001. In the summer of 2003, Chrétien and Graham committed Canada to assume the lead role in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO mission in Afghanistan. ISAF was initially responsible for securing Kabul and its environs, but an October 2003 Security Council resolution authorized its extension through much of the country.Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (Toronto: Penguin, 2007).

Some aspects of Canadian–American cooperation in the war on terror worked smoothly, but there were instances of misunderstanding or miscommunication. Perhaps the most widely noticed came after American authorities deported a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured, apparently on the basis of intelligence quietly relayed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Unable to get RCMP support for Arar's release, Graham urged Prime Minister Chrétien to intervene. Following Chrétien's representations, Arar was released and a judicial inquiry conducted into his case. Graham testified that he was unaware at the time that the RCMP had passed information to the American authorities.Tonda McCharles, "Mistakes kept from Martin", "Toronto Star". October 5, 2006, A1. Graham also unsuccessfully urged his American counterpart, Colin Powell, to consent to the release of Omar Khadr, a Canadian national taken prisoner by American forces in Afghanistan while a minor and held at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp.Michelle Shephard, "Ottawa played down Khadr concerns", "Toronto Star", August 20, 2007. Despite these differences, Graham and Powell had good relations and cooperated effectively on a number of issues, including the despatch of 500 Canadian Forces personnel to Haiti as a short-term stabilization force after the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Minister of National Defence When Graham's former law school classmate Paul Martin succeeded Chrétien as Prime Minister in December 2003, Martin left Graham at Foreign Affairs, but after an election in June 2004 reduced the Liberals to a minority, Martin moved him to National Defence. This would normally be regarded as a demotion, but Martin had promised during the election campaign to increase defence spending, and he indicated to Graham that he would enjoy prime ministerial backing in his efforts to rebuild the Canadian military after the economies resulting from the deficit-reduction program that Martin had implemented in the early 1990s as Minister of Finance.

In Graham's first months as Defence Minister, one of the most pressing issues was the Canadian response to the George W. Bush administration's invitation to take part in its Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) program. Graham offered qualified support to Canadian participation, in part because he feared that nonparticipation would marginalize the North American Air Defence Command (NORAD) within continental defence arrangements. But opposition to BMD and Bush administration policies generally was strong in Canada, and Martin did not provide energetic backing for Graham's efforts to convince his Cabinet and Caucus colleagues. In February 2005, Graham informed his American counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, that Canadian participation was politically impossible.

In July 2005, as part of a tour of Canada's arctic defense installations, Graham visited Hans Island, the sovereignty of which was disputed by Canada and Denmark. Denmark publicly protested the visit, but subsequently entered into negotiations to settle the island's status.

Perhaps Graham's biggest success as Defence Minister was implementing a new doctrinal and budgetary framework for Canadian defence policy. He persuaded Martin and Finance Minister Ralph Goodale to accept a $13-billion increase in defence spending, the largest in a generation, as part of the 2005 budget. This entailed significant capital expenditures, including the acquisition of Hercules aircraft to provide the Canadian Forces (CF) with tactical airlift capability.David Bercuson, "Liberals, lay down your arms", Toronto "Globe and Mail", May 18, 2010; citation for honorary doctorate, Royal Military College of Canada. In addition, the CF command structure was overhauled to improve the capacity to respond to either domestic disaster or terrorist threat, including the creation of a new Canada Command.General Rick Hillier, A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2010), pp. 350–351.