Ken Taylor – Here’s One Federal Official Who Was A True Canadian Hero

A Brief from Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

In an age when it’s getting harder and harder to find profiles of courage and integrity in senior levels of government, Ken Taylor, who died this October 15^th, 2015 at age 81, was just that.

Ken Taylor – A true Canadian hero who did his country proud in external affairs.

For those who care to know history, Ken Taylor will always be remembered as Canada’s ambassador to Iran during a brutal revolution in that country that, in 1979, toppled aWestern sponsored autocracy and replaced it with the Islamic regime that rules to this day.

During that period, Taylor and his staff risked their lives hiding six Americans in Canada’s embassy in Tehran while revolutionaries held 52 American diplomats and citizens hostage in the nearby U.S. embassy. While the hostage taking at the American hostage dragged on for 444 days – an agonizing length of time that played no small role in the undoing of Jimmy Carter’s presidency – Taylor and his staff worked with U.S. operatives to smuggle the Americans they hid out of Iran.

The episode was dramatized in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie Argo which, given it was a Hollywood production, played up the role the U.S. operatives played in keeping the six Americans out of the clutches of the Iranian revolutionaries and made very little mention of the role Canadians played.

Ben Afflick, Argo’s director and lead actor invited Taylor to a pre-release screening of the film and later agreed to make a few changes that gave the Canadians a little more of the credit they deserved. A postcript featured at the end of the movie reads; “The involvement of the CIA complemented efforts of the Canadian embassy to free the six held in Tehran. To this day the story stands as an enduring model of international co-operation between governments.”

After the six Americans were safely spirited out of Iran, Taylor returned home where he was greeted as a hero on both sides of the Canada/U.S. border.

As I recall Taylor appeared as marshal of the Grape and Wine Festival parade in St. Catharines a year or so after his time as ambassador to Iran and was greeted by cheers from people lining the route. Perhaps one of you out there might be able to share a comment here on that.

Taylor’s passing follows that of Flora MacDonald earlier this year. In her role as Canada’s Minister of External Affairs in Conservative Prime Minister Joe Clark’s cabinet during the time of the Iranian revolution, she was Taylor’s boss She was Taylor’s boss at the time and was responsible for authorizing the false identities and passports the six Americans needed to complete their escape.

At the risk of being accused of politicizing this tribute to Taylor, MacDonald and others in Canada’s External Affairs who showed such will and courage here, it is hard not to compare it to the pathetic role Canada’s current Harper government, including Rob Nicholson who is the incumbent Conservative candidate in the Niagara Falls riding and External Affairs Minister under Harper, played in the Syrian refugee crisis and the recent freeing of Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy from a bogus jail sentence in Egypt.

Like I said at the beginning, it is getting harder to find people like Ken Taylor in senior positions of government any more.

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