Who were the Ottawa mandarins?

Further to my earlier post about a Committee on Reconstruction, I was asked yesterday about the Ottawa mandarins, the name often given to senior civil servants who helped formulate and execute Canada’s war effort between 1939-1945.

I think Jack Granatstein, in his book The Ottawa Men, describes it best; they were a tightly knit group of colleagues – many from the same universities – who “changed the way government operated and whose overall influence and impact were positive in the extreme.”

Mandarin membership was never formally defined. But it included the likes of O.D. Skelton (Under Secretary of State for External Affairs), Clifford Clark (Deputy Minister of Finance), Arnold Heeney (Principal Secretary to the PM), and Graham Towers (Governor of the Bank of Canada), among others. 

As the war marched on and the machinery of government further expanded, the mandarins often worked with members of industry, labour and academia. But the mandarins themselves remained a cohesive - and, as some people felt, snobbishly elite - group of men (they were all men at the time) who worked and socialized together with their families during and after war.