THE IMPLICATIONS FOR CANADA OF A RAPIDLY EVOLVING AND RE-EMERGING CHINA WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY THOMAS M. COOLEY LAW SCHOOL: KRINOCK LECTURE 2016 UNIVERSITY OF ST. MICHAEL’S COLLEGE, THE CATHOLIC FEDERATED UNIVERSITY WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, CANADA DAVID MULRONEY* Ladies and gentlemen, dear friends, it is a great pleasure to welcome each of you to Canada, to Toronto, to St. Michael’s, and to welcome your school, and its wonderful foreign study program, back to our campus. I am deeply honoured to be able to offer this year’s Toronto edition of the Krinock Lecture. Although, I must admit that my only real claim on your attention is as a proud host, rather than a distinguished legal scholar. That said, while St. Michael’s does not itself have a law school, it has produced lawyers and judges aplenty along with other scholars— like Jacques Maritain, whom I will get back to in a moment—people who have thought and written about the very nature of law and our relationship to it as human beings. And there is one very interesting connection to international law that goes back to our origins—actually a bit before our origins. We are gathered in Elmsley Hall, which is named after the man who in the middle of the 19th Century donated this land to the Church. He was a pillar of the devoutly Protestant Canadian establishment of the day, and the son of a Chief Justice of Upper Canada. Elmsley, in one of the worst career moves in Canadian history, surprised the Great and the Good of his day by converting to Catholicism. It was a move that sent him from the top of the social order to the bottom, meaning, he was among the Irish, who were in those days quarrelsome,
* David Mulroney is President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St. Michael’s College, the Catholic federated university within the University of Toronto. He came to St. Michael’s after more than 30 years in Canada’s Public Service. A career Foreign Service Officer, Mr. Mulroney was Canada’s ambassador to the People's Republic of China from 2009 to 2012.