Ice War Diplomat: a new book by Gary J. Smith

Jeff Green | May 04, 2022

Gary Smith lived on Big Clear Lake in Arden, with his wife Laurielle, after retiring from the Canadian Diplomatic service and taking on the role of Vice-President of York University, where he attended in the 1960's.

While living in Arden, Smith served on Central Frontenac Council fonr term, between 2006 and 2010. During his time on council, a film came out about the politics surrounding the famous 1972 Canada- Russia hockey series, an event that altered the history of both the sport and the two countries.

The film took liberties with the history of the 8 game series that was called the “Summit Series” back in 1972. One aspect of the film that particularly irked Gary Smith, who played a key role in the series from beginning to end, as a young Canadian diplomat stationed in Moscow, was that “my role was played by a francophone woman, who smoked”.

Smith told his story to local reporters at the time, and articles were published about it in both the Frontenac News and the now defunct Frontenac Gazette.

Gary Smith moved to Perth in 2013, in order to be nearer to medical care because Laurielle required treatment for cancer. She died in 2016 and Gary has remained in Perth.

“I decided about three years ago that I was going to write the story of the series. I had enough time on my hands to do it with my wife being gone, and then when COVID came along I had a lot of time on my hands,” he said, in a phone interview with the News last week.

COVID provided him more time, but it made it more difficult to do the research that he wanted to do for his book, which is called “Ice War Diplomat”. It was released last week and has drawn national attention.

It took months to access all the documents that he needed from the national archives, a process that would have taken days or weeks but for COVID restrictions, but finally the whole story of a remarkable chapter in his life has been told.

He was just starting in the diplomatic core in the late 1960s, when a posting in Moscow came up. Before he went, Gary and Laurielle spent a year taking Russian language lessons on a full time basis.

“Laurielle, who was a teacher at the time, took a year off and all we did was learn Russian,” he said.

In Moscow, he played hockey in an amateur league with a team of Canadians called the Moscow Leafs, and the idea of a hockey series between NHL stars and the Soviet national team began to percolate. The Soviet team trained full time but they were considered amateurs, so they were winning World and Olympic Championships, while the best Canadian players were playing in the NHL. The Cold War was entrenched and Canada and Russia were looking for a way to establish a relationship while each remained on one side of a global political divide that had been entrenched for 25 years.

“Ice War Diplomat” tells the compelling story of how the series came about, and how it played out, from a unique perspective.

“When the Russian team came to Canada to start the series', I travelled with them,” Smith recalls, “I even had Russian credentials. While most Canadians still remember the Paul Henderson goal that gave Canada a victory, it was a series that was ostensibly just an exhibition series, although no one in Canada or Russia thought about it as an exhibition. It was more of a “war”, to paraphrase what Canadian star player Phil Esposito said when things were really heating up, a phrase that did not make Gary Smith's life any easier. He was in the middle of the ongoing diplomatic push and pull between the two sides that persisted right to the final game, when a dispute over referees almost scuttled the series before the puck was dropped, on that fateful September day. An estimated 15 million Canadians, 3/4 of the population at the time, watched the series on tv.

Aside from worrying about the teams, the entourages and the rules officials, dealing with 3,000 Canadian fans who made the trip to Moscow, where they were constantly under surveillance, often drunk on vodka, proved to be another major headache for the diplomatic core.

Just as Ice War Diplomat was about to be published in February, it had to be revised by Gary Smith in light of the attack on Ukraine by Russia.

“I had to provide some context,” Smith said. Smith has remained as an interested observer of post Soviet Russian politics. He published an Op-Ed piece in the Globe and Mail just after the start of the war in Ukraine that provides a perspective and insight that has been missing in most other coverage.

A documentary film, “Icebreaker” is also based in part on the book. It is slated to be completed in time for the 50th anniversary of the Summit Series in September.

“Ice War Diplomat” is available at bookstores in Perth, and Chapters/Indigo stores and online, and through Amazon. An audio book version will be available on May 10.