REGISTRATION

Please register on Eventbrite (click here). Note that the Annual General Meeting is for members only; the fireside chat with Madelaine Drohan, however, is open to everyone.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

You are cordially invited to the 2025 Annual General Meeting of Canadian International Council-National Capital Region. Following the CIC-NCB’s business meeting (for members only), there will be a fireside chat with world renowned author Madelaine Drohan, senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, a former Canada correspondent for The Economist, and a former foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail.

Madelaine Drohan is the author of the forthcoming book He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada. Copies of this book will be available for purchase at this event.

Melanie Walker, Executive Director, Canadian International Council will moderate this important fireside conversation with Madelaine Drohan.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Madelaine Drohan is a senior fellow at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, a former Canada correspondent for The Economist, and a former foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail. During her long journalism career, she covered politics, economics, and business in Africa, Asia, Canada, and Europe.

She is the author of the forthcoming book He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada.

BOOK DESCRIPTION: He Did Not Conquer: Benjamin Franklin’s Failure to Annex Canada

Throughout his long and illustrious career, Benjamin Franklin nursed a not-so-secret desire to annex Canada and make it American. When he was not busy conducting scientific experiments or representing American interests at home and abroad, Benjamin Franklin hatched one plan after another to join Canada to the American colonies and then later to the United States. These were not solely intellectual efforts. He went to Montreal in 1776 to try to turn around the faltering occupation by American forces. As lead American negotiator at the 1782 peace negotiations with Britain in Paris, he held the fate of Canada in his hands. Ill health and other American priorities then forced him to abandon his decades-long campaign to possess Canada.

Franklin’s elevation to the status of an American icon has pushed this signal failure into the far reaches of collective memory in both Canada and the United States. Yet it shaped the future of North America and relations between the two neighbours over the next two and a half centuries.