ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews Canada's involvement at the League of Nations, in particular its role in discussions of sanctions. It examines underlying questions and concerns that shaped public and official reactions to the crisis. The chapter links elite decision-making to social and cultural values and to debates within Canada about the workings of the international community and Canada's relevance to this process. Canada's contribution mattered to the outcome of the crisis and the workings of the international community more broadly. Canada's involvement in the Italo-Ethiopian conflict mostly took place in the context of the League of Nations. During the Ethiopian crisis, Canada therefore showed itself to be 'the last-ditch defender of national sovereignty', but only its own. Canada's policy must be situated in the context of Anglo-Canadian relations and linked to Canada's decolonization, a gradual evolution that started in the nineteenth century and continued long after the Statute of Westminster of 1931 declared that the dominions were sovereign and equal.
