Michael R. Lubbock was Executive Director of the Canadian Association for Latin America. He was born in the United Kingdom in 1906 and graduated from Oxford University. Before World War II, he worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Lubbock was invested as a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1942 and decorated with the Order of George I for his role in World War II. After the war, he became head of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration before working at UNICEF. Shortly after, he left UNICEF to join the UN Appeal for Children, which he managed and developed in 14 European countries. From 1948-1959, Lubbock served as director of the Bank of London and South America, and in 1960 he became a chairperson for the Peruvian Corporation, a British railway company in Peru. By 1968, he had returned to Canada to create the Canadian Association for Latin America, a research centre devoted to guiding Canadian companies and others wishing to develop ties with the continent’s governments and businessmen. He was the executive director until 1976. He died in Ottawa in 1989.
Lubbock’s lecture was a part of the series on “Canada’s Involvement in Latin America.” Instead of addressing the facts and statistics about business in Latin America, Lubbock endeavoured to give the audience a sense of what Latin America was like. The intangible aspects of the region were key to business success there. First, he said that he fundamentally believed in the people of Latin America: he thought that their spirit was essentially innovative, and that the recent change in their leadership, towards leaders with a positive attitude towards acting for the good of the country as a whole, would contribute to a new attitude to development in the region and make it an ideal setting for private enterprise to flourish. He also discussed the role of international development initiatives in Latin America. He argued that the most explosive element of the modern world was not the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism, but poverty and North-South relations. To properly address this, Lubbock suggested moving away from the idea that economic growth was universally good, regardless of who was profiting from it. The individual human, rather than statistic, must form the basis of development programs.
Lubbock’s lecture was held on November 26, 1974. Listen to it below.
