Help Wanted: Grade Nine Canadian History student to be editor of major Canadian newspaper

The Toronto Star features a fascinating story on its website and from its print edition on the behind the scenes work that Canada did to keep the flame of democracy alive in Chile during the Pinochet years.

It's a story probably unknown to many Canadians, a review about a government agency that funnelled money to professors and intellectuals to assist them in staying out of the clutches of the Chilean authorities during that turbulent time of history.

Canada it is told was key to saving lives in Chile, a nation at the time that was wracked by death squads, disappearances and certain lack of due process, Canadian policy was to be more influential in world matters and it seems Chile presented an opportunity to do some good:

"This is a great untold Canadian story," says Elizabeth Fox, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development who worked for the IDRC in South America during the 1980s.

Fox says that while the Ronald Reagan administration was propping up the Pinochet government (making it unlikely Cieplan would receive funding from U.S. authorities), prime minister Lester Pearson was trying to position Canada to be more influential on the global stage.

"It was absolutely huge that Canada did this. There just wasn't any other big funder around."

The above gives you a sample of the best of Canadian intentions and the worst in fact checking.

Now, if Ronald Reagan was President and Pinochet was in power in the 1980's, we wonder exactly how Lester Pearson returned to the political scene. Especially since the Nobel Peace Prize winning Prime Minister last served as Prime Minister in 1968 and had died in 1972. A few years before the Pinochet regime held its iron grip on the nation.

Pretty well any high school history student of today, could probably identify the Prime Ministers of the day as Pierre Trudeau a brief stay by John Turner and Brian Mulroney (While the initiative was most likely a Trudeau idea, it's interesting to note that Mulroney a close friend of Reagan's at the time, to his credit didn't cancel the program, or perhaps never knew about it)

It's an intriguing story, one which should be told, but hopefully with the correct facts in place.

It's the least we could hope for from a paper that considers itself Canada's leading paper and is frequently touted as an official conduit for the Liberal Party of Canada.