Remembering Cal Best
Born in Nova Scotia in 1926, James Calbert (Cal) Best was Canada’s first Black assistant deputy minister at the federal level.
Mr. Best spent several years at Manpower and Immigration and its successor, Employment and Immigration. As assistant deputy minister from 1978 to 1985, he played a key role in the major initiative to resettle tens of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia in the late 1970s. In particular, he was involved in a push to bring over 600 refugees, who had been aboard the notorious Hai Hong1 cargo ship, to Canada in late 1978.
Prior to his career in the federal public service, which began in 1966, Mr. Best had been a union activist and was one of the co-founders of what became the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC).
According to an article in the Ottawa Citizen published on the occasion of his death in 20072:
He broke many barriers on his way to becoming Canada’s first black assistant deputy minister and first black high commissioner. Rose Leblanc, Mr. Best’s executive assistant at the Immigration Department, remembered him telling her that “when he arrived in Ottawa he was the only black man on the street, and he could walk around and everyone would look at him.
“He was probably the only black man in the federal department at that time, too,” she added.
“Nothing was given to him, he had to work twice as hard.”
Following his time as a senior executive in Ottawa, he was appointed as Canada’s High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago in 1985 – the first Black Canadian to serve as a head of a Canadian diplomatic mission.
In his ‘retirement’, Mr. Best served on a number of boards and commissions, and was notable as a member of the Treasury Board’s Task Force on the Participation of Visible Minorities in the Federal Public Service.
Cal Best died in Ottawa in 2007.
- Dara Marcus won the CIHS Gunn Prize for his article “Saving Lives: Canada and the Hai Hong” ↩︎
- “Man of stature remembered as ‘ideal public servant’“. Ottawa Citizen. Canada.com August 5, 2007. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved February 16, 2026. ↩︎
