Born in Victoria, British Columbia, Alastair Gillespie served in the Canadian navy in World War II, surviving a hair-raising upside-down landing in a Corsair fighter. After studies as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he went on to a successful career in business before going into politics and becoming one of the most influential cabinet ministers to serve under Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He was one of many who worried that increasing foreign ownership of Canadian businesses threatened Canadian independence, and there were serious economic and political repercussions from the efforts of OPEC to force the price of energy upwards. Gillespie was in the thick of these affairs and he defends vigorously the policies of the time that sought to deal with them.