The Long Road to Montreal and Beyond: 1987-1991

When I look at the photograph in Chapter 30 taken at the plenary session at the 6^th World Congress in Rio de Janeiro, after I was declared the incoming President of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), I remember thinking that a new chapter of my professional life was about to begin. Unlike most of my predecessors, I had not had a long personal association with the World Council before my election at that Congress. My presence on that stage was the result of efforts by the Executive Council of the Comparative and International Education Society of Canada (CIESC) over a period of several years to host a World Congress nearly 20 years after the first one held in Ottawa in 1970. It is only through reading the files from the WCCES archives and my personal files from the CIESC that I am in a better position now to understand why I was on that stage listening to the tumultuous applause from a room filled with Brazilian educators and colleagues from many other countries. In this chapter, I will fill in some of the background to the Canadian bid to host the 7^th World Congress and the complex interplay among the various member societies, the events of my Presidency, and my efforts to reach goals similar to the ones outlined by Michel Debeauvais in the previous chapter. The experiences of the CIESC in hosting the 7^th World Congress were inextricably connected with the efforts of the Chinese Comparative Education Society (CCES) to host the 8^th World Congress in Beijing, China, although we did not fully realise it at the time.