John Wendell Holmes OC FRSC (18 June 1910 – 13 August 1988)[1] was a Canadian diplomat and academic.
[2] From 1947 to 1948, he was the Canadian Chargé d'Affaires ad interim to the Soviet Union.
[3] He became Assistant Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs in 1953 where he remained until he was forced to resign from the department, in 1960, after admitting to being a homosexual.
[5] Holmes was among hundreds of federal civil servants who were targeted in an RCMP homosexual witch hunt that intensified in 1958 and continued through to the mid-1990s, destroying lives, careers and families.
[7] He was the author of Life with Uncle: the Canadian-American Relationship (1981) and The Shaping of Peace: Canada and the Search for World Order 1943-1957 (2 volumes, 1979 and 1982).