James Bond’s Canadian Connections

Canada has never been a Bond location on screen, yet behind the scenes it has quietly shaped 007’s world.

While The Spy Who Loved Me’s parachute jump was set in Austria, it was actually shot in Canada

In June 2025, it was announced that the next Bond film, currently known as “Bond 26”, will be directed by a Canadian, Denis Villeneuve. The award-winning director, who was born in Gentilly, Quebec and is a self-described “die-hard Bond fan”, had at one point been offered to direct No Time to Die, but declined. There had in fact been plans to shoot part of that film in Canada when Danny Boyle was on board but nothing came of it – although logos for the Canadian tax credit services (specifically, for the provinces of British Columbia and Quebec) did make it into the end credits.

Whether or not having a Canadian at the helm will see James Bond visit Canada is yet to be seen, but at present the fact remains that 007’s on-screen adventures have not yet taken him to the world’s second-largest country. That said, Canada has been far from absent in the world of Bond, where references to it abound.

While James Bond hasn’t actually been to Canada on-screen, one of the most memorable stunts in the entire franchise was filmed there. The pre-credits scene in which Bond skis off a cliff and deploys a Union Jack parachute in The Spy Who Loved Me is stated to take place in the Austrian Alps but was actually filmed at Mount Asgard, located in the Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island in the territory of Nunavut (although as Nunavut was not created until 1999, Baffin Island was part of the Northwest Territories at the time of filming).

In front of the cameras, Canada’s most notable contribution to the Bond films is Lois Maxwell. Born in Kitchener, Ontario, she played Miss Moneypenny in the first 14 Eon-produced Bond films. To date, she’s the second-longest-serving actor in the history of the franchise (only Desmond Llewellyn has been in more Bond films) and is the only Moneypenny to appear opposite more than one 007.

One of the creators of the Bond films was Canadian. Harry Saltzman, who co-produced the first nine of the Eon films, was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Although he spent most of his adult life in England, he never forgot his Canadian background – in the 1960s, he attempted to make a film about the early-nineteenth century Métis leader Cuthbert Grant, but it never got off the ground.

Saltzman may well be responsible for a couple of subtle Canadian references in the 1960s Bond films. When the SPECTRE planner Kronsteen is introduced as a literal chessmaster in From Russia With Love, his opponent is identified as being from Canada by way of the Canadian flag on display – although, since the film was released in 1963, the Canadian flag depicted is the old one, a Red Ensign defaced with the Canadian coat-of-arms  (two years later, Canada adopted its current Maple Leaf flag). Canada is also where M initially orders Bond to go as part of the investigation into the missing atomic warhead in Thunderball, but he argues that he’d do better in the Bahamas, and ends up going there instead.

Another, more recent Canadian with Bond connections is the screenwriter Paul Haggis, best-known as the creator of that quintessentially Canadian TV show Due South (which ran for four series from 1994 to 1999) before he co-wrote Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace. The fact both films have subtle Canadian references (a Maple Leaf flag that’s very noticeable in the background of the scene in which Bond arrives at the Ocean Club in the former, and a female Canadian intelligence operative whom Bond saves from potentially sharing the same fate as Vesper Lynd at the end of the latter) is surely not coincidental.

Of the Bond novels, the one with the strongest Canadian flavour is The Spy Who Loved Me. Uniquely among Ian Fleming’s novels, it has a female narrator – and she’s Canadian. Specifically, Vivienne Michel is French-Canadian, born and raised in “a little place called Sainte Famille on the north coast of the Île-d’Orléans” – an island on the St Lawrence River, not far from Quebec City. Sainte-Famille (officially known as Sainte-Famille-de-l’Île-d’Orléans since 2017) is a real settlement on that island – in fact, it’s the island’s oldest settlement, dating back to 1661. Viv’s French-Canadian heritage is enhanced by her having been educated at the Ursuline Convent, “the centre of Catholic tradition in Quebec”. Having made an outcast of herself by leaving while still in her teens, she’s unimpressed with the “screaming provincialism” and “pervading fog of snobbery” of the place when she returns after several years in England.

Like Bond, Viv is an orphan, her parents having been killed in a wartime plane crash in Montreal – a reference, perhaps, to a real-life plane crash in that city in 1944. If so, Fleming changed the details; the actual plane that crashed was a military flight. All five military personnel on board, and a further ten civilians on the ground, were killed.

Bond himself only appears in the third act of The Spy Who Loved Me, coming to Viv’s rescue at the Dreamy Pines Motel in upstate New York. As it happens, he’s driving from Canada to Washington DC but (fortunately for Viv) he had a puncture. He tells Viv that he was in Toronto investigating a plot by SPECTRE to eliminate a Russian defector (identified only as ‘Boris’) on behalf of the KGB. This ended with a gunfight in which the local SPECTRE man (Uhlmann, ex-Gestapo) was mortally wounded. Bond states that he was working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (“the famous Mounties”), which is accurate for the period – prior to the establishment of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1984, the RCMP was responsible for intelligence work in Canada.

Interestingly, there was an actual Russian defector living in the Toronto area at the time. Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, had defected to the West in September 1945 and after extensive debriefing lived out his life in Mississauga, a city just to the west of Toronto. Gouzenko’s revelations about Soviet espionage activity in Canada played a crucial role in changing Western opinion towards a country hitherto regarded as a wartime ally as the Cold War began.

Bond’s Toronto adventure gets a brief mentioned in John Pearson’s James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007, which has Bond visit Canada on one other occasion. During the Second World War, the younger Bond went to a secret training camp “at a place called Oshawa, on Lake Ontario”, where he was trained for deployment in German-occupied Europe. Being James Bond, he excelled in all areas. The training camp was real – known as Camp X, it was a secret school for would-be covert agents located east of Toronto, between Oshawa and Whitby. An estimated 2,000 people went there for training in sabotage, subversion, intelligence gathering, using explosives, silent killing, unarmed combat and radio communications prior to deployment in occupied Europe. After the war, Gouzenko was debriefed there.

According to his biographer Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming is recorded as having visited Canada just once – in August 1943, when he attended the Quebec Conference. Quebec must have stuck in his mind, given Viv’s background. Stories persist of Fleming also visiting Camp X, where he is said to have taken part in some of the training exercises – and he either came top or bottom of the class, depending on where you read such stories. It’s just about possible that he may have paid the place a brief visit (being on the shores of Lake Ontario, it would have been easy enough to get there from the USA), but there’s no record of him actually doing so.

Stories of him visiting Camp X are sometimes accompanied by stories of him staying with friends in Toronto, specifically on or near Avenue Road, just north of the downtown area. The reason for this is that there used to be a church there called St. James-Bond. Its unusual name was due to it being a merger in the 1920s between two United Church of Canada congregations, St. James Square Presbyterian Church and the Bond Street Congregational Church. The church building was demolished in 2006; alas, given that Fleming never visited Toronto, its name is nothing more than coincidental.

But by far the biggest Canadian influence on James Bond came in the form of a man Fleming knew during and after the war – the spymaster William Stephenson, also known as the ‘Man called Intrepid’. Born in Winnipeg in 1897, he had a career that was remarkable even by the standards of the various men who have been named as real-life inspirations for James Bond. It’s because of him that you can nowadays buy postcards in Winnipeg which state that James Bond was Canadian!

Stephenson served with distinction in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, shooting down 12 enemy aircraft before being shot down himself and taken prisoner. During the 1920s he became a successful businessman in England, and by the late 1930s he had branched out into industrial espionage, passing on information about the scale of German rearmament gleaned from his business contacts in mainland Europe to Winston Churchill – who used this in his attacks against the Chamberlain government’s policy of appeasement. After Churchill became the Prime Minister in 1940, Stephenson was sent to New York to run British Security Coordination, an MI6 front company tasked with operating in North American to investigate enemy activity, prevent sabotage against British interests and spread anti-German propaganda.

In this role, he excelled. BSC worked closely with the FBI to close down German spy rings operating in the USA, and worked to influence American media towards pro-British viewpoints. He became a close confidant of President Roosevelt, and was friends with William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA). It was Stephenson who established Camp X, which opened the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Although he was knighted towards the end of the war, and was one of the first non-Americans to receive the Medal of Merit (at the time, the highest civilian decoration that could be awarded by the President of the United States), his story did not become widely known until decades afterwards. Fittingly for a man who worked in the shadows, there are quite a few discrepancies between the various accounts of his life that have made it into print (the fact that the best-known book about him, A Man Called Intrepid, was written by an author with an almost identical name only adds to the confusion).

He died in 1989. A statue of Sir William Stephenson stands today in Winnipeg, where he also has a library and a street named after him. The site on which Camp X stood is now a public park, and it’s called Intrepid.