Boreal

Shooting the Messenger

Confusion and Where Have All the Fish Gone?

“the projection of Canadian values and culture in the world by promoting universal respect for human rights, the development of participatory government and stable institutions, the rule of law, sustainable development, the celebration of Canadian culture, and the promotion of Canadian cultural and educational industries abroad;”

Foreign Affairs' mission statement at the time of the Messenger.

Shooting the Messenger“Would you consider using Gandalf modems to connect the Embassy’s terminals?” I asked the American company that was about to get a substantial contract from the Canadian government to manage the payroll for employees working out of our embassy in Washington D.C.

All personal data on employees at the embassy would be stored on the American company’s computers a few kilometers away, and made available to Canadian managers and others via computer terminals at the Canadian mission to the United States of America.

The Washington Embassy was, to my knowledge, the only Canadian mission where personnel information was maintained by the host country.

There were some objections to this arrangement.

Gandalf Technologies of Ottawa was an early data communications company founded by Desmond Cunningham and Colin Patterson, “best known for their modems and terminal adaptors that allowed computer terminals to connect to a number of host computers through a single interface (Wiki).”

These modems did not come cheap and were cutting edge technology at the time.

The negotiators for the American company and Foreign Affairs, at this Washington meeting, briefly interrupted their discussion to stare at me in disbelief.

I thought it was a valid question. Had not the Prime Minister of Canada said that this is what he expected the Department of Foreign Affairs to do: promote Canadian products and services at every opportunity.

Pierre Trudeau had come to the conclusion that diplomats in a world of instant communications, on the spot live reporting of history-making events, jet travel and so forth were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Foreign Affairs had arrived, more-or-less, at the same conclusion.

I had only been on the job a few months when an unclassified directive addressed to all Canadian missions crossed my desk. It requested that Canadian diplomats abroad cut down on their reporting on local conditions both in length and in frequency. They were duplicating information that was already being collected by the Department from news services.

In private industry and in most government departments this would ordinarily have led to a reduction in staff, or at least a reassignment of personnel. Instead, as Parkinson predicted, the diplomatic corps was not trimmed, not even Western Europe’s bloated contingent of diplomats.

A story, which had been making the rounds for some twenty years or so, and had taken on an apocryphal flavour, made fun a of a diplomat's increasingly pointless occupation. Why the diplomats kept repeating this story about how Prime Minister Pearson heard about the outbreak of the six day war between Israel and its Arab neighbours is a question Freud might be able to answer?

The punch line!

When a Foreign Service Officer showed up at the Prime Minister’s residence to inform him of the outbreak of hostilities, the Prime Minister thanked him and told him he need not have bothered, his wife Marion, who had been watching television, had already briefed him.

Mike Pearson would not be the first, or the last, to indicate a preference for the media as a source of information on world affairs. Pierre Trudeau, in an interview he gave in 1969, told his interviewer that he preferred a good newspaper article over a bureaucratic report from Foreign Affairs.

Joe Clark, after he became Minister for Foreign Affairs, ordered around the clock monitoring of the major television networks after being blindsided by a reporter’s question about a bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut.

Trudeau went the furthest in trying to transform the Canadian Foreign Service. He forced the merger of what were then the Trade Commissioner Service and the Foreign Service. Until then, Trade Officers (or Commercial Officers) stationed abroad operated independently of the Foreign Service.

The lumbering big fish that was the Department of Foreign Affairs would swallow the tiny efficient little fish that was The Trade Commissioner Service. The big fish swallowing the little fish was not a good thing, as one businessman would lament before a Common’s committee studying the impact of the merger.

Trade Officers had morphed into Foreign Service Officers and that was not good.

With the merger trade took a back seat to competition for perks and promotions. I was there when it all went down. It was not a pretty sight.

This may be the only time in the history of Foreign Affairs when its carbon footprint actually diminished. None of the officers affected by the merger wanted to leave Ottawa, for it was in the nation’s capital that the decisions were being made and everyone wanted to be in Ottawa to protect their turf.

Stories circulated about diplomats who left for international conferences and such, only to return to find their offices had been given to someone else or their desk moved to a less desirable location.

Trudeau's attempt to get Canadian diplomats to focus on making Canada less dependent on U.S. trade would fail miserably. This failure, the result of grown men behaving like children, made the free trade agreements, which would give the United States even greater control of the Canadian economy, inevitable.

The Trade Commissioner’s people and the regular Foreign Service did not like each other.

The Trade people saw Foreign Service Officers as pompous, pampered bureaucrats doing a meaningless job. To the Foreign Service professionals, the Trade people were arrogant newcomers with no class and too much money who had no respect for the rigorous pecking order and chain of command of the regular Foreign Service.

Then Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Marcel Massé found a solution that was acceptable to both groups but which would lead to our businessman’s lament. Each group would be allowed to dabble in each other’s area of expertise. I was in the auditorium when he made the announcement.

He had barely finished when a hand went up. “What about CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) officers, would they be allowed to [dabble] as well?”. Yes, Massé responded.

As far as the big fish swallowing the little fish that is not what was important, if I correctly understood Massé’s explanation, what was important was that they were all fish.

Massé went on to explain what he had previously described as career streaming. All officers would be allowed to choose a stream, a career stream e.g. diplomacy, commerce, aid and such. If he or she did not like the stream he or she was in, he or she could always jump to another stream or simply go-with-the-flow.

Much later, but before the streaming solution had blunted initiative there, I would spend more than a year as a consultant at CIDA. In my mind it was a different organization.

Today, you can’t tell one Foreign Service Officer from another. You would be hard pressed to find a more homogenized bunch of know-it-alls, and as far as being good at what they do! It all depends.

A revealing remark made by someone whose admiration for the Canadian Foreign Service is less than stellar goes to the heart of what is wrong with the Canadian Foreign Service: ”You can all always tell a Canadian Foreign Service Officer, you just can't tell him much."

And there's the rub.

Arrogance can blind you to what you don't know; into thinking you know more than experts-in-the-field. This conceited, condescending attitude can have serious repercussions even here at home.

The seminal event that made the collapse of the cod fisheries all but inevitable was the giving away — by people who obviously knew next to nothing about fish — of the cod’s basic food source, a small silvery fish, the capelin, to the then U.S.S.R., Japan and Norway for diplomatic considerations.

In 1978, the U.S.S.R. quota alone was 266,320 ton of offshore spawning capelin. That was the year that the crucial capelin was fished out, that was the year that Canada's cod started starving to death.

It was not the first time that Foreign Affairs would interfere with fish management, according to the author of Lament for an Ocean - The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery: A True Crime Story (McClelland & Stewart, 1998) Michael Harris.

In 1987, Harris writes, Foreign Affairs signed a secret agreement with France, delivering to France "10,000 tons of northern cod that had been cut from Canada’s own offshore fleet."

The lack of experts-in-the-field is a serious concern. In 2005, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peter Harder tried to do something about his Department's dangerous personnel short-comings but was thwarted in his efforts and forced to resign by the Teamster-like union that represents Canadian Foreign Service Officers, the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO).

PAFSO successfully argued, in Federal Court, that it had the final say as to who could join their exclusive, closed fraternity.

What I learned from my first meeting in Washington, from the botched merger and subsequent events, was that the Canadian Foreign Service dances to its own tune and that, in just about everything, it knows better, and there is nothing much anyone can do about it.


The diplomats were not entirely to blame for being ill-informed about the cod’s food source.

It was only after the near extinction of the cod fishery that the Canadian government, as it tends to do, e.g. the impact of mining oil from tar sands on global warming will not be extensively studied by Canada until it is too late, decided to spend money to learn more about the life-cycle of the cod.

One thing government scientist discovered was that young cod find their way to the spawning ground by following older cods, it is learnt behavior.

Even if the government had known this beforehand and regulated the taking of older fish it would have made little difference, for it also allowed the spawning grounds to be completely gauged by deep-sea trawlers making it unrecognizable to the cod or unsuitable for spawning.

For the complete story of the mismanagement of a fishery on which so many countries depended, read Michael Harris' book