Liebnitz and the patent of doom
Liebnitz cautiously entered Java: the Hut. A 300-pound Elton John lookalike in a lime green body suit lurked at a table in the corner, reading the Irrational Hurled Trombone through opal-frame shades. A muscular tigure in a leopard skin loincloth swung over…
Life in a Gilded Cage
It was late spring in Havana in 1969 when there was a knock on our door. There stood a short, elderly grey-haired gentleman whom we recognized after a moment as the doorman from the hotel we had stayed in some months earlier…
A Posting to the People’s Republic of Cambridge
In the spring of 2003, I was offered the opportunity to spend the next year on one of the foreign service’s more unusual postings, as a Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. The contrast with what I…
Reds in Rockcliffe?
Sixty years ago, the defection of a cypher clerk from the embassy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in Ottawa focussed world attention on Canada in an early and dramatic episode of what became the Cold War. Documents and testimony from…
Memorial Plaque for Government Service Abroad
On June 16, 2006, during National Public Service Week, the Deputy Minister of International Trade, Marie-Lucie Morin and the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, V. Peter Harder, participated in a ceremony to unveil a plaque dedicated to the memory of all public…
Toward a Canadian Foreign Intelligence Service
Canada is discussing the merit and necessity of establishing a clandestine foreign intelligence service. Support for such an institution formed part of the election platform of the recently elected Conservative Party. The retired head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, Sir Richard…
John Small 1919–2006
Memories of John Small by Arthur Menzies at memorial service in Ottawa on 31 May 2006.
D’Iberville Fortier 1925–2006
D’Iberville – D’Ib comme beaucoup d’entre nous l’appelions, était pour moi à la fois un ami très proche, un « gentilhomme » très cultivé et intelligent, et un grand serviteur de l’État, c’est à dire de son Québec natal et de l’ensemble…
2006 PAFSO AWARDS — “In Pursuit of Excellence”
On June 15, 2006, 285 colleagues and guests gathered to celebrate excellence in the Canadian Foreign Service at the PAFSO Dinner and Awards presentations held in the Panorama Room of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. John Gray’s bagpipes signaled the start…
Idle Days in Patagonia
I’d always wanted to go back. In the late seventies, I’d spent three years teaching at a very British boarding school in Buenos Aires. My pupils were a colourful lot, including the son of a deposed Bolivian dictator, a nephew of Argentina’s…
