bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, p. 35
Nancy Stiles was buried in Ottawa on Wednesday, January 24th before her friends, family and colleagues. She had lived only fifty years but all of us had memories of her to last us much longer.
I attended the funeral service and was not surprised to see the chapel filled with senior management of Foreign Affairs and CIDA, people who had worked with Nancy when she was Ambassador to Brazil and High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, young people who were brought into the department to help her tackle the difficult jobs at the Bureau of Assistance to Central and Eastern Europe and as the Foreign Service Advisor on Y2K, and others who had worked with Nancy on Central America in CIDA and in London.
What surprised me, and in retrospect should not have, was the similarity of sentiments felt by all who were at the funeral. I had worked with Nancy on the Bureau of Assistance to Central and Eastern Europe (RZD) form 1992-1995 or “Club Z” as we would later call it. And my experience with her there seemed to parallel others’ memories of her.
The Nancy we knew and respected at Club Z was a proud civil servant with a high sense of integrity, a strong manager who loved to take decisions, and above all, she was great fun.
Nancy was a model of a public servant long deemed to have been a disappearing species. She represented and upheld old fashioned public service ethics and values of integrity and honesty.
Nancy was often in jobs where she was under tremendous political pressure to fudge this and that, and do this or that for a political friend. Nancy took her responsibilities very seriously to the Canadian taxpayer and often she stood alone amongst her peers in these efforts. That the current day leadership of the public service preaches ethics and values, much would be learned by looking at the career of Nancy.
And Nancy was a great manager. She loved to take decisions and for the most part she always took the right ones. She had an innate ability to cut through the underbrush. Her common sense made the most difficult decisions seem simple. And she had a saying for achieving one thing and moving on to the next. “Be a closer.” she would exhort her staff.
Looking at her record reveals how much she achieved in her career. She developed an aid program to Central America at the time Minister Clark wanted more attention paid to human rights and community development. She was our High Commissioner in Sri Lanka at a time of near civil war and she travelled within the rebel areas. She took on the task of putting together
Canada’s cooperation program to Russia and Ukraine and Central Europe, when our program went from $27 million a year to over $127 million in one year.
She served as Ambassador to Brazil and welcomed a Team Canada mission there. And starting from a phone in the office, she put together Foreign Affairs’ Y2K team. Many of these tasks were herculean and I have often told friends that I believed Nancy had saved the Department’s bacon more than once.
But above all, Nancy was fun. Almost everyone recalls her magnificent and hearty laughter that cannonaded through the halls of Pearson or for that matter through the New Edinburgh Pub.
And it did not take much to set her off. I remember one March 31, when we were waiting anxiously to see if Prime Minister Mulroney would sign off on an Agreement to set up the Yeltsin Democracy Fellowship Fund. We would either lapse $25 million or achieve our objective of setting up the Fund at the University of Saskatchewan. I mentioned to Nancy that “I was strangely optimistic.”
Nancy looked at me, “you’re what.. strangely optimistic?” and then she exploded in laughter.
We often used that phrase when we ran into each other in subsequent years. And when I heard Nancy had cancer, I was strangely optimistic that she would recover.
That was not to be. So let us remember Nancy as a proud Canadian, who loved to travel the north by canoe and represent
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, p. 35. Read the rest of this issue →
