bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1999-2000) — Winter 1999-2000 // Hiver 1999-2000, pp. 4–6
When asked by the Foreign Service Journal recently whether he would recommend a Foreign Service career to young people today, former American Ambassador George Kennan replied “No,” except as “a prolongation of your education.” Kennan cited, among other factors, the slow pace of promotions for the “fiercely ambitious,” the career-limiting effects of political appointments, and the difficulty of maintaining two-career marriages.
Less than two years earlier, the retiring deputy minister of foreign affairs, Gordon Smith, was asked much the same question by bout de papier. “Yes, unequivocally,” Smith answered. Smith acknowledged that for junior officers, “the issue of the careers of spouses,” was “very difficult to resolve.” And he observed that “the youth of today” contemplated “career changes with a much greater degree of equanimity than was the case with my cohorts.” To Smith, however, these were problems for managers to address, not insuperable obstacles.
Overall, Smith declared, the foreign service still offered “enormous opportunities” and “fascinating career prospects” for new entrants, much as it did when he joined 31 years before. Though advancement had been a persistent problem, Smith’s assessment was that “there are real opportunities coming up” simply as a result of what he called the “demographics” of the department, presumably the upcoming retirement of the generation that entered in the 1960s.
Though the conclusions of these two elder statesmen differed, the issues raised in their responses demonstrated some of the common problems confronted by the foreign services of the United States and Canada. Not the least of these difficulties will be attracting and keeping the best candidates to renew the profession of diplomacy.
From my perspective as a historian of Canada’s foreign affairs who has observed our diplomatic profession at close range, I believe a look at the origins and development of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) will help in understanding the situation of the Foreign Service today.
It was not until 1909 that legislation established Canada’s Department of External Affairs (DEA), thus creating the basis for a distinct Canadian foreign policy as well as a Canadian Foreign Service. Throughout the 19th century, the British government had devised imperial foreign policy and conducted international relations on behalf of Canada and the rest of the British Empire. That approach was anachronistic in the 20th century, but an independent foreign policy for Canada evolved uncertainly and incompletely until the Second World War.
Development of a Canadian Foreign Service in the 1920s was the work, in large part, of the second under-secretary of state for external affairs, O.D. Skelton. Skelton had been a senior academic and distinguished scholar before he was lured to Ottawa by the prime minister and secretary of state for external affairs, William Lyon Mackenzie King. To Skelton, a separate Foreign Service was essential for Canada to assert its autonomy.
Skelton firmly believed in competitive entry and advancement by merit. With King’s support, Skelton recruited eight young men (women were not eligible), most with some experience teaching in university, in demanding examinations and interviews which Skelton designed and conducted in 1927-28. This ordeal favored articulate “generalists” and those who succeeded usually came from a background of history or political economy. For more than 30 years, lengthy essay questions were the hallmark of the Foreign Service examination. Among this group were Skelton’s successors, Norman Robertson and Lester Pearson. Pearson would go on to be Canada’s foreign minister and then its prime minister.
This initial recruitment coincided with the opening of Canada’s first diplomatic missions — legations in Washington, Tokyo and Paris. With the enhancement of the work of Canada’s high commission in London and the eventual establishment of a permanent office at the League of Nations in Geneva, there were overseas opportunities for these new diplomats. However, the first heads of post were selected by the prime minister, with prosperous former political colleagues predominating. Not until the eve of the Second World War was a “career officer” named to head a Canadian diplomatic mission.
By then, the Foreign Service had survived the Great Depression and, perhaps more significantly for its future, a change in government. While in opposition, the Conservatives had mocked the political appointments and regretted the obvious break with imperial diplomatic unity. When the Conservatives came to power in 1930, the Foreign Service was still a recent development and one closely associated with the former Liberal regime. Skelton and his recruits kept their jobs, thereby confirming the nonpartisan nature of the new institution. King’s successor as prime minister, R.B. Bennett, even retained two of King’s envoys. The growth of the Foreign Service was modest and its pay was cut, neither development surprising in those lean years. Arguably more damaging to the morale of the talented individuals that Skelton had recruited was the often complacent and usually non-committal foreign policy pursued by the Canadian government in the 1930s.
Canada’s international relations and its Foreign Service were transformed by the Second World War and its aftermath. One participant, Escott Reid, later recalled the 1940s as a “golden decade” of positive involvement in world affairs and exceptional opportunity for members of Canada’s Foreign Service. Reid and his colleagues had become responsible for framing and articulating Canada’s foreign policy and their efforts were sustained by broad support from the Canadian public. In addition to the remarkable growth in the international agenda, there was an exponential expansion of Canada’s representation abroad (now more often at the rank of ambassador). Even with accelerated recruitment, the Foreign Service could not keep pace with the growing demands. Its numbers were bolstered by academics and women, the latter classified as clerks though they performed the work of officers.
With the postwar influx of veterans and the acceptance of women as officers in 1947, the composition of the Foreign Service was altered considerably. Back in power since 1935, King still exercised his prerogative to appoint heads of post, but the opening of new missions ensured that there were ample opportunities for career officers as well. Indeed, by the time King retired as prime minister in 1948, most of Skelton’s recruits were ambassadors or deputy ministers, while one, Pearson, who had made the jump to politics to join the Liberal cabinet, was serving as secretary of state for external affairs under the new prime minister, Louis St. Laurent. Not surprisingly, this heady mixture of expansion, advancement and engagement in the major issues of international affairs fostered a positive outlook for most members of the Foreign Service in the early years of the Cold War.
That is not to say that there were not problems, in the “golden decade” and after. The consensus surrounding Canada’s international relations began to break down in the late 1950s; the election of a Progressive Conservative government under John Diefenbaker in 1957 put many in the Foreign Service who were closely identified with past policies on the defensive. The process for recruitment still favored excellence in policy formulation, but not necessarily in administration. That shortcoming left the Department of External Affairs vulnerable to criticism from elsewhere in government. Senior managers worried that the quality of entrants had declined and that francophones especially were under-represented.
Those concerns would be magnified in the 1960s as attrition from the ranks was more pronounced than before. As government and other public institutions, most notably universities and colleges, expanded, the competition for new recruits became more acute. More than half of the successful candidates in the early 1960s turned down offers of employment. No longer was the Foreign Service the only, or necessarily the most attractive, way for Canadians to see the rest of the world. Officers left its ranks in unprecedented numbers.
Some, including senior officials, did so involuntarily as victims of a “gay purge” in Canada’s public service in the 1960s (gays were depicted as suffering from “character weaknesses” and branded as “security risks” thus rendering them unemployable in the Foreign Service). As for women diplomats, DEA did little to attract them and still less to keep them. Even the continued overall growth in Canadian representation abroad, and consequently in job opportunities, was less comforting than before, as new posts were opened in less prosperous and often less secure locations in the Third World. fill these needs, recruiting accelerated, but that simply swelled the lower ranks without necessarily making sufficient provision for advancement.
Despite the comforting presence of a former colleague, Pearson, as prime minister from 1963 to 1968, these problems contributed to a relative decline in morale for the Foreign Service. By the late 1960s, that had led to the formation of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers (PAFSO), whose role as the bargaining agent for the Foreign Service was formalized when collective bargaining was introduced in the Canadian government in 1967-68.
Yet the most emphatic challenges to the work of the Foreign Service — and to the rationale for its existence — came from Pearson’s successor as prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, who held that office, except for a brief interruption, from 1968 to 1984. Though a former member of Pearson’s cabinet, Trudeau expressed disdain for the avowedly internationalist policies that Canada had pursued in the post-war period as well as for “quiet diplomacy” and the diplomats who had practiced it. Trudeau followed through on his rhetoric, trimming the budget for DEA at headquarters and abroad. Later in his administration, Trudeau commented that the image and self-image of the Foreign Service “are based on a concept of diplomatic practice grounded in an age which has disappeared. … Traditional concepts of Foreign Service have diminished relevance in an era of instantaneous, world-wide communications, in which there is increasing reliance on personal contacts between senior members of governments, and in which international relations are concerned with progressively more complex and technical questions.” Needless to say, Trudeau’s ruminations did not boost morale in the Foreign Service.
As well, there was a questioning of the persistent recruiting preference for “generalists,” with one of Trudeau’s foreign ministers, Don Jamieson, suggesting that DEA lacked strength “on the economic side.” Commentaries and surveys of new entrants detected a decline in idealism in the Foreign Service, as “a more hard-nosed approach to international affairs” took hold. Canadians generally were more inward-looking and wary as a result of rising unemployment and inflation as well as faltering national unity. That made them, and those who represented them, less disposed to take bold initiatives in world affairs. Whether or not it had earlier been as prevalent as legend and memoirs would have it, the missionary zeal of Canada’s Foreign Service officers had apparently abated. More than their predecessors, recruits worried about working conditions and career prospects. These anxieties had been compounded by a move announced at the end of 1971, to reduce the number of levels in the Foreign Service (from ten to five), to bring it into line with other job categories. Thus, promotion became a rarer event.
In January 1982, as part of a reorganization of government departments dealing with economic development, Trudeau announced the “restructuring” of DEA, which would henceforth include the Trade Commissioner Service. The government stated the department’s “primary purpose was to pursue aggressively international export markets and to give greater priority to economic matters in the development of foreign policy.” With the addition of immigration and aid officers, the Foreign Service was integrated within the expanded department (though the immigration service would depart a decade later and the principal instrument for aid would remain the Canadian International Development Agency).
In the 1980s, the growing number of political appointments to head diplomatic missions became a controversial issue in national politics. Trudeau’s tally had been 17 appointments in 16 years. When the Conservative Brian Mulroney took over as prime minister in 1984 he affirmed his commitment to “the standard of professionalism so characteristic of our Foreign Service.” But the Mulroney government soon lapsed from its professed faith. With 19 diplomatic appointments in his first three years in office, Mulroney and his foreign minister, Joe Clark, soon eclipsed the record of their predecessors. Clark suggested to PAFSO that one purpose of such patronage was to compensate for the inability of DEA to reflect “national priorities” in selection and recruitment (that is, the underrepresentation of women, those from nonprofessional backgrounds and Canadians from minority communities).
More galling still for members of the Foreign Service was that this activity took place against a backdrop of budget cuts and post closures. In February 1987, when six posts were closed, the only head to be reassigned at a comparable level was a political appointee. Later that year, the acrimony between PAFSO and the minister over the issue of political appointments to diplomatic positions received considerable attention in the national media. One academic lamented “the decline in the status of Canada’s professional diplomatic corps” from its earlier exalted position as “a high calling for the best and brightest young Canadians of the day.”
To compound the frustrations in the ranks, DEA had encouraged “lateral entries”
(often at higher salaries than their counterparts in the Foreign Service) to improve its policy-making capacity as well as its relationship with other government departments. In addition, the number of non-executive levels in the Foreign Service had by then been reduced to two, reducing the FS’s opportunities for promotion. In 1986, PAFSO noted the negative impact of lack of promotions, loss of positions and programs at headquarters and abroad, and “a freeze on recruitment to the Foreign Service” imposed for reasons of “economic restraint.” With justification, recruitment also bore the burden of making the Foreign Service a more accurate reflection of Canadian society — that is, bringing in more women, aboriginal Canadians, minorities and disabled persons.
Successive budget cuts and reorganizations certainly did not improve the situation. DEA was seen as less “connected” to the rest of government, an impression reinforced by the location of its headquarters away from the center of power near Parliament Hill. Attempts to redefine DEA as a “central agency” of government had failed. Other than trade promotion, its work was viewed as marginal to the basic needs and concerns of Canadians. In the early 1990s, the reputation of the Foreign Service for integrity was damaged as well by allegations of fraudulent travel claims. Meanwhile, for fiscal reasons, recruitment had become intermittent and consequently even more unpredictable, thereby discouraging potential applicants.
The specific problem of unpredictability was solved with the resumption of annual recruiting in the early 1990s; but other implications of recruitment policy have required more fine tuning. In an effort to cut the costs of the ritual, the focus of the competition was narrowed a few years ago to favor those with degrees in business or economics or with facility in a few specific languages. That move provoked considerable controversy among academics who specialized in international relations, whose students were among those excluded from consideration. Stung by that criticism, DFAIT moved first to raise the bar, transforming its past preference for graduate training into a qualification, then more recently to lower it. The latter change, last year, prompted the National Post to headline its article, “Ottawa lowers standards to fill Foreign Service jobs,” not exactly the positive message that DFAIT wished to convey about casting a broader and more inclusive net.
At the same time, the “Foreign Service Knowledge Test” was dropped from the entrance examination. That multiple-choice test had become little more than a form of Trivial Pursuit for Canadians interested in international affairs, and it was widely seen as having little relevance to the actual work of FSS.
In its “Human Resources Strategy” in 1998, DFAIT acknowledged that a higher standard for recruitment may have contributed to the department’s most acute personnel problem, the rate of attrition in the Foreign Service. “The number of officers leaving after their first posting has been rising steadily since 1986,’ the study noted, “with approximately 25 per cent resigning within seven or eight years of joining DFAIT.” With a continuation of the upward trend, DFAIT “would face a serious staffing problem.” The same document identified the main reasons “given by our departing officers”
“1. Low, non-competitive salaries;
2. Poor promotion prospects;
3. Spousal employment issues (single income, single pension);
4. Family related issues (ageing parents/ children’s education);
5. Devaluation of benefits;
6. Low morale (perception that the department’s senior management simply doesn’t care about the plight of overworked and underpaid officers); and 7. Decreasing job satisfaction.” By aiming for individuals with more education, experience and skills, DFAIT recruited and trained people who expected “professional pay-offs” within a “shorter time horizon.” Ultimately, DFAIT “cannot compete” with the “compensation packages” available from the private sector. A consultation paper in 1997 had similarly warned about the significant increase in the attrition rate of junior officers after five years. “The bottom line is that the primary feeder group for our management cadre will be at risk unless we take action now.” In other words, the best candidates would not stay to reap the benefits of the “demographic” trend mentioned by Smith (that is, the depletion of the executive ranks through retirements). As part of its comprehensive personnel reform, DFAIT in 1998 adopted an approach of “up or out” for Foreign Service recruits after five years. With the reintroduction of additional levels in the Foreign Service, likely in the near future, promotions will be more frequent. Salaries could be raised, as they have been lower than the equivalent professional groups in the public service, let alone the private sector. However, the 1997 study conceded that there were other factors, such as “family situation” or “recognition that Foreign Service life is not the career of choice,” that “cannot be satisfactorily addressed by the Department.”
While the prime minister retains the right exercised by his predecessors to name heads of post, PAFSO maintains its vigilance about whether this notion has been broadened to include missions formerly assigned to career officers. Of course, the list of assignments is also scrutinized by colleagues, government agencies and the media to assess whether it meets other objectives, including, for example, representation of women.
What does this brief glance at the historical record imply for career prospects for new recruits? Certainly, it demonstrates that the Foreign Service operates within a political, economic and social context. Not surprisingly, there is a strong correspondence between Canadian and American experiences. In both countries, Foreign Service leaders must take into account the values, interests and aspirations of new / prospective entrants. As recent editions of DFAIT’s “Human
Resources Strategy” indicate, senior managers are acutely aware of the difficulties of adjusting policies to take account of current circumstances and contemporary attitudes to employment. As Gordon Smith stated, current demographics may favor the entrants who decide now, for personal and professional reasons, to continue as Foreign Service officers, in spite of the problems that George Kennan cited and the complaints that PAFSO and its membership articulate. Adoption by DFAIT of a personnel policy of “up or out” after five years will certainly have an impact on the Foreign Service — but that impact may not be any greater than the cumulative effect of individual decisions to stay or not after a comparable trial.
To develop solutions to longstanding problems such as advancement, compensation and spousal employment is no less a challenge for Smith’s successors as it was for his predecessors — or indeed for their international counterparts. But it would be a serious mistake, in Canada or elsewhere, to contrast the situation now with an imagined past — whether depicted as a “golden age” or not — in which such problems supposedly did not exist.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1999-2000) — Winter 1999-2000 // Hiver 1999-2000, pp. 4–6. Read the rest of this issue →
