bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, p. 59
By the time this reaches print, many of us on the Executive Committee will have moved on. Some of us have been caught up in the inexorable posting cycle and will be reading this far from our bright new offices on Rideau Street. In my case, an assignment at headquarters has put me into the “excluded” caste and I am obliged to step aside. It is a curious state, exclusion.
I have stopped being concerned about the health of the foreign service or the fair treatment of our members, my colleagues and friends. Exclusion is a collective bargaining concept. It springs, it seems to me, not just from a demand by “management” that the holders of certain positions be free from collective bargaining responsibilities but as keenly from the demand of unionists that those to whom has been given some small amount of responsibility be kept at arm’s length from the untainted corps of the true believers.
I overstate the case. Nonetheless, what has happened to me has put me in mind of the patently artificial distinction that we have put between ourselves as professional foreign service officers. It is not the Treasury Board alone that has introduced this schism. It proceeds from the way many of us persist in thinking about the career and, more tellingly, about ourselves
Recently this magazine held a reception to thank its sponsors and the people who sustain it. Among the guests were several members of its remarkable editorial board. These men and women would have excelled in any field We are fortunate that they shone in ours. Call it romanticism or mere vanity, but I see a clear succession from people like Ed Ritchie to the most recently recruited FS-ID. And as our skirmishes over non-career assignments showed, this distinguished group of elder statesmen still care passionately for what we are doing and our opportunities to do it well.
I can hear some of you saying, cynically, that it is easy for the retired senior officer to take the long and generous view. That worries me. I have seen a lot of that cynicism during my brief tenure as President. It disturbs me that it comes from the most junior officers. Some of it I can understand. It is not easy to maintain a family on an FS-1 income. It is hard to face with any equanimity the prospect of many long years between promotions. It is galling, (but hardly new), to deal with a boss whose best years are gone. What disturbs me is the conclusion that some people draw from their disappointment-that all their troubles have to do with “management”, that if only we could escape its taint, especially, I suppose, ambition, then we could march forward into a new age. The rhetoric, I’ll grant you is compelling. What doesn’t work is the logic.
As we prepared for contract negotiations this year, some of us gathered together and read the records left by negotiating committees long past. There were few surprises. It was even a bit discouraging to see how many times the same ground has been gone over with Treasury Board. Some of the militant, energetic and effective whose names I saw are senior managers now. Some have retired. What they left behind, and what they still share is a profound sense that what we do is of value and worth promoting. Neither now nor then would they have seen anything but commonality and community between themselves and their colleagues.
What I am groping for here is some way to say gracefully that I do not think most of us joined up to behave like domestic public servants. Like it or not we work in a unique environment with its own culture. It is not fixed; it is dynamic and should be prodded. What it cannot sustain is any more separations. The imposition of the EX system was bad enough. A drift toward exclusionism on our part would be worse. Slogans and easy rhetoric are effective prisons.
That is why I am confident about the future of PAFSO. Many of us are leaving the Executive. But as in the past, there are many willing to serve their colleagues, not because they have some axe to grind, or cause to promote, but because the issues do not change and the career is worth working for. To our successors, every best wish. The whole foreign service is counting on you.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, p. 59. Read the rest of this issue →
