bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 25–27
Envoys Extraordinary: Women of
the Canadian Foreign Service is available
from better bookstores or Dundurn Press,
2181 Queen St. E., Suite 301, Toronto,
Canada, M4E 1E5.
The following two excerpts are taken from Margaret Weiers’ Envoys Extraordinary: Women of the Canadian Foreign Service, Dundurn Press, 1995, $29.99.
Dorothy Armstrong — Heritage Houses and Hockey
From the earliest days of Sir Joseph Pope and O.D. Skelton, the External Affairs department has cultivated an officer corps of generalists. Even specialists were expected to be generalists. The reason behind this policy went like this: a Canadian diplomat, whether he had a degree in law or economics or was an expert in a particular region of the world, should have an education, interests, and knowledge broad enough to handle any assignment or solve any problem that came along.
An incident in the career of Dorothy Armstrong is a perfect illustration of this time honoured principle. A “thirty something” foreign service officer in External’s European division in the 1960s, Armstrong was called from her desk one day and given a curious assignment. She recalls:
There was some distress in the European bureau in the mid-’60s because the Canadian national amateur hockey team was behaving badly abroad as well as losing games; we got letters from five or six ambassadors in Europe all saying, in essence, “Please don’t send the national team any more. When they come they undo at least five years of diplomatic work.”
I was asked to take a few weeks off and do a study on why the team was making such a mess of things and what we could do about it. It didn’t take me long to discover why.
This team was essentially a pick-up selection of part-time college students coached by a very well-meaning priest, Father David Bauer. Now they were true amateurs but they were the only true amateurs on the world circuit. Like the Soviet hockey team made up of Red Army professionals, the other European teams were in similar situations, at least semi-pro.
So I recommended that until we could field a hockey team that would reflect our true abilities as seen in the National Hockey League’s professional standards we should get out of international hockey altogether, which was a pretty drastic recommendation. Specifically, I recommended that we withdraw from international hockey competition until we could field a team that would include at least some professionals so that we’d be on a more equal footing with the other teams. Otherwise, we were wasting our time, spoiling our reputation — not only our hockey reputation but somehow our political reputation as well because our image was so connected with hockey.
The report was so well-received that Dorothy Armstrong became an informal adviser to the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. Moreover, Canada did withdraw from international competition until new rules permitted NHL professional players — at least those who were not needed for the Stanley Cup playoffs — to join their national teams. The exercise also “deeply impressed upon me the importance of sport in international diplomacy,” Armstrong added.
Her most vivid memory of the assignment concerns the reaction of then prime minister Lester B. Pearson:
I got a message that the prime minister wanted to talk to me about it, he wanted to talk to the person who had done the report. He was a great hockey fan, of course. So I duly went over to his office and was standing outside when I heard him say to his aide, “I’m really looking forward to meeting the young man who wrote that report.” The aide came out and saw me and said, “Here he is, sir” I walked into the room, Mr. Pearson looked at me and threw back his head and laughed. This was the best moment of all, particularly in view of his known scepticism about women in External.
Pearson was not the only sceptic on that subject. The dean of arts and sciences at the University of Toronto, where Armstrong studied for a master’s degree in political economy, did his best to discourage her from pursuing a diplomatic career. In 1955, Vincent Bladon told her that it was almost impossible for women to get into External and that she should not break her heart over it. Instead of dampening her enthusiasm, however, the dean’s advice made her more determined. After all, she had been thinking of the foreign service as a career since she was eighteen years old.
Born in Elva, Manitoba, in 1931, Dorothy Armstrong devoured historical novels as a teenager, was absorbed in history as a high school student, and took an honours BA in the subject at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Along the way, she concluded that international affairs were “history in the making,” and that a career in diplomacy would not only maintain her interest but also satisfy her growing curiosity about other countries, cultures and societies.
Even before she had received Bladon’s cautionary counsel, Armstrong knew that she would have to be better qualified than the young men if she wanted to be on an equal footing with them in the foreign service examinations. After completing her MA at Toronto, she went to Paris to do doctoral work at the Institute of Political Studies. It was there that she wrote the examinations in 1956, shortly after the beginning of the Suez crisis. The memory of those days gives Armstrong the shivers:
Oil supplies were cut off to France for some time from the Middle East and, on the basis of very restricted supplies from other sources, only certain public buildings in Paris were heated. This did not include the residences at the Cité Universitaire where I was living and I can remember preparing for the exam — as much as you can prepare – bundled up, gloves and so on. In fact, we almost had to sleep that way, it was so cold. We were allowed one hot shower a week, I recall.
Then when I wrote the exam — it was at the Canadian embassy, the old Avenue Foch address — I actually wrote in gloves because of the lack of heat. There were five or six of us writing at the time and I expect none of us will forget the extreme discomfort of that exercise.
It was a long exam… a lot of essays, précis and so on, and it went on for hours. The exam today is, it seems to me, a much lighter affair compared to that. I can remember one major question: we had to choose one out of four topics on which to write for three hours. They were really trying to see if we could do analysis, one of the most basic skills required in the foreign service. This was presumably supposed to weed out people who couldn’t. Nowadays, the exam may not be tough enough in that department.
Having succeeded in the written examinations, Armstrong was summoned to appear for a rigorous interview conducted at the Paris embassy by a panel of ambassadors chaired by Norman Robertson, the high commissioner in London. (Armstrong called him “one of the department’s legendary ’greats?’”) She tried to prepare herself for the grilling by memorizing the United Nations Charter and studying other important international documents. She failed to read the morning papers, however, and muffed the panel’s first question about an overnight crisis in the Algerian war that was all over that day’s front pages. She was also disconcerted when Robertson asked her for her view of marriage.
I knew this was a heavy question meant not only to find out what I thought but to put me off stride a little. That is one of the purposes of the oral interview, to see how unflappable you might be in a tight spot. I thought about it for a few seconds and told the truth: “Marriage is fine for those who are interested in it.” At that time, I certainly wasn’t. So many years of my life had been invested in preparing for the foreign service that was the big thing. I think I was also dimly aware of the strictures against marriage for women officers then in the department. Thus the commitment had to be strong. When Armstrong joined External in 1957, she found considerable ambivalence about women officers and their determination to stay the course. A number of women had married and left the department after five or six years because their husbands were unwilling or unable to give up their professions to follow their wives around the world. “There was that kind of reluctance about us and a certain sense that we were not serious,” Armstrong remembered. “We truly had to prove ourselves, over and over, as professionals in those early years of the ’50s and ’60s.”
John W. Holmes, who had had a distinguished career in External from 1943 to 1960 before joining the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in Toronto, unwittingly revealed the kind of doubt and condescension encountered by Armstrong and her female colleagues. Speaking at Ladies’ Night at the Toronto Board of Trade in February 1965, Holmes said:
Although there are few women in the service, that is because fewer apply. The competition is open to them on equal terms in spite of the fact that they are a risk no insurance company would take. I needn’t tell you on Ladies’ Night that they are all attractive and marvelous diplomats to boot, but they have a habit of getting themselves attached by marriage to someone else’s diplomatic service. It is a particularly lamentable form of dame-drain.
Pamela McDougall — From Clerk to Royal Commissioner
Most of the women who began their diplomatic careers as clerks did so because government policy until 1947 barred women from joining External as officers. But Pamela McDougall, the second Canadian woman to become an ambassador, rose through the ranks because, as she said in an interview, “It had never occurred to me that I might be a foreign service officer.”
She could have had a career as a research scientist. Born in Ottawa in 1925, McDougall attended Glebe Collegiate before studying chemistry at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. She had summer jobs at the National Research Council in Ottawa, and, after completing graduate studies at the University of Toronto in 1946, she worked at the council for a year as a researcher in organic chemistry. However, following a year’s study at the Sorbonne on a French government bursary, McDougall abandoned science. “I really didn’t want to continue in a laboratory,” she recalls, “and when I came back from France I just simply went out and looked for a job.”
Having relatives in the civil service and being an Ottawa resident, she naturally took her search to the federal government. Because she spoke French and had travelled, somebody suggested External Affairs and somebody else told her to learn stenography.
Fortunately for the future diplomat, she then met a wise woman in External’s personnel division who said, “Learn stenography? You’d be crazy. We’ll see if we can get you appointed as a clerk and then you can go on from there, you can write exams.”
Starting as a grade 3 clerk, McDougall was assigned to the consular division. She said, “I was handling correspondence, I was doing jobs a lot of junior foreign service officers were required to do — they hated them probably — I found it quite interesting so the time wasn’t wasted.” Indeed, as a clerk she was offered her first posting abroad, to a new consulate the department was opening in Germany. Again, she was advised, “No, don’t do that, don’t disappear into the boondocks while you’re still thinking about trying to qualify as a foreign service officer.”
She stayed in Ottawa and wrote examinations, becoming first a junior administrative assistant and finally, in 1952, a foreign service officer grade one. She spent about eighteen months in the department’s United Nations division before her first diplomatic posting abroad.
Getting that assignment gave McDougall an insight into how External officials sometimes treated women. The department initially wanted to send her to Berne. Then it occurred to someone in personnel that the man being considered as the new head of post in Switzerland was not likely to accept a female officer on his staff. His attitude reminded McDougall of an earlier incident of discrimination against women by Canadian diplomats. McDougall was studying at the Sorbonne when the Canadian embassy gave a reception to honor Canadian novelist Gabrielle Roy, who had come to Paris to accept the Prix Femina for The Tin Flute. Of the Canadian students living at the Cité Universitaire, McDougall recalled, “All the men got invited to the reception for Gabrielle Roy and none of the women, which I thought was just horrendous.” McDougall wasted no time letting her friends at the embassy know what she thought of such a slight to the female students.
Instead of Berne, McDougall went to Bonn as third secretary. In her own view, she came out the winner because she found Bonn “a far more interesting and more important posting than Berne.” She had her reasons for feeling this way.
From 1953 to 1957, Germany was an exciting place to live and work. The German people, having recovered from the post-war occupation, were full of energy and had embarked on what was to become an economic miracle. They were rebuilding their war-torn cities and eagerly implementing a new, democratic constitution. Germany was taking steps toward a rapprochement with the rest of Europe that would ultimately lead to European Union. The country joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1955. Subsequently, a NATO contingent of Canadian troops was stationed on German soil. It was also a time of heavy German immigration to Canada. All these events engaged McDougall’s interest and intellect during her four years in Bonn. By comparison, Berne looked like a dull political backwater, notwithstanding the proximity of the Alpine ski slopes.
Posted back to Ottawa, McDougall dealt with human rights in the U.N. division, worked on the French desk in the European division, and then spent a year as the senior political advisor to the Canadian delegation on the International Supervisory Commission for Vietnam.
An international conference in Geneva in 1954 had produced accords to end hostilities between France and the Vietminh in Indochina. It established a commission composed of representatives from Canada, India, and Poland, to supervise the ceasefire zone on the 17th parallel between North and South Vietnam; to ensure the free movement of people; to facilitate the release of prisoners; and to stop any illegal movement of troops and arms. Every young, single foreign service officer in External in the mid-1950s could expect a tour of duty in Indochina; men were the first to go, but women eventually had to take their turn.
McDougall remembers the assignment as both horrible and fascinating. There were many small irritants such as the Army officer in charge of the commission who barely tolerated the diplomats from External, and the administrator who appropriated McDougall’s staff car and took over the cockroach-ridden but spacious and attractive room in the Continental hotel in Saigon that she had left for her successor, Vivienne Allen. Regular trips to Hanoi were a nightmare; on one of them McDougall contracted amoebic dysentery. A bout of hepatitis confined her to her hotel room for six long, wretched weeks.
“But it was a fascinating experience. I travelled in Vietnam, travelled in North Vietnam to some extent, went to Cambodia and was able to see Angkor Wat, met some interesting people, worked with some very worthwhile people, enjoyed the Indians,” McDougall recalled. “I think I’m probably one of the few Canadian foreign service officers that wasn’t entirely put off the Indians during their time in Indochina.”
There was considerable tension among the Indians, Poles, and Canadians on the commission. Some of it arose when the Indians chaired commission meetings and field trips; they sought unanimous agreement on every issue. The Poles, meanwhile, insisted on reporting what they saw as violations of the Geneva agreements by the anti-communist parties but ignored breaches by the communists. The Indians usually backed the Poles. Canadians, more critical of the communists, also disagreed with the Indians about the fate of South Vietnamese anti-communists should the communist north win free elections in a unified Vietnam.
In 1958-1959, when McDougall was in Indochina, the commission was in a holding pattern, little was being accomplished, and the Indian representatives wanted to do nothing that would upset India’s friendly relationship with the Soviet Union, one of the countries to which the commission reported.
Most Canadians were frustrated by the lack of progress and by the Indians’ attitude, but McDougall, perhaps because of her innate warmth and empathy, adopted a philosophical and detached viewpoint as she observed the games that were being played. She later remarked, “I found my Indian colleagues interesting and comparatively easy to get along with and I didn’t get too worked up about their machinations, which were probably no worse or more surprising than those of all the other players in this tedious interval between two wars.”
It was the first time that McDougall had worked in such an international setting, participating in multilateral discussions and negotiations. She called it “an excellent experience … well worthwhile.” She did not know it then, but the assignment in Indochina, working with Indians and Poles, was also good preparation for future postings to New Delhi and Warsaw.
Based in Ottawa for almost two years after returning from Saigon, McDougall spent some time in the Far Eastern division and then was sent on an inspection tour of Canadian posts abroad. “I think in 14 months,” she said, ’I was out of the country something like four months just travelling from one post to another. I was in South America, in the Caribbean, I was in Europe, Eastern Europe. It was a great opportunity to see what made a post tick and what bothered people.”
Her inspection tour finished, McDougall was posted to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi from 1961 to 1963, as first secretary and later counsellor. She handled internal and external political reporting and supervised the office’s information section. On her return to Ottawa, she was made deputy head of External’s Far Eastern division and head of its China section.
Having established herself as something of a specialist in Far Eastern matters, it was no surprise that McDougall’s first (and only) ambassadorial posting was to Warsaw. The assignment simply reinforced a cynical and common quip in diplomatic circles everywhere. It goes something like this: if you want a posting to Brasilia, become fluent in Arabic.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1995-1996) — Winter 1995–96 // Hiver 1995-1996, pp. 25–27. Read the rest of this issue →
