bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009) — Winter 2009 // Hiver 2009, pp. 41–42
A Personal and Professional Tribute by Michael Dawson given at the Good Shephard Wakefield Anglican Church, November 18, 2009.
Janet Graham joined the Department of External Affairs in 1975 and was posted to Pretoria, Port of Spain, Harare and Lago. She was appointed High Commissioner to Ghana and in 2001, High Commissioner to Tanzania and Ambassador of Canada to Ethiopia in March of 2009. She is survived by her husband, John Shearman, and children, Leah, Georgia and Jonathan.
Janet’s husband, John Shearman, has asked me to offer a few words of remembrance because, perhaps uniquely, Janet was a relative by a happy circumstance of my marriage to her cousin, one of my first friends in Ottawa when I arrived to join External Affairs, and my colleague.
My first observation is that while Janet maintained a healthy separation between her professional and domestic lives, she was very much the same person at all times. Empathy, integrity, good humour, hard work and a sense of the transcendent characterized Janet’s approach to her life.
Like her beloved father David, Janet possessed formidable intellectual gifts. Well read and thoughtful, always a delightful debating companion, her home and her professional lives were intellectually alive and imbued with a sense of adventure and an openness to the world around us.
What made her a devoted parent made her a mentor to many. Janet’s encouragement, her gentle insistence on quality and her good advice influenced more than a few individuals. Some may not have even realized that they were being mentored.
By any standards, Janet’s career in the foreign service was a notable one. She was one of the Department’s foremost experts on Africa, beginning with her first posting, to South Africa. She once said that she returned from South Africa with a husband and a good supply of wine; the – wine had been consumed but the husband was still here.
Among her other African assignments 1 7 were Acting High Commissioner in |] » Nigeria, High Commissioner in Ghana,
High Commissioner in Tanzania and lastly, 1 Ambassador to Ethiopia and representative « to the African Union.
Her work in Africa was full of challenges «
and interesting, indeed unique, experiences. |) Sent as Acting High Commissioner in
Nigeria, this status was deliberately estabt) lished to express Canada’s displeasure with i negative developments affecting human
rights and governance in that country at that time. Not surprisingly, her tenure was tense c and brief and culminated in the closure of our mission. She then had the relatively s unusual experience of implementing the s emergency plan to ensure the destruction of 5 all classified files with John wielding a large r sledgehammer to ensure the destruction of i: the computer discs. And of course there were the challenges of the diplomatic social circuit, especially the cocktail party in Tanzania that ended badly for John when he was bitten by an intruding viper. Janet had to help identify the exact species so that the correct anti-venom was administered. Strange work for a High Commissioner.
While vipers may be at the outer limits of the unexpected, in the foreign service we recognize that the world and life draw from an often dark, bottomless well of the unplanned and unexpected. And we set great store in our ability to face and surmount these events. Janet’s year that ended last Friday was by any measure the epitome of facing and surmounting such obstacles.
Having just overcome her first meeting with cancer, anyone would have understood if she settled for something quiet. But when unplanned events occurred, she stepped into the position of Director General for Africa in September 2008. In that capacity, Janet had to deal with issues that were intractable and tragic such as the genocide in Darfur.
She was supposed to fill the position for just a few months. But Africa, never a quiet predictable place, had other plans. Along with all of her regular duties, within a short time, she faced the terrorist kidnapping of Bob Fowler and Louis Guay.
She threw herself into the whirlpool of this crisis without any thought or reflection other than selfiess desire to help resolve it and bring our colleagues safely home. She did this day-in and day-out, with good humour, skill and tireless dedication.
Janet was also very much blessed with the mandatory departmental skill of picking up an unfamiliar file, absorbing its essence and carrying it forward.
One of the few times our professional careers intersected was when she was appointed director of the division responsible for Canada-US defence relations, a subject full of arcane knowledge and incomprehensible jargon. I recall that she said to me that she had little experience of these issues but to no one’s surprise, within weeks she was fully conversant with issues such i as the all-important NORAD treaty which r was up for renewal.
She was the keystone in the process of negotiating a new NORAD treaty with the United States, shepherding it through the system and to a final implementation.
However it was always clear to everyone that Janet very much preferred working in I the field rather than in the corridors of the Pearson Building. Her assignment to I Ethiopia was eagerly anticipated and I t know would have given her much professional and personal satisfaction.
For Janet, the foreign service was not just an attractive career but a calling. She reflected deeply on the conduct of our s foreign policy through the lens of her I extensive experience. She had little patience with simplistic arguments over whether our |. foreign policy should be interests-based or :
values-based. She never allowed herself to lapse into cynicism.
For Janet, the kernel of the issue was the pursuit of our interests in ways that would reflect our most profound Canadian values. She stood for negotiation and compromise, and pragmatic engagement with even the most difficult governments. She believed in working with coalitions of like-minded countries and NGOs and she had a broad, 21st century view of what a modern coalition should look like. She valued multilateral institutions but had no naive faith in their effectiveness. She worked effortlessly with the full Canadian international team, including National Defence and CIDA. At all times, her counsel was to exercise persistence and patience.
This I think is Janet’s legacy to her colleagues in the Department of Foreign Affairs. She was an exemplar of the finest traditions of the Canadian foreign service, its sense of duty to our country and to the global community, its high standards of intellectual rigour and integrity, its fearless advice to our political leadership.
Janet met her last challenge with serene courage. Her passing leaves her many devoted friends and colleagues with a void in their hearts. However as time passes, our memories of her will surely warm our hearts and bring a smile to our faces.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009) — Winter 2009 // Hiver 2009, pp. 41–42. Read the rest of this issue →
