bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2007) — Fall 2007 // Automne 2007, pp. 37–38
The following is the tribute given by James (Si) Taylor at the Memorial Service on Friday, September 7, 2007. John Hadwen was a member of the senior editorial board of bout de papier and a constant supporter of the foreign service.
It is an honour to have been asked to speak at this service about John Hadwen’s career. John has left a wide circle of friends and colleagues. They would want me to express our deep sympathy to Shirley, to John’s sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren, and to the entire Hadwen family. We share
– as much as anyone outside the family can share – in the pride, tinged with sorrow, of this memorial to John. It is not hard to talk about him. There must be dozens of his old associates with vivid memories of him and with stories about him. He himself reflected a good deal about his work, and wrote and spoke about it extensively. He had a long career. His university studies were interrupted by the War, in which he served for three years in the artillery in Italy, Northwest Europe and Germany. He completed his studies after the War, entered the foreign service in 1950 and served a further 37 years in Ottawa and abroad. In all he gave 40 years of service to Canada in war and peace. A long career, indeed, for which we all stand indebted.
As it was long, so also John’s career was broad. He knew the work of headquarters and the work of posts abroad; the business of diplomacy, multilateral as well as bilateral; and how to work easily with everyone from the great and the near-great to the most recently hired junior employee. In his time he served in virtually every country in south and south-east Asia. He had two assignments in Pakistan, first as a junior officer and later as Ambassador where he was also accredited as Ambassador to Afghanistan. He was High Commissioner to India where he was also accredited as Ambassador to Nepal. It was in Nepal that he developed his affection for the Ghurkas, an interest which he maintained in retirement. Earlier he had served as High Commissioner to Malaysia where he was also accredited as Ambassador to Burma and High Commissioner to Singapore. Subsequently in Ottawa he had responsibility for relations with China, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Thus his experience in Asian affairs was amongst the widest, if not the widest, of any officer of his generation. To this broad experience of bilateral relations he added a tour of duty in Norway.
But he was equally versed in multilateral relations. Through service in the Permanent Mission to the UN in New York, and through later participation in delegations to many successive sessions of the General Assembly and to other UN and Commonwealth bodies, he became a leading expert among Canadian diplomats in economic relations with developing countries. He was one of the team that established the External Aid Office, the precursor of CIDA. Along with a Dutch colleague he profited from his work at the UN to co-author a standard text entitled How UN Decisions Are Made.
John became as accustomed over time to carrying senior responsibilities in Ottawa as he was abroad. He served for three years in the 1960s as special assistant to the Hon. Paul Martin, then Secretary of State for External Affairs. Later, as a director general, he was at various times the senior officer responsible in the Department of External Affairs for consular matters, for security and intelligence, for personnel and for relations with East Asia. Over his whole career he was, by my count, named ambassador or high commissioner seven times, and director general five times. This is an exceptional record. It demonstrated how justified, in John’s case, is the phrase that appears in the order which appoints every ambassador, “ ..reposing special trust and confidence in your loyalty, integrity and ability, we appoint you-“
John was a very special kind of manager. He was full of ideas and perfectly prepared to entertain unusual, even quirky, notions
– to think outside the box, in the current phrase. During much of his time, the foreign service was inundated with successive waves of bright ideas about yet further reorganizations. Yet for all the originality of his mind and for all his own capacity for organization, John never belonged to the great Ottawa school of management by buzzword. Fundamentally he believed in people far more than in processes. He believed that the right people, decently treated and well led, could accomplish much for Canada. He was devoted to the foreign service and worried all his life about the damage he feared that governments were doing to it. His heroes were men like Ed Ritchie and John Holmes and of course L.B. Pearson. When he came in his turn to lead, John paid close attention to dealing, knowledgeably and humanely, with everyone who worked for him. While many of us, for example, have admired the standard set by chauffeurs at Canadian missions abroad, only John thought enough and cared enough about these men and their work to take the trouble to write a paper about it. It was in the same spirit that, reflecting on his years as Director General of Personnel, he took particular satisfaction in having devoted attention to the needs of every category of the Department’s employees. John was a man in the mode of Kipling’s ideal who could “walk with kings — nor lose the common touch.”
John was as open to ideas as he was to people. He liked reading, writing, analyzing and discussing. He could expatiate on nuclear proliferation or economic development in the Third World, or international energy programs or the paintings of Holbein. But he liked just as much to have fun with ideas, and was equally at home with campaigns to ensure there were Christmas trees on Parliament Hill, or water jets in the Ottawa River — or that the bilingual abbreviations on the elevator buttons in the Pearson building were accurate. He had a wonderful career — a career to be proud of. And as with the summer sunset at his much loved Lake of Bays, even when the sun is gone, a splendid light remains.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2007) — Fall 2007 // Automne 2007, pp. 37–38. Read the rest of this issue →
