bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1999) — Spring 1999 // Printemps 1999, p. 34
The following letter to the Editor of the Ottawa Citizen was published on March 4, 1999:
Margaret Meagher, who died last week in Halifax at 88, was a true pioneer, and although she was too modest to make much of it, a role model for a whole generation of women in the Canadian Foreign Service.
Her achievements were extraordinary. She was the first Canadian woman Ambassador to Israel at a time when most other countries had no women diplomats at any level whatever. (In fact, highly qualified for the work, she may have been the first female career diplomat anywhere in the world to have reached this pinnacle, since the two or three early examples from the USA and USSR were political appointees, something quite different.) She then continued to break ground as first woman Ambassador to Austria, to Sweden, and High Commissioner to Kenya.
In Vienna, she also ably represented Canada on the Board of Governors of the Atomic Energy Agency, and eventually chaired their sessions, no easy task in the 1960’s (when, let us face it, scepticism about women in high places was not unknown) or anytime.
But it was in Stockholm in 1969 that she took on her most historically significant task, by her own admission the high point of her career: that of leading negotiations with China (initiated earlier by Ambassador Arthur Andrew), which were to result after thirteen months of difficult discussions in the establishment of diplomatic relations. There were special tensions involved because it was a major foreign policy initiative not altogether pleasing to some of Canada’s major allies. And as she later wrote “there were times when I was rather discouraged. I was not sure we were ever going to get a successful conclusion to it… but the negotiations were carried on always in a very civil manner. There were no raised voices, no pounding tables, nothing like that.” It was a tribute to Ambassador Meagher’s diplomatic skills that all ended well, without fanfare, and that her Chinese counterpart and his wife years later called on her in friendship at her Halifax home where she lived in active retirement.
She was intellectually astute, but she combined a very human side with a sense of dignity, well illustrated by her joy of driving the official car at her postings to spots of interest out of town or even on long trips from Nairobi to Kampala, with the official chauffeur in the back seat (he was more than happy there) but carefully switching places as they returned to the capital. She understood the need to treat all her staff well, and did so. Some even asked to accompany her as she moved on to new assignments.
Although sadly she always declined to write her memoirs, she did recognize that she had played a unique role as a woman, at times almost alone out there on the international diplomatic scene. As she told an interviewer not long ago “It was, I suspect, one more reason why I was determined to do a good job. I was, after all, blazing a trail, and whether I performed well or fell flat on my face might have had some influence, at least for a time, on the appointment of other women. In retrospect, I like to think that my record made some small contribution to the cause of equal opportunities for women in the Canadian Foreign Service” There is no doubt that it did. We are immensely proud of her, and all of us who have been privileged to serve Canada abroad honour her memory. a
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 16, No. 1 (1999) — Spring 1999 // Printemps 1999, p. 34. Read the rest of this issue →
