bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 19–21
ON SIX CONTINENTS: A LIFE IN
CANADA’S FOREIGN SERVICE,
1966-2002 by James Bartleman; McClelland
& Stewart Ltd., 2004, pp. 253, $36.99
The review in bout de papier last winter of James Bartleman’s account of his early life, Out of Muskoka, expressed the hope that some day we might be given a full account of his professional life. Now we have it.
Mr. Bartleman had an exceptionally interesting career, with nine postings, including six as Ambassador or High Commissioner, and a series of increasingly responsible Ottawa assignments, culminating in the position of foreign policy advisor to the Prime Minister and assistant secretary to the Cabinet for foreign and defence affairs in the Privy Council Office. His account will be of particular interest to foreign service officers, past, present and future. But it should also be useful to students of Canadian foreign policy and international affairs. Even that mythical creature, the general reader, will find it absorbing.
Mr. Bartleman reports that an early supervisor found him guilty of “an excess of enthusiasm and initiative” in the performance of his duties. The officer was doubtless drawing on Talleyrand’s advice: “Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle.” If so, this was a lesson Mr. Bartleman never learned. This was particularly evident when, after a disappointing first posting in Bogota, he was assigned as Acting High Commissioner to open Canada’s first mission in Bangladesh. He developed a close relationship with the country’s first Prime Minister, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Working with a team of experienced CIDA officers, he helped put in place a major program of development assistance. He records that the highlight of his thirty-five years in the foreign service was his association with the World Health Organization campaign to eradicate smallpox in Bangladesh, in which he helped bypass a bureaucrat who accused him of not following proper channels.
By comparison his next assignment, to the NATO delegation, proved quite mundane, especially the work on the frustrating negotiations with Warsaw Treaty Organization members on arms control. Returning years later as Ambassador was a different matter as the Soviet empire was breaking up and Yugoslavia descended into chaos. The account of his successful resistance to the American proposal to use air power against the Serbs in the summer of 1993, putting Canadian peacekeepers in UNPROFOR at risk, could be used as a textbook example of effective diplomacy.
Mr. Bartleman’s longest chapter deals with his first ambassadorial assignment, to Cuba. Perhaps because of the Castro- Trudeau relationship, he had exceptional access to Cubans from the President on down. Unfortunately this did not exempt him from attempts to compromise him, with successive phone calls from an admiring woman, a caller seeking help to smuggle gold and a young man claiming to find him handsome. At that point he stopped answering the phone, but always wondered what else might have been on offer. In a nastier incident, two Embassy dogs, including his, were poisoned. More bizarre was a stray cat that became a fixture in the Embassy until a strange whistling sound came from one of its ears. It was only years later, when he read of a CIA attempt to turn cats into eavesdropping devices, that he wondered whether the Cubans had been somewhat more successful than the Americans in this exotic technology. Canadian newspapers have already focused on another kind of punishment inflicted on Mr. Bartleman, this time from a Canadian Cabinet Minister who visited Cuba.
Mr. Bartleman became aware of the difficulties faced by a Canadian Ambassador to Israel even before his departure. A vocal minority of both the Jewish and Arab communities in Canada with whom he met insisted that it would be his duty to support its side and its side only in the Arab-Israeli dispute, with threats to ruin his career if he did not toe their mutually exclusive lines. The first two years of his posting coincided with a relatively quiet period in Israel’s history, but the start of the Intifada in late 1987 marked what he describes as the low point in an emotionally draining posting. His experiences ranged from being stoned by Palestinians to a memorable put-down by Defence Minister Rabin after, on instructions from Ottawa, he had complained about Israeli’s tactics.
In his earlier book, Mr. Bartleman dealt with his posting in South Africa, when a brutal, near fatal mugging exacerbated the clinical depression from which he was already beginning to suffer. In an attempt to put this behind him, he agreed to a change of scene, as High Commissioner to Australia. This posting in turn was cut short when the opportunity arose to return to Brussels, his wife’s home city, this time as Ambassador to the European Union.
As the title of his book suggests, most of it deals with his assignments abroad. Perhaps understandably he does not describe his assignments in Intelligence in detail. He does note that in the first of these he unexpectedly found himself to be the departmental expert on terrorism during the 1970 FLQ crisis and demonstrated that this was not part of an international conspiracy. His later period as Director-General helped provide him with the background he needed for his period as NATO Ambassador. He does provide an excellent account of his period dealing with the Commonwealth Caribbean and Central America. As an example of the initiative which that early rating officer so deplored, he instructed the security service to block the Gander airport runway with vehicles to prevent a Cuban aircraft from taking off after a woman who had attempted to defect had been forced back on board. As he says, he had no idea whether he had authority to issue such an order, but it sure felt good, and the woman was allowed to stay. The only disappointment with the book is that he skips so quickly over his work as the Prime Minister’s foreign policy advisor. Can we hope for a third volume, perhaps after his retirement when political sensitivities may be less acute?
At the Prime Minister’s request Mr. Bartleman left the Foreign Service after 35 years to become Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. After years as a diplomat he reports that he welcomed the extraordinary chance to return home to work for causes he believed in, including fighting racism, encouraging young aboriginal Canadians to stay in school and joining the battle against the stigma associated with those suffering from mental illness.
Mr. Bartleman has dedicated his book “For the members of Canada’s Foreign Service and their long-suffering families.” He agrees with those commentators who consider that there has been an erosion over the years of Canada’s place in the world, which he considers was largely outside the control of whatever government was in power. However he is full of praise for the current generation of officers: “Despite aspersions cast their way by people nostalgic for an era that looked better with the passage of time, they were as good as and sometimes better than those who had come before, including my generation.”
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 19–21. Read the rest of this issue →
