bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2018), p. 4
THIS PAST APRIL, PAFSO HELD its first professional conference, entitled The Foreign Service Officer of the Future. The full day of discussions attracted an enthusiastic audience of close to 150, including PAFSO members and alumni, colleagues and friends from other unions, government departments, think tanks, the media, and universities. Some of them were surprised at the fact that these events were not a regular occurrence, but a few others wondered if we were straying too far from our union roots.
In fact, PAFSO was founded as a professional association in 1965. Only after the passage of the Public Service Staff Relations Act of 1967, which gave government employees the right to bargain collectively, could we take on our more familiar union role. As a professional association, we can go beyond collective bargaining and labour relations to unite our members on the basis of knowledge and expertise that cuts across our different departments and offices both at home and abroad.
Gone is the era when the idea of “professionalism” could be used to flatter members out of seeking fair labour practices by, for example, stigmatizing the idea of paid overtime. Like lawyers, dentists, or veterinarians, we see no contradiction between proper pay and commitment to our service. Indeed, PAFSO’s dual functions support each other: as we tackle the issues of salaries and benefits directly through collective bargaining, our professional association activities enhance our image and reinforce the value of our knowledge and special skills to our employer, our partners, and the broader public.
Our labour relations and collective bargaining efforts have received more of our energy and resources for good reason: without decent salaries, it was very hard to focus on anything else. Many of us remember the mid-nineties salary freeze, when an FSO1 started at $32,945 per year — a third below what colleagues at departments like National Defence made for similar policy work — and had no hope of promotion to FS02 for an average of I years.
Thankfully, the efforts of negotiating teams led by Executive Director Ron Cochrane have yielded parity with comparable public service groups, and room to think about the well-being of the Foreign Service and the long-term interests of the Foreign Service Officer of the Future. We need to address the threats to the career Foreign Service posed by decisions such as the abandonment of Global Affairs Canada’s national recruiting policy, the end of Official Language Training, the trend towards assignments of non-FS to FS positions, and the appointments of executives who have never served abroad. We also need to encourage our employer to use our talents, and to reverse the trend towards micro-management and risk-aversion.
In short, we need to make the public and the employer more aware of the ways in which our profession supports and reinforces Canada’s people, interests, and values. They need to understand the role we play across the world, in often difficult and dangerous circumstances, and the cross-cutting skills we bring to the table. Over the next few months, we will be exploring ways to go about this, including by conducting a strategic review to ensure that our efforts and resources align with our needs. The enthusiastic response to our conference highlighted the thirst for this kind of activity from within PAFSO and from the broader foreign service community.
PAFSO members have historically found it difficult to talk about our achievements and value. A large part of a diplomat’s success involves persuading a partner that your good idea belongs to them, and some of the best negotiation efforts are almost invisible. This orientation can be a handicap in Ottawa, where many of our interlocutors, even in the media and partner departments, struggle to see what we do.
The world is facing a series of unprecedented challenges, from climate change and global pandemics to the transformation of a global world order that has benefited Canada for more than seventy years. As politics become increasingly polarized, the soft skills of diplomacy and negotiation become both less fashionable and more valuable. This makes it even more essential that PAFSO is ready to stand up for the long-term interests of the Foreign Service not just as individuals, but as an institution. Nobody else does what we do, and nobody will care about us and our profession more than we do, now or in the future.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2018), p. 4. Read the rest of this issue →
