Letter from the Monkey House
If you read September 11’s Ottawa
An Interview with Gordon Smith
As many readers will know, Gordon Smith, then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced early this summer that he would be leaving the Department and moving to Western Canada. Rob McRae of our editorial board caught up with him in this eighth…
Nathalie: A “Minor” Problem
by Robert E. Lapointe
Micros and Minis — Can They Cover the Essentials?
In a series of three articles, bout de papier will be looking at how (and if) mini and micro missions really work. In this edition Martin Collacott describes his recent assignment as Our Man in Phnom Penh; in later editions, Jennifer Daubeny…
DFAIT’s Tough Love:
by Marie A. Stamp
Editor’s Notebook // Carnet du rédacteur
Over the last two decades, many countries of Asia Pacific have sustained growth rates that are among the fastest in the world. With each passing year the region is emerging as the dynamic colossus of the new world economic order. The cumulative…
Country Desks — Do They Work? Les bureaux-pays — fonctionnent-ils?
In the autumn of 1996 and as part of the broader restructuring exercise, all of DFAIT’s geographic bureaux were reorganised in such a way that the distinction between General Relations and Trade Divisions was erased. Easier said than done. With China or…
Reengineering DFAIT
Change in DFAIT in the last several years has, to say the obvious, been enormous. Some changes have been small — dickering with the matrix system and with the FSD’s, dropping a few traditional functions, revising appraisal forms — though the principles…
Retooling the Political Officer
For over a decade, officers in the political-economic stream of the department have been under silent pressure to change. This is because successive governments have been placing greater and greater emphasis on trade promotion in foreign policy. Last year’s foreign policy review…
Editor’s Notebook // Carnet du rédacteur
If you thought that the attributions listed above are surely wrong and should read, respectively, Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and Ronald Reagan — well, check out “Brewer’s Quotations”.. The lines were in fact coined by two full-time speech writers and an advertising…
