bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2016), p. 34
My father grew up during the Depression in small town Ontario. It was the opportunity to go to university that changed his life forever. The great teachers he met at the University of Toronto in the early 1940s profoundly expanded his intellectual horizons – such as Northrop Frye who taught him first year English and the political thinker, Frank Underhill, who fired his interest in public service.
My father graduated in 1947, just as the federal public service was starting to expand rapidly after the War. The Special Branch of the RCMP recruited him to come to Ottawa to work as one of new cohort university trained intelligence analysts, in the aftermath of Gouzenko’s revelations. But it was the opportunity to work on the Colombo Plan in the early 1950s which inspired him to join the Foreign Service in 1955 and gave him a life-long interest in developing countries.
After a very happy first posting to Germany, in the early 1960s my father developed an enthusiasm for Africa. He took our family to Nigeria, then a young, vibrant democracy, not yet scarred by military coups and the horrors of the Biafran War. He did a four-month temporary duty in our new Embassy in Kinshasa and came back telling tales about water skiing on weekends while dodging crocs in the Congo River. In the late 60s, he was posted to Tanzania, then in the first flush of international enthusiasm for Nyerere’s vision of African socialism. We visited all the great game parks of northern Tanzania, when rhinos were plentiful, tourists were few and the roads were freshly paved. In his only fit of athletic endeavor, my father joined the annual expedition led by the Colonel of the Tanzanian Army to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. After three days of hard walking, he reached the summit, took a few snaps of the snow-covered crater at the top with the small camera my mother had given him, and then walked down again. I never saw him take another picture or climb another hill.
After a posting to London and a stint in Ottawa working on East Asia, my father received his first Head of Mission assignment in late 1978 as Ambassador to Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was a turbulent time: in Pakistan, the military government had recently executed the charismatic and corrupt former President Bhutto; Afghanistan was governed by an unstable and unpopular socialist regime. I was visiting my parents in Islamabad in November 1979 when a crowd of student militants, inspired by events in neighbouring Tehran, stormed the U.S. Embassy and burned it to the ground, killing six people. Despite direct appeals by my father to the Foreign Ministry to protect diplomatic premises, the Pakistani government took no action that day to stop the militants, fearful that if ordered to use force, their soldiers might mutiny. The diplomatic community was deeply shaken by this brutal and chaotic event and relations with the United States went into a deep freeze – which lasted only six weeks until the Soviet Union decided, after a coup in Kabul, that it had to protect its position there by invading Afghanistan. The United States immediately switched tacks and negotiated an understanding with the Pakistani military to enable the CIA to funnel weapons through Pakistan to arm the Afghan mujahideen – with destabilizing consequences for all three countries that are still playing out today. My father proved to be the last Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan until after the fall of the Taliban in 2002.
My father’s last posting was to New Zealand and the South Pacific. He was impressed by the radical free-market medicine being administered to the moribund New Zealand economy by an energetic new Labour Prime Minister, David Lange. And he loved travelling to his five South Pacific countries of accreditation where Canada still had a small but appreciable aid presence. Over thirty years later, when I covered the other half of the South Pacific from Canberra, I would marvel that in the late 1980s, my father had a Canada Fund of $1 million dollars to use to represent Canada in that now neglected region.
My father retired in 1989 but he never really left the Foreign Service – he just continued to participate in other ways: helping with the PAFSO Awards, serving on the bout de papier senior editorial board and running RHOMA for five years as its Chairman. He was always happy to have a reason to put on an impeccably neat suit, tie and matching handkerchief and take the bus down to the market to spend an hour at PAFSO world headquarters to make a few phone calls on PAFSO or RHOMA business. These post-retirement activities kept him in touch with the evolving Department and new generations of Foreign Service officers. He had an abiding interest in the health of that institution and in how it was treating its people. He never thought of himself as a mentor, but many other people regarded him as theirs. As one person wrote to me after his death: “He made me feel important, but it wasn’t only me, I think it was fair to say he made every one of us feel important, like we all counted”. More so than memos written or agreements negotiated, that was his real legacy to the Foreign Service.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2016), p. 34. Read the rest of this issue →
