bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 26–27
Readers of bout de papier should not assume that with the passing of Agnes McCloskey, the autocrat of External’s early finances and administration (see bout de papier December, 1983), the department ceased to be preoccupied each waking moment with saving every possible penny of the taxpayer’s dollar. For example, after Agnes’ departure from our midst, came the tricky minefield of air travel.
In earlier years, External’s staff went out to a post entirely by surface travel. They went abroad ocean liners, and they rode the Trans-Siberian Railway or the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.
When air travel became widespread, a Great Debate ensued in External over whether our intrepid heroes should fly First Class or Economy.
You guessed it — Economy won the day. But some of those clever chaps over in the East Block quickly came up with the argument that, while indeed officers should fly economy on regular business, an Ambassador should be allowed to travel First Class when going out to take up a new post; it would be infra dig, these canny chaps maintained, for a Head of Post to emerge from the Economy exit after an 18-hour flight to his new capital, where local dignitaries and the Canadian Embassy staff would all be gathered to greet him coming out of the First Class exit at the front of the plane.
This argument gathered strength when word reached Ottawa of a little mishap that befell our Ambassador to the United States, the late Marcel Cadieux.
He had agreed to attend a major reception of Canada Day in Florida, which the authorities there were supporting enthusiastically. To greet Marcel on his arrival, they had mustered at the airport a Marine Band, schoolchildren with Maple Leaf flags, state and civic dignitaries — all of whom were positioned on the tarmac where First Class passengers would exit. By the time Marcel, flying Economy, had managed to emerge with the rabble from the rear exist and push his way up front, the greeters — assuming he had missed his flight — were already headed back to town, leaving no one to meet Her Majesty’s Canadian Ambassador. God forbid this should happen to Allan Gotlieb!
To forestall further embarrassments of this kind, some bright soul in External thought up an ingenious compromise: Ambassadors would continue to fly, but, if they were flying to take up a new post, they would be ticketed to shift into First Class for the last leg only of their journey, thus enabling them to emerge from the proper door into the arms of their welcomers.
My wife Crenia and I were probably the first guinea-pigs on whom this dubious quick-change act was tried out
– on the occasion of my appointment in 1970 as Ambassador to Colombia and Ecuador. We indeed flew Economy, all the way down to Panama where, to the astonishment of the Avianca crew, we made our sly little shift into First, enabling Colombians and Canadians at the airport to give us welcoming abrazos without being in the slightest aware of External’s sleight-of-hand that had made our auspicious arrival possible. Since then I have often mused how this maneouver might have been executed by External’s earlier steamship and railway travellers. Would a new Canadian Ambassador to Rome, travelling in steerage across the Atlantic, be ticketed to slip up to the Promenade Deck at Nice, or would he have to wait until he spotted Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples? Would our new Ambassador to Greece, munching a brown-bagged cold sandwich in the day coach of the Orient Express, be able to move into the club Car at Lublijana, or would he have to wait until Skopjle? If Canada opened a consulate in Vladivostok, would our new appointee make his artful little move on the Trans-Siberian Express at Omsk, or not until Urumchi? Lest you think these examples of External’s concern for the taxpayer’s dollar a little far-fetched, let me cite one more, which will have to be fudged ever so slightly on security grounds but which, by no means, is apocryphal. When aerial hijacking was at its height during the seventies, one of External’s couriers was making his flight around South America to deliver diplomatic bags to Canadian Embassies. Our couriers are provided with two adjoining seats on a plane (in First Class), on one of which they place the bags, from which they must not become separated.
Shortly after this courier’s plane entered Latin American air space, hijackers surfaced from amongst the passengers and ordered the crew to land at a nearby airport. There, they allowed the passengers to go free, holding the crew while they negotiated their demands by radio with the tower. When our courier picked up his diplomatic bags to leave with the other passengers, the hijackers told him to open them. He wouldn’t. They told him to leave the bags behind and get out.
Meanwhile, the local authorities had managed to rush up a special tactical squad, which stormed the plane. Bursting in one door, with a hose, they shot fire-extinguishing tarmac foam into the interior to smother any fire from explosions. Our valiant courier stayed with his bags – and got doused with foam.
The operation was successful. The plane’s crew, and one soggy Canadian courier, were freed. After a quick dry-cleaning job on his suit at the airport, he continued on his appointed rounds, on the next plane out.
At the next airport, an External clerk came to pick up the bags for his Embassy – and handed the courier telegrams from the Secretary of State for External Affairs, and the Under- Secretary, commending him for devotion to the Service over and above the call of duty.
There was only one catch. Arriving back in Ottawa, the courier put in his regular travel expense claim, including a $2 charge, with voucher, for dry-cleaning one foam-soaked suit. This was turned down – on the grounds that, when the dry-cleaning took place, he hadn’t been absent from Ottawa the required 72 hours to justify a dry-cleaning claim under Regulations!
As our budget-parers will soon find out, this story is by no means apocryphal.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1985) — Summer 1985 // Été 1985, pp. 26–27. Read the rest of this issue →
