bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, p. 2
A letter arrived a few days before this number of bout was sent to the print shop. Intended as a contribution to our “letters to the editor” section, it was a passionate denunciation of Departmental management and its treatment of the social affairs stream. For a moment I harboured the normal editorial urge to publish in the interests of controversy. We are, after all, in the business of making news. But less egocentric instincts prevailed, and I called the author to urge caution and restraint.
Was I wrong? In thinking of the career of the author, the decision was probably prudent. Departmental rules have been written to keep this type of debate away from the public eye. But if not in bout de papier, if not within the confines of the profession, if not by way of open and rational channels of debate, then where do we pursue the issues? And it struck me as I was reading the letter, for a third time, then a fourth, that the Canadian foreign service needed the cathartic release of a critical debate about the work we are supposed to be doing, however momentarily unsettling the process might be.
In reading that letter and in comparing those views with the views of others, one senses the growth, perhaps only incipient, of a sense of spiralling crisis. But it may not necessarily turn out to be one marked by dramatic change or even significant evolution. We have, after all, gone through worse in the past. I’m reminded of the tempestuous events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the story of the late Bruce Rankin, who allegedly told Pierre Trudeau, at a meeting between the Prime Minister and senior foreign service officers, “You’ve f…ed up the morale of the finest diplomatic service in the world.” (Gwyn, The Northern Magus, p. 300) Rankin’s career survived and blossomed. And the Canadian foreign service carried on.
But the pressure points are now visible. They are visible to differing degrees in different streams, and they manifest themselves to a greater or lesser extent depending upon one’s job, rank, area of specialization or career aspirations. There are many pressure points, any one of which could loom large in the future evolution of the foreign service.
At the top of the list are the intractable problems of career development, and the challenges these present to a coherent, longterm personnel policy. Wherever you go, whoever you talk to in the Canadian foreign service, ’career’ is a subject of the most visceral concern. And for good reasons. Following decades of growth and positive evolution, we now face a bleak prospect of reduction and stagnation. Officers now entering at the recruitment level confront a statistically reasonable prospect that they will never be promoted past the first foreign service grade.
How do you encourage performance by a person whose prospects of promotion are minimal? Or whose salary range is below comparable ranges enjoyed by persons with equivalent or fewer responsibilities in other fields of government? Or whose work ethic has been systematically undermined by management systems which fail to take account of the imperatives of quality!
These are serious concerns. As a group, foreign service officers are not noted for immodesty. The entrance requirements are strict. We have a sound and deserved reputation for valuing the integrity of our product. Rarely are there complaints about hours of work or the immutability of deadlines. For most of us, job satisfaction resides to a large extent in the pride we take in the quality of our work and the recognition which quality brings. But how can a system survive which, on the one hand, places a decreasing emphasis on job satisfaction and, on the other hand, calls for an increasing sacrifice in terms of time, family and money?
The intractability of these problems is in part the residual heritage of reorganization. Consolidation, we were told, was aimed at saving External Affairs from increasing irrelevance in a world of new issues and tighter integration between domestic and foreign objectives. The cure was radical surgery, which, for all of its managerial wisdom, ignored the human dimension. There are now dissenters from the agreed theology, and new prophets have emerged to contest accepted truths. CIDA decentralization has become a test case. And so the concept of a consolidated foreign service is increasingly being viewed, within and beyond the foreign service community, as a theoretical foundation with as much credibility and reliability as the phlogiston theory of the universe.
If we add the accumulated problems of reorganization to the latent frustrations of daily work, and factor in new and contentious issues, such as lateral transfers, patronage appointments and new technology, what do we get? We get, to say the least, problems of morale. We end up with sensitive junior officers writing about the “drudgery” of the work-place and “the creation of an underclass in the foreign service.” We arrive eventually at a decline in output, a decimation of quality and diminishing prospects at reversing the trend-lines.
Part of the frustration which gives rise to letters and editorials is endemic to the system. Many of us have discovered the sad truth that it is better to file grievances than to rely on powers of reason. It’s faster and it works. Confrontation is built into the structure of salary negotiations. We have found to our detriment that nice guys finish a few percentage points behind the crude and the rude. To negotiate the foreign service directives involves dealing with the divide-and-conquer mentality of Treasury Board. In short, the organic links between officers of the foreign service and what is vaguely known as administration and management engender hostility rather than respect.
But it need not be so. A large portion of the cynicism and mistrust that are breeding in the bowels of the Pearson Building are products of poor communication and poor decision-making processes. Both are correctable where the political will exists. There is no inherent reason why key administrative and personnel problems cannot be discussed openly and freely with the persons most directly affected. Nor would there appear to be any long-term gain for anyone in a communications policy seemingly designed to obscure more than it clarifies. Acknowledging the desirability of openness does not imply, as some would fear, that management prerogatives are negotiable.
The challenges for foreign service officers would appear to be two-fold. The first is to recognize the growing pressure points within our profession and the likelihood that, over time, they will grow from festering complaints to open sores. The second is to begin to deal constructively and effectively with possible responses. Clearly, we need an agenda of issues and problems, as well as an open, structured, rational debate.
Letters to the editor are useful tonics. We have some good ones in this issue. In the right place, at the right time, they are the highest form of intellectual debate. But, in our collective circumstances, they are no substitute for a more equitable two-way system of communication, where real issues can be addressed and real progress can be made. Was I right in preferring the intrinsically Canadian route of quiet diplomacy to the less subtle message of open attack? On verra…
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1988) — Winter 1988 // Hiver 1988, p. 2. Read the rest of this issue →
