bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1988), p. 34
In December, 1965 John Holmes spoke to the Toronto Board of Trade about Diplomacy — Canadian Style. Some 23 years have not aged these comments.
The theme of what I want to say is that the diplomat, Canadian style, is a decent guy … Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, he does not spend his life pushing cookies. He is too busy in his various small and large ways trying to promote peace and prosperity. He doesn’t just sit in an elegant embassy. He spends a lot of time off on special assignments in the jungle or the UN Assembly, where it is equally hot… Of course, he boobs from time to time, but he often takes the blame for others. It is only to make a historical point that I recall the familiar story of the last war, a favourite in officers’ messes, about the young External Affairs man on the train being goaded by caustic comments from a group of men in uniform about his civilian clothes, who finally burst forth, “Well, if it hadn’t been for us you wouldn’t have had your bloody war.” The joke, of course, is a period piece. It is quite irrelevant to this decade when our soldiers are being diplomats in Vietnam and Cyprus and working alongside our diplomats in NATO councils. The head of our disarmament delegation is a general, doggedly fighting away to eliminate generals.
The term diplomat can, of course, be applied to anyone who is nice to his wife or tactful to his bank manager, but in Canada it is more properly applied, in a technical sense, to career officers of our Department of External Affairs. It should be understood that Ministers of Foreign Affairs or Prime Ministers are only honorary diplomats rather than pros, even though some of them like Mr. Pearson graduated from the professional to amateur ranks… Ours is a highly professional service, staffed almost entirely by career officers who take their vows before f the age of thirty and emerge from this dedicated life when they retire at the age of sixty-five. During that long period they lead a life of hard labour and selfless devotion for which they get all too little credit.
A diplomat is like claret or a piece of cheese; it takes some years to mature him.
There will always, I think, be some appointments from outside and I don’t think members of the career service object, provided these do not interfere with their reasonable hope of promotion. In this respect we are, of course, more fortunate – or wiser – than our neighbours to the south who block off the most important ambassadorial posts for friends of the Administration.
It takes brains to be a good diplomat, but it also takes a considerable amount of social awareness in both meanings of the term. He does have to know how to count his forks from the left, but it is more important that he know this country above and below the tracks and beyond Richmond Hill.
You join the service and go where you are sent. Now most posts are hot. The song of the service for the past ten years or so has not been “The Next Time I See Paris”,, but a poignat and off repeated song of farewell, “Nothing could be finer than to be in Indo- China in the morning.”
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1988), p. 34. Read the rest of this issue →
