In Defence of the Politician-Ambassador

Table of Contents Introduction Diplomacy Is Politics by Another Name The Deputy Minister Needs to Know Both the Town and the World Conclusion End Notes About the Author Canadian Global Affairs Institute Introduction “Ninety per cent of politicians give the other 10 per cent a bad reputation.” -Henry Kissinger For at least two decades, civil servants, politicians and scholars have been discussing the internal bureaucratic problems and machinations within Global Affairs Canada – previously known as Foreign Affairs Canada and before that, the Department of External Affairs.1 Fifteen years ago, Janice Stein and I wrote about this, and illustrated the point by revealing the seemingly self-imposed absence of the foreign service on critical policy advice about Afghanistan, as well as the department’s inability to produce a foreign policy review/white paper during the government of former prime minister Paul Martin.2 At that time, we interviewed Martin, who took some responsibility for the problems in the foreign affairs bureaucracy. “Over 25 years, due to the combination of Michael Pitfield’s (Pierre Trudeau’s Clerk of the Privy Council) centralization initiatives and my budgets (in reference to Martin’s nine years as Finance minister, and cuts to departmental budgets that he authored), we have totally destroyed the policy-making capacity of the public service, and nowhere is this more manifest than in the Department of Foreign Affairs.”3 A former deputy minister with intimate knowledge of the department went further: “The Department of Foreign Affairs can’t do policy. They have no policy capacity. The Department of Foreign Affairs is a roving travel agency and property management department.”4