Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference on the roof of the Canadian embassy in Washington, in June, 2019.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Successive Canadian governments of all political stripes have failed to repair our ailing foreign service. While attention has generally been directed toward the consequences for our geopolitical interests, the foreign service also plays a crucial role in developing economic opportunities – a role that goes underappreciated. To improve our trade and investment relationships, we need to fix it.
In 1981, Pamela McDougall, a diplomat, wrote in her report to then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau that the Canadian foreign service was in crisis. More than four decades later, the issues she mentioned persist, and new ones have sprung up.
Today’s Global Affairs Canada has an even smaller portion of its staff abroad than its predecessor did under Mr. Trudeau. Employee mistreatment has arguably gotten worse. The staff is mired in bureaucratic barriers at every turn and lacks even rudimentary regional expertise. As detailed in a recent book, when Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were arrested by Beijing in 2018, one official was left exasperated at the government’s lack of China specialists.
Why does this matter for trade and investment? Because as anyone who has run a business knows, the quality of the relationship is as important as the money on the table. Ambassadors are increasingly becoming salespeople for domestic businesses, as are the officers and bureaucrats who support them. Canada cannot build high-quality relationships when it does not have a substantial presence abroad or when diplomats lack region-specific knowledge and are held down by mountains of red tape.
The first step is showing up. If Canada wishes to develop constructive trade relationships with foreign businesses and consumers, it needs to have enough people abroad to market us and our products. Yet according to our former high commissioner to Australia, our Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development, as Global Affairs Canada is legally known, has opted for a “less foreign, more office” strategy, in which most staff are based in Ottawa, precisely contrary to our economic needs.
Less than a fifth of Global Affairs’ Canadian employees are in foreign locations. Many of our missions abroad have little to no funding and meagre staffing, with no Canadians in some offices, existing merely to “show the flag” and not much else. Thus, the local staff we do have are forced to spend all their resources achieving bare minimum objectives, with little left to nurture the organic relationships that blossom into trade and investment deals.
Literacy in local languages, policies and customs is also crucial for export development and wooing investors because it’s essential for building rapport and understanding the needs of our partners. It’s entirely reasonable to demand that a diplomat speak Wolof when she’s trying to find a Senegalese buyer for Canadian wheat, or that she grasp the intricacies of Indian capital controls when trying to attract a Gujarati investor. But not only do we lack this expertise, we actively discourage it.
Global Affairs hampers specialization by rotating its officers before they can gain experience in a specific region. While a common practice in diplomacy, this comes at a cost. There are already not enough resources for language training or in-depth study as it is. Senior leaders are also rarely promoted from specialist pools because management strongly prefers generalists. Thus, bright-eyed freshmen arrive to find they are not only disincentivized to become fluent in the regional issues they work on, they cannot do so even if they want to.
The job also needs to be attractive to brilliant people and empower those people to take risks if we want to turn soft connections into hard cash. Officers need to be capable of, and rewarded for, making consequential decisions, because the window for coming to an agreement and developing a relationship often closes quickly. But this is not possible because the department is plagued at every turn by excess bureaucracy and chronic risk aversion.
It can take nearly two years to recruit postsecondary candidates, so those with strong external offers (i.e., the top candidates) and bills to pay (i.e., the less privileged) are long gone by the time results come out. Having poured this much effort into selecting personnel, presumably on the basis of their decision-making ability, the department then hampers their agency with cumbersome approval processes and bloated management. Our methods seem tailor-made to filter out many talented candidates and suffocate the rest with micro-management.
The tendency of our government to view international affairs as remote and as a footnote to domestic issues has thus allowed Global Affairs Canada to limp onward with insufficient expertise, a limited presence abroad and substantial bureaucratic bloat. These flaws have repercussions beyond the mandate of the department; they have economic consequences.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that less than a fifth of foreign service officers are in foreign locations. Less than a fifth of the Canadian employees of Global Affairs Canada are in foreign locations. This version has been updated.