THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 7, 2022
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade met with videoconference this day at 11:30 a.m. [ET] to examine and report on the Canadian foreign service and elements of the foreign policy machinery within Global Affairs Canada.
Senator Peter M. Boehm (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, I see that we have quorum and I declare the meeting in session. My name is Peter Boehm. I’m a senator from Ontario and Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade.
Before we begin, I wish to introduce committee members participating in today’s meeting. We have Senator Gwen Boniface from Ontario; Senator Mary Coyle from Nova Scotia; Senator Marty Deacon from Ontario; Senator Amina Gerba from Quebec; Senator Stephen Greene from Nova Scotia; Senator Peter Harder, Deputy Chair of this committee, from Ontario; Senator Michael MacDonald from Nova Scotia; Senator Victor Oh from Ontario; Senator Mohamed-Iqbal Ravalia from Newfoundland and Labrador; Senator David Richards from New Brunswick; and Senator Yuen Pau Woo from British Columbia.
I wish to welcome all of you, as well as people across the country who may be watching us today.
[Translation]
Today, we are conducting a hybrid meeting. I would like to remind senators and witnesses taking part by videoconference to please keep your microphones muted at all times, unless recognized by name by the chair.
I will ask senators to use the “raise hand” feature in order to be recognized. Those present here in the committee room can signal to the clerk, Ms. Lemay, who is present, their desire to ask questions or to comment.
Should any technical challenges arise, particularly in relation to interpretation, please signal this to the chair or the clerk and we will work to resolve the issue.
Today we begin our special study on the Canadian foreign service and elements of the foreign policy machinery within Global Affairs Canada.
[English]
Today for our first hour we have a panel of three witnesses, and we will have a second panel after that.
To begin, I have a couple of preliminary remarks. We are embarking on a very large study here. It will take us some time to complete this. It will involve many witnesses and obviously different perspectives. I want to emphasize that it is not a foreign policy review, in any sense, but it is a look at the foreign service of Canada, whether it is fit for purpose.
Most importantly, the question is: Why does this matter to Canadians? What is in the Canadian interest in terms of our foreign policy, our international trade, our development assistance and the consular assistance we offer to Canadians all over the globe? What has been the impact of various amalgamations? We can look at the Trade Commissioner Service, going back into the further past, and more recently the amalgamation of the Canadian International Development Agency into the department.
How is the management working? What about the culture of the foreign service? How is policy formulation working? What about recruitment? What about the promotional system? What about the workforce, and what about the conditions of foreign service? There has not been a study on that since the McDougall Royal Commission on Conditions of Foreign Service report of 1981.
I would have colleagues keep that all in mind. We’ll be diving deep in some areas and less so in others. I’m looking for complete participation by everyone, of course, as we move down this path.
For our first panel, we have with us the president of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, Pamela Isfeld, who is a veteran of many exciting postings in the foreign service. We also have the President of the Canadian Ambassadors Alumni Association, Michael Small, who has been our High Commissioner to Australia and our ambassador to Cuba. He’s been the Assistant Deputy Minister of Human Resources, among other things; and Michael and I have the distinction of having joined the foreign service on the same day many years ago. Finally, Daniel Livermore, also a former ambassador. He’s the Honorary Senior Fellow, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. This is a gentleman who served as a mentor to many of us who followed behind him. We’re delighted to have such a great group with us. I want to welcome you all and thank you for joining us. Ms. Isfeld, the floor is yours.
Pamela Isfeld, President, Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m very honoured to give the opening presentation at this first study of the foreign service since the McDougall commission in 1981, which was before I graduated from high school, so I think that we are due.
I’m here in my capacity as the first full-time president of the Professional Association of Foreign Services Officers representing 2,000 members of the FS group. I know that five minutes is not very long, and I understand that the chair is ruthless with time, so I will get right into telling you who the FS group is and what we do. I’m happy to answer questions and I will provide a written brief to the committee after this.
To state the obvious, the defining feature of the foreign service group is foreign service. Although we are not the only group to serve Canada abroad, we are the only one whose terms and conditions of employment explicitly require each and every one of us to rotate between missions abroad and headquarters in Canada, according to the operational needs of the employer.
During our careers, members of the FS group face specific demands, and we also develop specific expertise associated with this condition we call “rotationality.” I’m not sure if anyone else uses that word, but that’s the word we use to describe this kind of service.
Each of the FS group’s five streams perform different functions. The immigration stream is the only one managed by IRCC rather than Global Affairs Canada, and they work to implement Canada’s immigration policies. Their work includes helping businesses bring in skilled workers, reuniting families, and assisting people fleeing war and persecution to resettle in Canada. International assistance members support Canada’s priorities in areas including sustainable economic growth, global health, and environmental protection; and they assist populations facing natural disasters, conflict and food insecurity.
Trade commissioners work to support Canadian business and international markets by gathering market intelligence, identifying opportunities and facilitating access to decision makers. In addition to managing our embassies and overall operations abroad, our management consular officers help Canadians who are in trouble or caught in emergency situations overseas. If you were a Canadian who needed to get out of Afghanistan this summer, or someone who was caught in the travel restrictions that came about with COVID last year, you were probably helped by a member of our management consular team.
Our foreign policy and diplomacy service, or political stream, represents and advocates for Canada’s national interests and values at bilateral missions and multilateral organizations. They establish and maintain networks of influence, negotiate and implement international agreements, and report on and analyze political, security, economic and social developments in order to support operations and sound decision making.
I realize that this may sound a little bit opaque or abstract, so if you have time and you would like to know details of some of the actual work that people have done, I would suggest that you check out our website at pafso.com where we have stories of our foreign service award winners. Those really bring home and highlight some of the work that real people are doing in all of these areas.
Since the McDougall report in 1981, many things have changed, including society’s attitude toward diversity in the foreign service. Fifty-three per cent of the FS group are now women, up from less than 25% in 1981, and visible minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community are now represented at 8% and 10% respectively. However, this increased diversity brings the need to adapt to different needs and requirements in the workforce as well as to address the issues that have been long outstanding.
PAFSO’s concerns on behalf of our members fall into a few broad categories. First, health and safety. The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the difficulties in getting consistent health care abroad into sharp relief, and you will have seen the headlines about incidents abroad, like the things experienced by our members in Havana that have also brought this to our attention.
Security is a major issue. As the world grows more volatile, general and specific threats to Canada’s missions and personnel abroad are increasing. We have had career issues, including a long period without recruitment in the last decade that has left serious gaps in the foreign service, especially in the management consular stream. I learned yesterday that they’ve now been asked to find another 35 management consular officers, or MCOs, to help with the government’s program in Ukraine, and they are 100 people short, so they’re not sure how they’re going to come up with these people.
The problems are made worse by a system that does not recognize and manage expertise in the foreign service. Since our careers affect every aspect of our lives —
The Chair: Ms. Isfeld, I’m afraid we’re at five minutes.
Ms. Isfeld: Oh no.
The Chair: Yes. I don’t see myself as particularly ruthless, but we’re going to try to stick to time, and maybe some of the other elements that you have could come out during the question period. I’m sure my colleagues will pick up on that.
Ms. Isfeld: Thank you.
The Chair: We move to the president of the Canadian Ambassadors Alumni Association, Michael Small. You have the floor.
Michael Small, President, Canadian Ambassadors Alumni Association: I’d like to thank this committee for choosing to study the state of Canada’s foreign service. It is a subject of permanent interest to the association that I represent, which counts over 300 former Canadian ambassadors, high commissioners and consuls general as its members. We bring, I believe, a long-term perspective to bear on these questions.
You’ve chosen to study the management of the Canadian foreign service. That’s a more specific remit than studying the management of the human resources of Global Affairs Canada. According to its latest report, the department has 12,500 employees worldwide, of whom only about 2,400 belong to the foreign service, meaning they are the employees who move on a regular basis between serving abroad and at home. While they are a minority of employees, they constitute the connective tissue that knits together the department’s 175 missions abroad with its headquarters in Ottawa and the wider Government of Canada. The foreign service, of course, comprises two departments, including Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. You will want to take a look at how that department manages its foreign service component.
The essential definition of a foreign service employee, regardless of rank or classification, is that they are rotational. This means when they are hired, they accept terms and conditions of service that allow the employer to move them anywhere in the world at any time. In practice, they move between jobs on a predictable cycle every two to four years. This is essential to making the foreign service work. Staff have to move around to develop professionally, to share the burden of staffing hardship posts and to keep in touch with Canada.
This also has important organizational consequences. Rotational members of the foreign service are not attached to specific positions. Instead, they are hired and promoted in pools rather than being hired by individual managers to do a specific job. This puts unique responsibilities on the human resources branch of the department to maintain the staffing levels of the service.
Maintaining a rotational workforce requires regular, predictable, Canada-wide hiring processes. It cannot be done stop-start. Failure to do so creates long-term demographic imbalances, leaves managers scrambling to find workarounds, damages the department’s image with potential future recruits and leads the foreign service to be less representative of our country as a whole. I’m delighted that Global Affairs has recently started hiring new rotational staff in this way. However, between 2009 and 2019 there was a long dry spell. The department needs to resolve to keep hiring new recruits through thick and thin.
Global Affairs need many kinds of expertise. It currently delivers 56 different programs. The core skill for leading a diplomatic mission is diplomacy, meaning the ability to understand others’ points of view while being effective in advocating your own. Developing diplomatic skills is a long game. It requires experience working with different cultures, understanding how international organizations work, studying foreign languages and learning from senior colleagues, mentors, competitors and even adversaries. I believe the department has undervalued diplomatic knowledge and skills in its executives in recent decades in favour of other management competencies. Some deliberate thought is needed on how to develop the next generation of Canadian diplomatic leadership.
Canada has a career foreign service in the sense that most foreign service officers spend the majority — or the entirety — of their careers within it. This has benefits in terms of their collective knowledge of the world, but it reduces the firsthand knowledge of how other Canadian government departments work, especially those that shape Canada’s wider international policies. The several thousand non-rotational staff in the department that make their career in Ottawa offset this deficit, but more could be done to make assignments in Canada outside of Global Affairs headquarters a standard component of any foreign service career.
It follows from what I said about diplomacy that I strongly believe the great majority of appointments of heads of mission should be drawn from the foreign service. Governments of the day will always wish to appoint those they hold in high regard from outside the public service to serve in certain ambassadorial positions. The public profile and communications skills of some of these appointees can be assets in certain posts, for example, witness Michael Wilson in Washington in the early 2000s or Bob Rae at the United Nations today. However, there are unseen costs to having individuals heading diplomatic missions who do not have networks inside the department, who are unfamiliar with the machinery that runs the foreign service and who stay for only one job. Such appointments should be the exception rather than the rule and should be chosen sparingly and strategically.
Developing a cadre of professional heads of mission drawn from career foreign service means the candidate should be eligible to fulfill the most important and challenging jobs in the foreign service. Recent trends are worrying in this regard. I cannot remember another time when such a low percentage of the top jobs in Canada’s most senior embassies abroad have been held by career professionals. For example, currently, only three of our eight G7 missions. I do not think this is intentional but the negative effects are cumulative on Canada’s cadre of professional heads of mission.
Finally, I call your attention to the underlying Ottawa-centric tendencies in the way the foreign service is managed. Senator Harder, 15 years ago, you pointed out that Canada had the most headquarters-heavy foreign ministry of any G8 country, with 75% of its Canadian staff working in Ottawa. There was a concerted push under your successor to cut positions in headquarters and move them into the field, but after subsequent budget cuts and reorganization, that figure stands today at 81.2%.
A few years ago, the British Foreign Office christened one of their transformation initiatives “more foreign, less office.” We’ve opted for the reverse: less foreign, more office. That mindset needs to change. I’ll elaborate in the question period.
The Chair: Thank you. We will move now to Dr. Daniel Livermore, Honorary Senior Fellow, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa.
Daniel Livermore, Honorary Senior Fellow, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, as an Individual: Although my remarks today are personal, I’m also representing the Canadian Foreign Service Alumni Forum, a new organization that seeks to speak on behalf of retired members of the Canadian foreign service.
The committee has taken on a timely and important task. It’s asking the right question: Are we doing this right? In a highly competitive, conflict-prone international world, the Canadian foreign service needs to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
There are some obvious options. One option is to be the first state to ditch the Westphalian system. We could do the following: drop the Trade Commissioner Service and the consular service, replacing them with websites and 1-800 numbers; cancel our development programs in favour of cheques to organizations that do good work; and close most of our 175 missions, replacing expensive Canadian staff with contracted locals and honorary consuls.
As a second alternative, Global Affairs Canada, or GAC, could get serious about the type of foreign service that a country like Canada needs both now and two decades from now.
A starting point is recognizing that foreign policy is the shared responsibility of many departments that have expertise on issues like immigration, the environment, agriculture, finance, fisheries and forestry, but the foreign service needs a champion, so faute de mieux, it’s GAC.
In this committee, there is a tradition of serious people discussing high-strategy issues, but strategy is not GAC’s problem. GAC knows why the Ambassador Bridge is important. It knows why NORAD and NATO are crucial to Canadian security.
The problems of the foreign service are at a different level, at the operational level of government. Someone has to own these operational problems, but they are often ignored. Why is that? A colleague who left GAC recently described its situation in the following way: an antiquated bureaucratic system marked by risk averse decision making, limited empowerment to those on the ground, ineffective and counterproductive human resource policies, and complacency and non-comprehension in senior management.
I’d like to focus on two issues, with a common theme, namely, expertise, which the single most important, indispensable commodity in any foreign ministry. The first issue pertains to what is called Locally Engaged Staff, or LES, at our missions abroad. LES are people hired as translators, interpreters and program officers. They outnumber Canadians at most missions and constitute about one third of the employees in GAC. They have been treated abysmally. A Canadian embassy was once an excellent place at which to work with good pay by local standards. However, some years ago GAC decided that it would no longer compete at the upper end of the market, and in recent years, our ambition has receded even further. Now, a Canadian embassy is no longer an employer of choice in many locations.
As a result, Canada has lost valued, effective, indispensable LES who are the foundation of local expertise. If you can’t attract LES of the highest calibre, your foreign service is in trouble. When the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs attends the committee, ask what Canada did to assist the LES in the Canadian Embassy in Kyiv as Canadians moved to safety, or to help the LES of the Canadian Embassy in Kabul.
The second issue is the decline in specialized expertise among foreign service officers. All good foreign ministries focus on expertise along two lines of work. One is geographic, in other words, expertise on Russia or on China, for which the basic requirement is language. The other line is called functional, which is topical knowledge about international security, trade law, nuclear issues, et cetera.
Safeguarding that expertise takes effort. Successful foreign ministries have achieved this by having their geographic and functional experts lead or co-manage the process of recruitment, training, assignments and postings. As the guardians of their streams, they safeguard expertise with an eye to succession planning.
Years ago, GAC decided to try to fit the square peg of the public service staffing system into the round hole of the GAC pool management system. In so doing, the experts were denied their traditional role in co-management of expertise, as the HR staff took over. As a result, GAC lost all control of expertise. The victims have been the aspiring experts of the foreign service.
The Chair: Dr. Livermore, I am afraid we’re at time. I’m sure we’ll pick up on some of your comments in the question period.
[Translation]
Before I open the floor to questions, I remind members participating remotely to use the “raise hand” button to be added to the list of questioners, which our clerk will manage.
I also wish to inform members that you will each have a maximum of only four minutes for the first round. This includes questions and answers.
Therefore, to members and witnesses, please be concise. We can always go to a second round if we have time.
[English]
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much to our distinguished panellists. My question is being directed to Mr. Small. I wonder if you would like to comment on the geographical distribution of our foreign service personnel in the context of the ever-shifting global challenges that we face. Do you feel that we may be under-represented in certain jurisdictions, for example, the continent of Africa? If so, do you see a potential resolution to these issues?
Mr. Small: Thank you, senator. I haven’t looked at the distribution closely in recent times, so I’m going to work from my historic memory.
One of the reasons why we have a rotational foreign service is precisely to make it easy to shift staff around as governments’ priorities change and situations on the ground change. Africa specifically has always been a domain where we’ve had very strong aid representation because those have been the biggest programs delivered in most of our embassies. There’s always a strong case, which has been undervalued, in having trade commissioners assigned there and more political officers to report on governance, human rights and diplomatic issues. That’s probably what I would look at, were I in my former seat, in terms of African representation.
At the moment, given the crisis in Eastern Europe, it is very obvious that we will need more people on the ground in our very small mission in Riga, which covers the three Baltic states. I’m sure, however, as we are covering Ukraine, we will want to have more people in the field and not just in capitals, to deal with refugee outflows and the manifest ramifications of that.
We will want to build up more expertise than we have been able to in recent years, especially in the languages of eastern Europe. Those are top-of-mind issues for me.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you very much. My follow-up is for Dr. Livermore.
In the context of the rotational nature of the service, do you feel we provide sufficient health supports to our personnel who are posted overseas, particularly from the perspective of psychological and medical issues and in light of the recent COVID crisis that we’ve all faced? Have Canadians abroad felt a sense of vulnerability in the care which they receive? Thank you.
Mr. Livermore: Thank you, senator. I think this is a difficult question to answer because the track record is not 100% clear.
In recent years, the department, I think, has done a pretty good job of trying to upgrade its responsive capacity to new developments, but the plain fact is that the foreign service is very thin on the ground, which means if you decide to remove one person or one family from a post because of COVID or because of another type of problem, you basically emaciate the capacity of that post to function. You have to re-establish things very quickly.
The plain fact is that the foreign service isn’t strong enough to function under those conditions. We need a much more resilient foreign service, much more flexible, with a surge capacity of personnel able to cope with these problems, and we don’t have it. We’ve lost that surge capacity.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you.
Senator MacDonald: I have a question directed first to Ms. Isfeld, but the second part of the question I invite everybody to respond.
Ms. Isfeld, two years ago, when you became president of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, you spoke about a risk-averse culture at the Department of Foreign Affairs. You said:
Many senior managers got ahead at a time when it was safest to be process-oriented and not rock the boat, and are still reluctant to take risks, even when the rewards could be profound.
You said you were planning to apply pressure to change that. How successful have you been in that regard? My question to all of you is: Can you describe how the risk-averse culture most manifests itself? And what are the implications for Canadian foreign policy?
Ms. Isfeld: Thank you very much for that question. We do still see problems with senior management being fairly risk-averse and also very crisis-oriented. There is not much incentive for advance planning. As my colleague Dr. Livermore mentioned about health care, we don’t have very much surge capacity. We’re not able, as a department, as a culture, to look very far ahead, to make decisions and to plan to take risks.
In the last two years especially, the department and its senior management have been forced to become even more flexible and to take risks that they didn’t necessarily want to take. I don’t know that I could take credit for that in my role as the full-time president. Some of that is circumstances related to COVID and to other things that have just happened.
All of these forces are combining to make the Global Affairs in particular, and IRCC as well, take a look at how the system functions as a whole and how that affects the way that we can be managed in the foreign service in particular.
One of the complaints that the FS group has had going back to the commission in 1981 was that we hire very smart people with a lot of skills and capacities, and then we don’t always give them very much scope to act and make decisions on the ground. We have very high approval requirements. We have cumbersome processes. These are some of the things that we would like to see changed and that we think would make the foreign service a lot more effective.
The Chair: We have a minute left, so time for Mr. Small and Dr. Livermore to offer quick comments.
Mr. Small: That is a very common critique. I think it’s true across the public service as a whole. I would look at some public-service-wide trends, in terms of the increasing accountabilities, year after year, placed on senior managers and the centralizing tendency that I referred to in my remarks. It means that the people who are hired for initiative feel less inclined to take it. We have a media culture which punishes people if they appear to step out of line, almost instantly, although diplomats are now very much encouraged to use social media. These are contributing factors.
The Chair: Dr. Livermore, you have 30 seconds.
Mr. Livermore: I’ll try to be brief. I have one major point. You hire young experts who are extremely good. You then suffocate those experts with the senior management complement — which is extremely weighty, and I would recommend that senators take a look at the size of that complement — who then remove all signs of expertise as notes go up to the minister. If the minister gets stuff that doesn’t look very expert, there is a reason for it.
Senator Woo: Thank you to the witnesses for getting us off to a good start on this study.
My first question is an opportunity for Dr. Livermore to finish his remarks. In particular, if he could clarify his opening comments about essentially demolishing the Trade Commissioner Service and international development complement overseas. Was that ironic? I didn’t quite understand what you were trying to get at there. This is an opportunity for you to clarify.
Mr. Livermore: What I am suggesting is that we are already well on the road to eliminating the development stream and the consular service because we’re trying to introduce the idea that 1-800 numbers and cheque writing are the equivalent in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, which, of course, they are absolutely not.
So it is intended as an ironic comment, but it is also a remarkable road that the department has taken in some respects, which the committee may want to take a look at. We should be looking at development expertise and how that is used and how it can be effectively employed by the department. We should be looking at consular services and whether they are effectively employed on the ground. I think it’s extremely good for the consular services to use 1-800 numbers in some circumstances. Maybe even up to 80% of consular cases can be solved that way. But that is no answer to the Canadian Foreign Service of the future.
Senator Woo: Thank you. That is very helpful.
Mr. Small, it’s nice to see you again. Could you help me understand a bit more what the pool management system is and why it is so important for our Foreign Service? If Dr. Livermore wanted to add to the discussion, we would welcome his comments.
Mr. Small: This is a technical human resources issue, but it is extremely important because it has extensive consequences for the way the Foreign Service is managed.
People are hired as foreign service officer level 1 or 2. They are not hired for specific jobs. So you’re not hiring somebody to be the counsellor in the Canadian embassy in Washington and their job is permanently attached there and, by extension, they would have a right to remain in Washington indefinitely — the same way you would hire, let’s say, a technical expert in your headquarters in Ottawa. They are hired as a pool under conditions where they can be moved around. That enables the flexibility and rotation that is essential for the Foreign Service to work and to respond to different needs and pressures.
It also means that individual managers, if they have a vacancy, can’t hire a rotational foreign service officer. If I’m a director in Ottawa and I don’t have a Ukraine desk officer, I cannot go out and hire a new foreign service officer to do that. That belongs to the Foreign Service. It requires a centralized function to keep the staffing levels up and it means you have to plan in a long-term and consistent manner to keep your staffing levels up — which, as I pointed out, has not been fully done. The illustration that Ms. Isfeld gave about the management consular officers is a clear example of that.
Senator Woo: Are you suggesting that this pool management system is now being undermined? That’s the impression I got. Dr. Livermore?
Mr. Livermore: Pool management has been made meaningless by the attempt to mix two different systems that simply don’t match.
Let me give an example of building expertise on Russia. If you want Russia expertise, basically you have to train Russia experts in language every single year. You need to have postings in Moscow at the junior level. You have to bring those people back to Moscow, or perhaps neighbouring countries, over the course of their career so that at some point when you are looking for the number two in Moscow, perhaps the ambassador, you have a whole bevy of people who speak Russian and who know the country and the issues around it. We haven’t done that for years.
Senator Richards: Thank you to our witnesses and guests. I have two quick questions for anyone who is willing to answer.
Have we discovered the cause of the Havana syndrome? Was it a malicious malware attack? How many people were affected, and what has been done to offset this?
Ms. Isfeld: Thank you for the question. From the latest numbers, we understand that about 17 people were affected by what we call the Havana syndrome. Fourteen of those are PAFSO members, and the others are from other occupational groups. There is an ongoing investigation that has not yet reached any conclusions about what the cause may be. There are various theories and scientific explanations. It is complicated because of the political situation involving Canada-Cuba and Cuba-U.S. relations and so on, but there is no conclusion.
This has highlighted for us the problem of health support to our members and others in the Foreign Service. One of the things that happened when people came home was that after a certain period, they were basically told to go to their own doctors when they came back. Given that a lot of them had been overseas for years, some of them didn’t even have a family doctor, let alone a doctor capable of dealing with something like this. The department has since offered more support to people and now has more capacity internally to advise people on those kinds of issues. From our perspective, as the union representing the workers, this is a major issue and the major thing that comes out of the Havana syndrome. I will let others add to this.
Senator Richards: Thank you for that answer. It’s an ongoing struggle, isn’t it?
I’m the first to agree that diversity in all levels of government is needed, but how does diversity cohabitate with the level of excellence in today’s Foreign Service? I’ll put that question to anyone.
Mr. Small: I think it advances it. It is extremely important that we not only have a Foreign Service that represents Canada in all respects — geographically in different regions of the country, as well as all other kinds of diversity, including LGBTQ and different cultures.
The Foreign Service is a very attractive employer. We are an employer of choice, particularly for new and second-generation Canadians. That strengthens our Foreign Service — not just in terms of countries where they might have personal ties and languages but by demonstrating that we are a multicultural country and have people of different backgrounds going to serve elsewhere. I’m a big supporter of it and I think the Foreign Service has only benefited from it.
Senator Coyle: Thank you so much to all our speakers today. I have been interacting with the Foreign Service for decades now and was offered a position back in the Dark Ages, in 1984, when I finished my graduate degree, to join what was then CIDA. I didn’t do that. A lot of what you are saying is resonating with me.
Dr. Livermore, my first question is for you. As you are looking at expertise for the Foreign Service, what do you see that remains constant in terms of what we need? You spoke about the geographic and functional areas. What do you see remaining constant and what do you see changing, particularly as we look to the future and as we recruit and train Foreign Service personnel?
Mr. Livermore: We have done a good job over the years of recruiting people with initiative and certain skills. We have looked for linguistic capacity, and there is abundant linguistic capacity in Canada thanks to the diversity of our population. We have also trained a lot of people in languages, but that training has fallen off in recent years because of problems in terms of the cost of language schools. I think that you still need the basic streams of linguistic expertise. You need Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, et cetera, and you need them in quantity. That’s where we have fallen off in expertise.
We have plenty of opportunities to do that. I recall early in my career being offered a posting in Moscow but being told I wouldn’t get language training before I went, and I decided to turn that occasion down.
If we fall down on this kind of expertise training, then we do the foreign service damage over the long haul. Pool management makes it very flexible and easy to adjust quickly. We can do so very easily if we have the right systems in place. Thanks.
Senator Coyle: Thank you very much, Dr. Livermore.
I have a question for Mr. Small. You spoke about the issue of heads of mission who are not career diplomats and the issues that raises. That’s a fact of life. What do we do about that? How would you suggest those individuals are better prepared? How are they better integrated? How does the bureaucracy and that person come together in ways that are more optimal for the functioning of this important role?
Mr. Small: Thank you, senator. It is a fact of life. It is also a fact of choice. My key point is government should be strategic and selective in terms of where the missions are headed by people from outside the public service because there are invisible costs, which I tried to allude to in terms of the operational efficiency.
Our biggest embassies abroad, notably in London, Paris, Washington, have always been staffed with a career deputy head of mission position. Frequently those people have been ambassadors before and are very well equipped to support someone from outside the public service coming in, but that is not true of even the very next tier, or even other G8 missions. Those costs become more evident the more widely you put people from outside the public service into smaller missions. That’s a response, but it’s also costly in terms of departmental resources.
More importantly, I would emphasize the cost in terms of the long-term career development. Being ambassador to France is the apex of somebody’s career, or High Commissioner in London. If nobody in your career foreign service ever gets a shot at that, it has an effect. Currently, our single most important job — in Washington — is held by a career diplomat, and that was very heartening, but that’s the first time in 16 years that has happened.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Small.
[Translation]
Senator Gerba: Thank you to our witnesses. My question is for Ms. Isfeld.
Some time ago, the Privy Council Office issued a call to action to address systemic racism and to foster greater representation of diverse communities, particularly African Canadian and Indigenous communities.
Following the call to action, GAC announced that it had taken steps to, among other things, increase the number of Black and Indigenous employees working in the executive branch.
Have you seen any meaningful changes as a result of the actions announced by GAC? If so, do you feel they are sufficient? Thank you.
[English]
Ms. Isfeld: We have seen some changes in the last couple of years. At Global Affairs Canada, they have started an anti-racism secretariat that is working to increase opportunities for Black officers, in particular, and members of visible minority groups. We have seen there have been some efforts, some promotions that have been targeted particularly to members of those groups.
I’m not sure that I have seen anyone actually appointed yet from those competitions, but we are definitely seeing changes in the approach to staffing and recognition of the fact that there is value in having diversity in senior management, and in all of our ranks as well, since we are not only supposed to be overseas representing, telling our headquarters and our system about what is going on in our countries. We are also supposed to be representing Canada and the faces of Canada to those other places, and there is definitely a value in that and in bringing different perspectives.
I think it will take some time, but I do think there is a serious effort to make change in Global Affairs Canada in particular, and at IRCC as well.
Mr. Small: Very briefly, my own experience is 10 years ago when I was head of human resources. The department was overhiring, had a strong representation of people considered visible minorities, but if you looked inside that group, you did not find a completely representative balance. Certainly, employees of Black or African heritage were under-represented within the department’s hiring. Current efforts, as Ms. Isfeld described, are welcome to make more deliberate efforts to try and recruit and encourage people from those backgrounds to join the foreign service. The foreign service overall, including at the head of mission level, is doing a good job in representing the diversity of our country, but it’s a long-term process to grow those people, and you have to start at the bottom by recruiting them.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses. My question could be for anyone.
Ms. Isfeld, two years ago when you became President of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, you noted your concern about the lack of recruitment and renewal in the system. How is that issue being addressed today? Has there been any improvement so far?
Ms. Isfeld: Thank you, senator. Yes, there has been. We do have to recognize that Global Affairs Canada has taken on the concerns. Concerns were raised in an audit of the staffing system a few years ago, and Global Affairs Canada has looked at its recruitment. Since 2019, there have been two recruitments at the entry level for Global Affairs FS1 and associated promotion exercises up the chain to repopulate those groups.
They seem to be on a system where they are doing a recruitment exercise and a competition every two years, which makes sense. I think all we can hope is that they continue that because they are needing to staff. After about a 10-year gap, especially at the entry level, that has left some cracks in the system, and they need to replenish those groups and rebuild their capacity. However, it is happening, and I think the issue is recognized at both GAC and at IRCC.
Mr. Small: I would only add the importance of official language training. Foreign service officers have to be bilingual, and I believe your next round of witnesses will speak at some length to that. The Canadian education system does not always produce bilingual recruits. The foreign service has a well-developed system for training its new hires in both official languages to make sure that when they start they are fully functionally bilingual. One of the reasons why there was that long gap is it is expensive to do, and it was decided at a certain point before 2019 to stop funding that educational training. The foreign service could hire people who are already fully bilingual, but you won’t hire them in representative numbers across the country.
I currently live in British Columbia. The educational system here and in Western Canada is pretty mixed in terms of producing bilingual graduates from our public school system. I’m glad to see the department has rectified that and has gone back to what it did before. However, that damages your representativity.
Lastly, the earlier question about risk averse, I think one of the reasons there was this long dry spell is that the senior management of the department was quite risk averse about overstaffing its pools, but the net result is that it underhired against needs.
Mr. Livermore: I could share perhaps a couple of quick words. Recruitment was woefully inadequate over time, which is the source of GAC’s current problems.
You have to hire a lot of people and you have to train them well because you have to take into account attrition rates. In other words, people do leave the foreign service. They leave after one posting. Sometimes they leave mid-career, but they often leave, and you have to anticipate this. I would recommend to the committee that they look at data. Don’t take witness statements. Go for the data, as to how many people were hired and why those decisions were taken. I think you will find them shocking in retrospect.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you to all our witnesses for being here today. Forty years have passed and our world has changed. Look at the globe; our globe has changed. It is remarkable and, frankly, overwhelming to take in all of the information that we have been given — thank you to the Library of Parliament and others — in starting this process today.
I would like to start with Ms. Isfeld and ask you about your background and the work you have done; you have held some postings. Those postings, as I recall, have included Russia and Afghanistan and some others. I am going to ask you — and others are welcome to answer — what do you see? I’m trying to look at the real world, life-on the-ground impact of what seems to be a number of issues in an organization that needs to take a really close look inside. On the field, in Russia, in Afghanistan, in the different places you have been, what do you see as the highest end result of these issues that we are talking about today, of sustainability, organizational issues, gaps, cultures, management? How does it end up on the field?
Ms. Isfeld: Thank you for that question, senator. It is a very salient one, but it’s also a bit hard to narrow down an answer. Maybe I will just talk about my very personal experience. My last posting was in Warsaw, Poland. I was the only Canada-based staff person in my section. I was the head of the political section, the political counsellor. I had no other Canada-based staff person. I had an excellent team of locally engaged staff, but they could not have Canadian security clearances to the same level. They could not travel. We were accredited to Belarus, and it was hard for them. They didn’t have diplomatic status, so that made it harder and more risky for them to travel to our other country of accreditation.
The fact that we had not recruited and we had cut junior positions abroad meant that, in my team, I had no backup from another Canadian when things happened. For example, when Crimea was invaded in 2014, which we did not see coming, that fundamentally shifted the work of our section to much more of a security focus. Poland at that point had been a sort of commercial relationship. We had done a lot of public affairs and so on. Luckily, I happened to have that security background and I spoke some Russian and so on. It would have been ideal to have had a deputy, to have had some surge capacity at that time. I saw that lack of capacity there.
In Afghanistan, the two times that I was there, I was seconded, loaned, to NATO to work as a political adviser to Canadian generals. And, again, initially I was then the only Foreign Affairs employee attached to those missions. They did increase our presence after that. But, initially, we didn’t have the people to be able to send a team of two so that I wasn’t working 14-hour days, 7 days a week. Those are the really practical things that we see with the lack of recruitment. It comes down to workload and lack of surge capacity and depth of knowledge.
The Chair: Thank you, Ms. Isfeld.
Senator Boniface: I’m will carry on the line of questioning from Senator Deacon. I particularly caught the comments of Mr. Livermore, who commented on the lost surge capacity. The world has dramatically shifted around security-related concerns.
Ms. Isfeld, it’s a good thing you had some security background, given the issues you encountered. But I’m wondering how you both would view regaining that surge capacity. How realistic is it in this day and age to be able to assume that surge capacity — I guess how realistic and, alternatively, how necessary surge capacity is in this field as we look at the world around us today?
Mr. Livermore: I think surge capacity is absolutely essential. Surge capacity can be retained in Ottawa where it is fairly cheap to have on hand, as opposed to having capacity at missions where it is relatively expensive. The key, as I mentioned before, is recruitment. You have to have people. You have to have them trained in languages, and you have to have them going out. The foreign service of today could be very simple. Give a foreign service officer a credit card; direct that person to set up shop in a foreign capital somewhere. It could be very simple — or it could be very complicated, depending on circumstances.
As you do your investigation, I think you will find that GAC is overweight in oversight. There are too many people looking over too many shoulders trying to check too many boxes at too many places. Some of this load has to be lightened. Those savings can be used to create surge capacity. Lightening the senior management load could be used to create surge capacity. The good thing about junior surge capacity is it is relatively cheap, as opposed to senior management, which is relatively expensive.
Ms. Isfeld: The answer is in a realistic assessment and willingness to invest. It means hiring more people and paying them and recognizing that there is a cost to doing that kind of business. When you look at the military, for example, and how they staff, they have room for people to be on training and so on, and we need to do the same.
The Chair: I want to express my frustration as the chair that I will not be able to ask a question and that we won’t have a second round but maybe in the next panel.
Senator Harder: Chair, I’ll channel your question through my words, yet again.
It is good to see former colleagues. Thank you for participating. I want to assure you, Mr. Small, that we are not just looking at the 2,000 people in the rotational foreign service in our remit. We are not just looking at the 12,000 people who are in the department, but we also want to look explicitly at the locally engaged staff and the interaction between the Global Affairs Department and other departments with an international interest and, frankly, at their interest in Global Affairs because it’s not just a one-way street.
I also wanted to point out a theme I have heard today with which I very much agree. That is the need in a foreign ministry to have redundancy capacity. When we started out in Afghanistan, we had nobody speaking the tribal languages of Afghanistan and Pashto in particular. That harmed our ability.
Mr. Livermore, could you speak to the kind of redundancy we need? The second point I’d like you to follow up on is your comment with respect to the pool being broken. I very much share that. We have rotational foreign service officers who don’t rotate, and we’ve got non-rotational officers who regularly rotate. Isn’t it time that we acknowledged the pool is actually the department? Perhaps even the department should be its own employer, which is one of the things I would advocate.
Mr. Livermore, I wonder if you could respond. Could you give us the data that we should be seeking in this review in writing?
The Chair: Dr. Livermore, quickly, if you can, because we’ve passed time completely.
Mr. Livermore: Very quickly, I think we need to think in terms of having a whole group of positions. Pick a number. Pick 100 positions of people who are in language training full time, but basically in and out of language training. And that 100 could be 10 people on Russian, 20 people on Mandarin, 5 people on Korean, et cetera, et cetera.
We have to make sure that we dedicate that number and not, as we do now, cut that number every time there is a reduction exercise. That’s how you create linguistic expertise. The redundancy can appear in various forms and it can be used to second people to other departments in government where there is expertise in foreign policy issues. It can also be used to deploy to missions that are in trouble. They’re short-handed for one reason or another.
Once you have a pool management system that works, it’s very easy to handle surge capacity. It’s just a question of doing it.
The Chair: Dr. Livermore, I want to thank you for that answer and Senator Harder for the question.
I would like to thank our three witnesses for their comments today. Your expertise is very much appreciated. I dare say we might have you back at some point as this study continues.
For the second part of our meeting today, we have three more experts. Margaret Biggs, who is the Matthews Fellow in Global Public Policy at Queen’s University. She is also chair of the International Development Research Centre and a former president of the Canadian International Development Agency, where I have worked with her closely in the past.
[Translation]
We also have Pierre Guimond, senior fellow at Laval University’s Graduate School of International Studies, as well as former ambassador to Hungary and minister-counsellor in Paris.
[English]
And from the Canadian International Council, its president and research director, Ben Rowswell, who has served in Afghanistan and rounded out his foreign service career as our ambassador to Venezuela.
We’ll go to Ms. Biggs. You have the floor.
Margaret Biggs, Matthews Fellow in Global Public Policy, Queen’s University, as an individual:
Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. Your fit-for-purpose review of Canada’s foreign policy ministry is timely and essential in light of the rapidly shifting global context Canada is facing.
I will take a slightly different approach or tack than your previous witnesses.
I will speak to three issues that I believe will be important for your study of our integrated foreign ministry: context, capabilities and coherence.
On context, the crisis in Ukraine has broken the spell of post-Cold War complacency that has conditioned Canada and Canadians to take global affairs for granted for too long.
Canada now faces an uncertain and potentially hostile operating environment. The rapidly deteriorating geopolitical context is now layered on other major disruptors: the climate crisis, the global pandemic, cyber-threats, democratic retreat, et cetera, to name just a few. All of these transcend borders. All of them impact our vital interests and values. None of them are discretionary.
While Canada’s alliances are more important than ever, our allies are sometimes unpredictable and they also expect us to bring concrete assets and action to the table.
To determine whether our foreign ministry is fit for purpose, I really encourage the committee to anchor your study in assessment of these new realities.
Capabilities. As we watch with horror as the Ukrainian crisis unfolds, attention has shifted to NATO and Canada’s defence capabilities.
Without question, Canada needs to upgrade its defence capabilities. But for most contemporary global challenges — whether they be pandemics, protracted humanitarian and refugee crises, cyber, anti-democratic forces, human rights violations — there are no military solutions.
More than ever, Global Affairs Canada needs to lead and galvanize Canada’s efforts. As you have heard today, Canada needs to reinvest in its diplomatic corps. Our foreign ministry needs people with a deep understanding of other countries and societies, and people who can advance Canada’s interests in a myriad of international fora.
However, to be fit for purpose, Canada’s foreign ministry needs robust capabilities and instruments across multiple functions — trade, political, diplomacy, development — and across diverse issue sets.
I encourage the committee to scope your study broadly and to look at the skills, training and career paths needed for a high-functioning foreign ministry across the board.
I would like to highlight two areas that I think are vitally important and risk being overlooked.
Contrary perhaps to what the others have said, first, I would say Global Affairs need a robust home game. Foreign ministries are complex, decentralized, highly responsive and running 24/7. To complement these operational imperatives, Global Affairs need a strong policy planning function. It needs the capacity to look over the horizon, to integrate across issues, to distill signals from noise. It needs to generate new ideas and solutions. It needs deep expertise on some core issues, like international economics. It needs people who can work across government, build relations with Canadian stakeholders and engage and support ministers and parliamentarians.
Second, Canada needs a strong global development capacity, a cadre that understands how different societies develop and is skilled at delivering effective interventions; a cadre that can work with multiple development finance tools, is on top of evidence and innovative solutions and can contribute meaningfully to deliberations at the leading global institutions such as the World Bank or UN agencies like the World Food Program.
At the time of the amalgamation, there were fears that the Canadian International Development Agency would become subordinate to political and trade interests. I do not believe this has happened. But there are risks.
To be frank, history shows that foreign ministries traditionally see development as a secondary issue, a secondary vocation. And integrated ministries in other countries have warned that development expertise tends to bleed away after a few years, weakening capacity and effectiveness.
The OECD has commented that development effectiveness has lost salience in recent years. And this matters, not just because of the moral imperative of addressing poverty and exclusion in the world; it matters because our development assistance efforts need to be as effective as possible. And it matters because our future prosperity and security, and the sustainability of the planet, depend on how low- and middle-income countries develop.
Finally, a final word on coherence.
I believe more can be done to capitalize on the integrated department’s assets. I would note that coherence is a multi-dimensional, multi-variation, directional issue. For example, the OECD has developed guidance on policy coherence for sustainable development that many European countries follow.
I would like to briefly mention three areas that I believe are currently under-leveraged. The first is trade and development. Like Canada, developing countries are looking to grow their economies, break into international markets and overcome a myriad of trade barriers. Canada, meanwhile, is looking to expand its research into new markets and lead reforms at the WTO. And there are clear opportunities for synergies between our trade and development objectives.
The Chair: I’m afraid I’m going to interrupt.
Ms. Biggs: I’ll come back to trade and development, democracy support and the SDGs. Thank you very much.
The Chair: Thank you. I think we can tease these out in the question-and-answer period, certainly on the Sustainable Development Goals and other points that you have made.
[Translation]
Pierre Guimond, Senior Fellow, Graduate School of International Studies, Laval University, as an individual: I would like to begin by congratulating the members of your committee for their initiative.
The study you are launching today comes at a time when many observers of Canada’s international relations are calling for a major review of our foreign policy. Hopefully, your recommendations to the government will arrive as this new policy is being put in place.
Senator Deacon spoke of a new world.
Since retiring from Global Affairs Canada, I’ve been devoted to sparking Canadians’ — especially young Canadians’ — interest in international relations and Canadian diplomacy. I want them to be able to commit to developing an interest in it. So I’d like to put forward some ideas for the department as to how it can get more involved in public affairs with Canadians and with foreigners.
Mr. Chair, you yourself asked why this is important to Canadians.
I assume that you will also want to align the study you are beginning with what your committee did in 2019 on cultural diplomacy. I’m pleased to see that the Prime Minister has already asked Minister Joly to develop a cultural diplomacy strategy in her mandate letter.
However, there’s a difference between the arts and culture. As far as the arts go, I think the government does a pretty good job of promoting them abroad. That said, there’s still much work to be done to promote Canadian culture as a whole. One example is the current government’s refusal to renew the mandate given to former minister Garneau to reinstate a program supporting Canadian studies abroad by a large number of academic and research institutions. We’re not making adequate use of the very important and credible resources that lie in Canadianists in many countries where we’re trying to promote our soft power, that is, influence diplomacy.
In broader terms, I believe the department has to look at a more strategic approach to its public affairs. It seems to me that the department is limiting the efforts it should be making to communicate well with Canadians and foreigners to our ministers’ media needs.
A true public affairs policy should include a one-stop service that gives universities and public interest groups access to government speakers and experts so they can provide more detailed information about our international policies, which ministers can only outline. This new service should also encourage our ambassadors to travel across Canada and share their experiences, thus urging all Canadians to become interested and involved in foreign policy.
With this in mind, I’d like to suggest that you encourage the department to take on a greater presence on university campuses, both to promote careers at GAC and to make public presentations on foreign policy with experts, with a view to informing our foreign policy on a scholarly basis.
I’d also like to echo some of the Quebec media who are very interested in the issue of bilingualism at GAC. GAC’s reputation for having little interest in operating a bilingual department is a source of concern for its current and former employees, and even for some Quebec candidates who wish to join the foreign service.
I don’t feel the issue of the department’s predominantly English-speaking image is rooted in the lack of new French-speaking recruits coming into the department; they make up a fair portion of staff. Rather, I fear a certain semblance of indifference or ill-advised complacency has crept into the department over time when it comes to using French internally and projecting the bilingual nature of Canadian diplomacy. One solution for this issue would be to appoint more francophone deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers. Greater efforts should also be made to properly train those entering the department at the grassroots level, who, as former ambassador Small said, don’t already have a solid command of our two official languages.
That said, on my posts abroad, many of my diplomatic counterparts didn’t understand why our Canadian diplomats were not all bilingual before they went on to become fluent in a third or even a fourth language.
As a final point, I want to quickly say that Global Affairs Canada is not like other departments. Only one other department, National Defence, makes so-called foreign policy the very essence of its work. Its professionals and managers at all levels, even the most senior, must, in addition to general public service skills, possess skills specific to the profession of diplomacy, just as military knowledge is required at National Defence: intercultural skills, good judgment of the global context, the ability to influence and forge alliances, resilience and adaptability, and knowledge of history and major world issues. That is what’s required of new recruits at Global Affairs Canada.
I’d like to thank the interpreters, and also you, Mr. Chair.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Guimond.
Ben Rowswell, President and Research Director, Canadian International Council: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I too commend you for choosing to study the state of Canadian diplomacy at this time, when the world is changing so dramatically.
I am president of the Canadian International Council. As you said, we are a council that strives to give Canadians a voice in world affairs. If I understand correctly, you want to know if Canadian diplomacy is fit for purpose. I will answer this question with a historical vignette.
Let’s go back to 1939, another time when the world order was shifting. An authoritarian great power had unleashed a war of aggression on its neighbours in Europe. France was the main target. Canada had a small embassy, a diplomatic mission in Paris. We were a very small player on the international political scene at that time. Germany had the most modern and imposing army in Europe.
Canada had to make a decision: What would it do with the diplomatic mission in Paris, as Nazi armoured tanks were approaching? We decided to keep our diplomats there. Our embassy remained open for nine months after the first Nazi attack on France. Georges Vanier was head of mission at the time. He felt that, in order to advance Canada’s national interests in a time of conflict, we needed to be there to make our own analysis of the situation, influence the main actors and show Canada’s solidarity with another democratic country.
[English]
The Canadian embassy in Paris only closed when the French government vacated the capital in June of 1940, nine months after the Second World War began.
General Vanier was one of a generation of diplomats present in the centre of the action in the Second World War. By being there on the ground, he and contemporaries of Lester Pearson acquired knowledge and experience and built relationships with the world leaders of the day. This made them indispensable participants in the reshaping of the world order when war gave way to peace.
Fast forward to 2022. Once again an authoritarian great power that has invaded a democracy. This time Canada has a much larger and more experienced diplomatic corps than we did in 1939. We are a more significant player in Ukraine than we were in France in 1939.
Where are Canada’s diplomats today? I have no quarrel with their decision not to make a military commitment to Ukraine, but we are talking about diplomacy. Where are our diplomats? They are not in Kyiv, although other entities remain active there. Some countries have mounted ministerial visits to Kyiv during this terrible period of bombardment.
Our diplomats are not even in Lviv, where all the other G7 embassies are operating. We have pulled out every single diplomat from Ukraine and left our Ukrainian staff to their own devices.
Ukraine, sadly, is not the only hot spot from which Canadian advocates are absent, We used to lead global advocacy to restore human rights in Iran based on the credibility and the contacts with activists that we had by maintaining our embassy in Tehran. We weren’t able to maintain that role after 2012 when we abandoned our embassy there.
In this hemisphere, Canada played a genuine leading role in standing up for democracy and human rights in the manmade humanitarian disaster in Venezuela, until we chose to pull up our stakes and leave. I was their last ambassador, and two years later we didn’t even have an embassy.
There are certain places where there is a competition for the future of the world being waged between great powers. It is sadly becoming more and more difficult to find Canadian diplomats in those places.
Why is that? I’m not in government now so I can’t pretend to know, but I can draw on my experience as a diplomat in some of the world’s most violent conflicts. Is it because Global Affairs is not equipped to operate diplomatic missions in a war zone? Far from it. During my time as a representative of Canada in Kandahar, I led a team of 80 civilians in that city located in the heart of Taliban insurgency.
We can operate in war zones where there are no Canadian Forces present. I served in Baghdad from 2003 to 2005 with a team of three, protected by a private security firm. Is it because the Canadian public does not have the stomach for the potential loss of a diplomat? Canada has shown plenty of stomach.
We already lost our diplomat and cherished colleague Glyn Berry in 2006, well before we ramped up the large deployment that I was lucky enough to lead.
The answer as to why Canadian diplomats are increasingly absent in the world’s hot sports is summed up in a bureaucratic doctrine called “The Duty of Care.” In that concept lie many of the constraints facing Canada’s foreign service in 2022.
I don’t mean to criticize the doctrine itself. There needs to be a decision-making process by which to determine if the risks outweigh the benefits, and that’s what the duty of care does.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Rowswell. We’ve reached beyond time, but we can pick up on some of your points in the Q&A.
Senator Woo: Thank you. Another great set of testimonies.
My question is for Ms. Biggs about the balance between foreign service professionals, people who work within GAC, and other internationally trained and expert civil servants in departments other than Global Affairs Canada. It’s a truism that foreign policy and domestic policy issues now overlap much more so today than they did 40 years ago.
I’m trying to understand how we should manage this overlapping set of needs and skills, because it strikes me that some of the best expertise on the most important issues facing Canada in the international space is in Finance Canada, the Bank of Canada or Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. How do we bring that into our diplomacy and foreign representation? What’s the model for this?
Ms. Biggs: Thank, senator, for the question. That’s a big question, and I wish we could go back to some of our former heads of mission to help answer it.
You’re quite right. Many of the issues I mentioned and you talked about are well outside the remit of the foreign ministry and the three ministers in it. Looking, for example, at climate change and COP26, the lead clearly came from Environment and Climate Change Canada. They have deep expertise and are leading the climate plans, both domestically and internationally, similar to how Health Canada leads on issues of public health and the global pandemic. Foreign policy is conducted by many parts of the Government of Canada, but it’s only Global Affairs Canada that can have the wide-angled lens, if you will, to see all the moving parts and to integrate the overall effect on Canada’s interests and how it wants to project internationally.
I would indicate, for example, that after the deficit reduction in 2012, Global Affairs Canada had to downsize and effectively remove its capacity on issues related to environmental and climatic diplomacy. I don’t want to be critical; there probably is some capacity, but isn’t doing the job of Environment and Climate Change Canada. However, it needs to be aware, because these are global issues that have global influence, and our major allies and adversaries are active on them.
There is no simple solution to it. There are lots of paths Global Affairs can take in terms of trying to ensure there is coordination and integration across a range of federal departments.
[Translation]
Senator Gerba: My question is for Ms. Biggs.
Ms. Biggs, you served as president of CIDA from 2008 to 2013, I believe. At the beginning of my career, I worked a great deal with CIDA, especially organizing missions by Canadian companies to Africa under the industrial cooperation program.
Having had frequent discussions with African decision-makers, I know that they remain very nostalgic about CIDA’s role and Canada’s presence in Africa, now that all the major world powers are strengthening their presence there themselves.
After CIDA shut down and merged in 2013 with DFAIT, which became Global Affairs Canada in 2015, what are your thoughts on how the department was reorganized and Canada’s presence in Africa today?
[English]
Ms. Biggs: Thank you for the question, senator. I understand your question very well. I don’t have numbers for you in terms of the positions of Canadian officers that are serving in Africa, but I can say that Canada’s development assistance is still disproportionately targeted toward lower-income countries, many of which are in Africa. African countries are well represented there.
More broadly, I would underscore that we often view Africa, and I think Michael Small mentioned this, in terms of our development role, which is hugely important. Africa is an extremely important continent with many emerging economies. There are a number of security risks there. We know that other powers, or adversaries in many cases, are looking for commercial influence and other kinds of influence on the African continent. Extrapolating from your question, senator, I would advise that we not take our eye off the continent of Africa and that we see it for its strategic importance to Canada going forward.
[Translation]
Senator Gerba: I would tend to agree with Ms. Biggs.
Today, other countries mostly see Africa as a strategic partner. Other countries are strengthening their economic relations with Africa, especially right now, given AfCFTA, the African Continental Free Trade Area.
In your opinion, would it be important for Canada to somewhat revisit its role on the economic and trade front with Africa, and strengthen the presence of qualified staff in embassies?
[English]
Ms. Biggs: Thank you very much. Again, I don’t want to comment on or criticize what is currently going on, because I’m not aware. I do agree — and this goes back to the point I was making about trade and development — we can combine our forces and look at which African countries are looking to grow their economies, for trade facilitation and ways to break into markets. Our trade service can help with that. From the development point of view, we can help them build the enabling conditions for economic growth and trade.
It’s an important issue that you put your finger on, and we tend to think that Africa is not of much strategic and economic importance, and it is.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you to our witnesses today. I first would like to go back to the original point. Ms. Biggs, I would like you to finish talking about leveraging. I was interested in the last part of the second and third points you were starting to address about democracy. If you would just take a moment to finish that, could you start there?
Ms. Biggs: Thank you. The departments were put together, the units were put together, to create some coherence and synergy. In trade and development, there is more to be done, but I wanted to mention two other areas.
One had to do with democracy support. We know that autocratic forces are on the rise and democratic norms are under assault. We’ve known this, and it’s come to a head in recent weeks and months. Together, I believe, the political cadre and the development folks in the department have the opportunity to deliver an ambitious democracy support agenda. This is where Ben Rowswell has a lot of experience. We’ve tended to downplay it, and we can pull together and build up our assets in that area. It touches on a couple of parts of the new department.
I also wanted to mention the sustainable development goals, or SDGs, not as a pitch, although I could do that. Too often people think the SDGs are just a niche development issue, a UN checklist or something that we have to report on, but I believe that the SDGs provide a powerful framework that can integrate, align and help mobilize all the department assets. It is the lingua franca in many international conversations now, but for the department, they could use it more to align their objectives with their political, security, governance, development and trade interests. That’s the point that I wanted to make on that. Thank you.
Senator M. Deacon: Do I still have time, Mr. Chair?
The Chair: Yes, you have one and a half minutes.
Senator M. Deacon: Thank you for that. It’s very helpful.
Mr. Rowswell, coming back to some of your experience in the field, using the historical perspective you’ve given us today, you referred to the examples of pulling out diplomats, and I think it’s something you’re passionate about that you’ve observed and seen happening.
Are there other scenarios in a similar sense that concern you — not just about pulling out diplomats but other issues in that field that are of equal concern? What do you think the international perception is about Canada’s services in terms of this kind of decision in the long run?
Mr. Rowswell: I do think it’s essential that we have people on the ground. It’s important for credibility, even if it’s one or two people. You could still fly the flag when you have one person, and for that purpose it’s important to be there.
Even in the Iraq conflict, when we strongly opposed the intervention, the leaders of the day — including Peter Harder, who was deputy minister — felt it was important for us to have someone on the ground so that we had Canadian eyes and ears and so that we were not always relying on our partners for their perspectives.
There is also a longer-term gain. Diplomats are often thinking in terms of 10 or 15 years. Something might be difficult now. For example, having diplomats in Moscow might be constrained right now. What if there is some kind of change in Russia? We need our missions to stay open, even when it is dangerous and even when these countries are adversaries, because embassies are instruments of state power. In the contemporary argument about Russia, I do hope that we stay open.
Senator Boniface: My question is to Mr. Guimond and Mr. Rowswell.
Former Canadian diplomat, Daryl Copeland, has argued that Global Affairs would benefit from a flatter and more focused headquarters, with more foreign service and a large role for missions abroad. Former diplomat, Bruce Mabley, expressed a similar view that GAC needs to find ways to reduce archaic and hierarchical management processes and make the department much more horizontal-knowledge-based.
I’m interested in your comments on that. As former diplomats, would you echo those concerns? Do you also believe that current management structure is perhaps too vertical in nature?
[Translation]
Mr. Guimond: I think the other witnesses talked earlier about this balance or imbalance between the department’s capacities in Ottawa and in its missions abroad. One of the foundations of the principle of rotational pools, rotationality, is that foreign service officers have to do both missions, that is, they have to be at headquarters in Ottawa to contribute to policy development, and then they have to go out in the field to put into practice the policies developed at the department.
Therefore, in my view, it’s a central element to have staff members who advise ministers on policy formulation in Ottawa and know what’s going on in the field, and conversely, people who can provide assistance in the field, because staff members know the reasons why policies were formulated in Ottawa and can implement them. Is 50% of officers in Ottawa and 50% in the field the right balance? I don’t know. We have to strike a good balance between involvement in developing policy and implementing it. That’s all I could say on the matter.
Mr. Rowswell: Thank you very much, Pierre.
[English]
I would offer that a diplomatic corps operates in two different ways: as a hierarchy, for sure — you have a minister and deputy minister, and all the way down — but also as networks. Networks are the archetypal organizing principle of our age. Without even making major changes, there is already an incipient network structure to diplomacy. The pools that Pierre mentioned to you create connections across the levels.
Of course, we are networking with foreign diplomats, foreign publics and foreign civil societies all the time, so I wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the hierarchy. I would just play up the networking. Remember that hierarchies are for organizations in which information is scarce, and that is no longer the case. You can have junior officials who have a tremendous amount of knowledge, maybe almost as much as those at the top of the hierarchy. It is more a question of empowering people throughout their ranks and empowering the locally engaged staff, which is where the bulk of our network power resides within the Canadian foreign policy establishment.
Senator Boniface: Mr. Rowswell, I’m interested in your comments about Venezuela and Iran in terms of keeping our presence. Can you help me understand why we choose not to keep our presence?
Mr. Rowswell: These are two very different situations. For Iran, I believe we wanted to send a signal that we didn’t like Iran. You could call that virtue signalling. It’s usually not associated with that particular party, but it’s a practice in diplomacy. We disregard the actual function and we think, well, this would make a great communications method.
In Venezuela it had nothing to do with that. We had difficulty in getting Canadians on the ground. Because there is bias and discrimination against locally engaged employees in the Canadian Foreign Service, we decided we couldn’t operate a mission, even with Venezuelans who are very competent and extremely committed to Canada. I think that was an error, but for very different reasons.
Senator Coyle: Thank you to all our witnesses today.
It’s good to see you again, Ms. Biggs. I have a question for you. I love the way you framed things around context, capabilities and coherence. I was heartened to hear your judgment that with CIDA now being within the big picture, you don’t see that resulting in any adverse effect.
You spoke about the need for strong development capacity and about democracy and the SDGs. We know there is tremendous expertise in the south among the partners that Canada is working with. How does that play out in what you see today in terms of our needs for strong development capacity within our Foreign Service?
Ms. Biggs: Thank you very much for the question, senator. First, I would say that you might wish to ask other witnesses to address the question. When CIDA and the other department were amalgamated, many feared that the development piece would become subordinated or sublimated. I don’t see that, but you should ask.
One of the key things about the development piece in the department is that it should be demand driven. It is about Canada’s moral imperatives, but it is also about Canada’s interests. These are defined over the medium and longer term; they are not about the short term. What we do in the development space should be demand driven and it should be based upon our understanding and what we hear from our partners on the ground about the needs and priorities of those countries and communities. That’s the difference.
We have seen this over the decades: If you want to be effective in this space, you can’t be supply driven and impose priorities. The same would go for issues related to democratic development and support. We can export expertise and technical assistance, but at the end of the day we need to be able to support the development of Indigenous practices and governance and civil society, et cetera.
I hope that answers your question. It’s not just a tactic; it is actually the essence of the development purpose of the department.
Senator Coyle: I appreciate where you are going with this. Could you go a little further in terms of what are the implications for the personnel whom we want to attract and train in a certain way to be good interlocutors in that development environment, as described?
Ms. Biggs: It’s similar to what we have heard from some of our first-rate, world-class diplomats. You have to develop expertise. It’s the same for development. It is not something you just pass through. You have to understand the needs, and you have to be on the ground. You also have to understand your intervention — whether it is assistance on the education side or health systems or whatever it may be — and what leads to effective results.
It is both strategic and also very much context driven. Because of the international assistance side of it, you need strong skills to understand what makes for effective development and what instruments will work best.
It is like everything else in the department. You need expertise and you need to make sure that you develop that expertise and maintain the capacity, similar to some of the other areas. In the Trade Commissioner Service or trade policy, it is the same. You need people who are highly expert. That doesn’t mean you can’t have people moving between the dimensions of the department, but I worry about the watering down of the expertise.
Senator Richards: Thank you to all the witnesses. This is extremely informative. My overview question is for Mr. Rowswell. I listened with interest when you mentioned 1939. By the end of 1945 Canada had the fourth-largest army and third-largest navy in the world. We are certainly not that robust now, and I think the dealing with Ukraine has been a little bit shameful by NATO, but that’s my personal opinion and not the opinion of the committee.
I wonder, sir, if more coordination between Global Affairs Canada and our military would alleviate some problems. Would it be able to function better? That’s the only question I have, sir.
Mr. Rowswell: I’m happy to speak to that because our experience in Kandahar I think is quite positive. Canadian civilian employees and Canadian Armed Forces can work extremely closely together. I mentioned I led a team of 80 civilians. That included aid workers, diplomats, civilian police — RCMP, OPP and others — and correctional services. We were fully integrated into Task Force Kandahar, which was the command led by General Jonathan Vance when he was the one-star general running our mission. Our offices were side by side. Our headquarters staff were essentially one single united staff. It was an extraordinary experiment in civil-military integration. It was replicated all the way up to a task force that included representatives from those two departments in Ottawa and a cabinet committee that had the Minister of Defence and Minister of Foreign Affairs. So it is possible.
Both sides of that coin, the civilian side and defence side, are learning organizations, and they can adapt to one another’s culture. They are both committed to the wellbeing of Canada and to advancing our interests, so there is no reason why we cannot do so. What I have found is that it depends on two things. It depends on strategy and it depends on people.
Strategy, there has to be some overarching structure that you are working toward. That was put into place quite laboriously through those years. I worked with Ms. Biggs at the time in PCO, and there was that report by John Manley and then a whole-of-government strategy that was extremely detailed and helped identify how we would work together and what national interests we were trying to achieve. Then it comes down to people in that ultimately it doesn’t matter what structures you have in place, the people have to want to make it work. There are ways of identifying who works well in teams outside of their silos and who has talent in building those bridges and thinking creatively. I think we proved it in the past in Afghanistan and we could prove it again in Ukraine and whatever other conflict comes our way.
Senator Richards: Thank you very much. I have no further questions.
Senator Ravalia: Thank you to our witnesses. My question as well is for Mr. Rowswell. It’s sort of a follow-up to what Senator Richards brought up.
I appreciate your testimony of the lack of Canadian diplomatic presence in some key global hot spots from your personal experience. In the context of cybersecurity and historic alliances, do you feel that we face a vulnerability in partnerships that we have had long established, such as Five Eyes and Arctic security, et cetera, in light of the recent establishment of newer alliances such as AUKUS, which have excluded Canada? Thank you.
Mr. Rowswell: This is a highly fluid situation. We are in a period of time where the international order is changing and the institutions, the alliances are shifting. Certain institutions have risen quite quickly. I think of the Quad as a group of liberal democracies concerned about China. AUKUS, obviously a military grouping of the same, but I think we are just at the beginning of a whole era of institutional reinvention.
Canada should pay attention to the new ones arising — should we belong to that or not — but I think we should go further and decide for ourselves which new groupings make sense for us. For example, we don’t necessarily need to always follow the lead of the United States. It is obviously our biggest and most important partner and most powerful country in the world, so we don’t want to ignore them; but in our organization, we have been exploring what I think is a tremendously promising partnership with Germany.
Germany is reinventing its foreign policy in light of the Ukraine conflict and is massively ramping up not only its military spending but its defence spending, and Germany has far more in common with Canada when it comes to our values, our political culture and what have you, than either the United States or even the United Kingdom, for example. We are two countries that are essentially twins of one another when it comes to our values. This is the most important country in Europe. Instead of following others, why don’t we say there are partners out there willing to work with us? We built an alliance. We are trying to build this new network for democratic solidarity.
I would strongly emphasize that we embrace countries of the global South. There is no reason at all in this new era of international conflict for us to assume it is us and Western Europe. That was a factor in the 1940s when NATO was created because that made sense at the time. We are a global nation, and the countries that share our values exist all around the world. We should be finding ways to join forces with some of those countries in the Americas, in Africa, in the Middle East and in Asia.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Rowswell. I’m interrupting you, and with the indulgence of Senator Ravalia, I think perhaps Mr. Guimond, as a former policy planner, might have a view on this, if I may.
[Translation]
Mr. Guimond: Yes, I heard someone make a comment earlier about the unpredictability of foreign policy and international relations. Global Affairs Canada has the skills. Mr. Chair, you pointed out that I was director of policy planning for a few years. Back then, we created a forecasting bureau that regularly did studies looking far into the future, 10 or 20 years into the future. This goes far beyond the political programs of our governments, which last four or five years. However, it’s an exercise that needs to be done. These individuals foresaw the pandemic several years ago and discussed how a small but large organization like Global Affairs Canada should respond to it. It’s very difficult to create organizations that can deal with these issues over the very long term. I believe that you have to be able to convey a very long-term vision within short-term operationalization that meets the policy needs of the moment and in the medium term.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Guimond.
[English]
Senator Harder: My question is for Margaret Biggs. Ms. Biggs, you are well placed to give a little bit more on what you called the home game. It is important to have a home game, but for Global Affairs, the home game ought not just be 125 Sussex Drive. There was a time when Allan Gotlieb was the deputy minister — which is now 50 years ago, I guess — when foreign affairs was described as a central agency. In other words, part of its home game was to coordinate the domestic departments and to perform a role which your former department, Privy Council Office, now claims at its sole jurisdiction.
If you were to give us more advice on to the home game, not with respect to the headquarters but the home game with respect to the Government of Canada, and even provinces for that matter, what would it be?
Ms. Biggs: Thank you, Senator Harder. Maybe I’m back to the future, but I actually think that given how ubiquitous global issues are and how domestic and global issues are so intertwined, how global issues transcend boundaries, I do believe that Global Affairs Canada needs to situate itself and be seen as essentially a central agency.
I did spend six years at the Privy Council Office before I became the president at CIDA, and I was there for Iraq and Afghanistan and international policy review. What is hugely important is, as robust as we need to be overseas, Global Affairs need to bring the global story to the centre of government and to Canadians. It needs to reclaim, and maybe earn, some of the respect by showing it brings value to policy deliberations at the centre.
Somebody mentioned, maybe Mr. Rowswell mentioned that we know there has been highly centralized decision making. It is not just the current government. It is a function in part of the 24-7 rapidity by which things happen now.
So there is a centralization of issues. But there is no way the Privy Council office or the Prime Minister’s office can have the capacity to distill the key global events that are going on or to do the policy creativity — the kinds of ideas that Mr. Rowswell was just saying that we need to do — to think about how Canada can position itself in this really rapidly changing world that’s in flux.
I’m not sure I’m answering your question. We can focus on the “way game” but I think what has been missing in part over the last number of decades is to reinforce Global Affairs Canada’s presence at the centre of government.
The Chair: I had a number of questions, but since at the outset I said that this study could take about a year, I know I can keep them in reserve. I wanted to follow up on Senator Harder’s question and pitch it directly to Mr. Rowswell and Mr. Guimond. That is: Why does Global Affairs Canada — the foreign service — how does it matter to Canadians? Mr. Rowswell, you and your organization have undertaken consultations across the country, and I congratulate you for that and for revitalizing the CIC. You are hearing different things from different branches. But is there sort of a lapse in Canadians’ knowledge or just how they look at foreign policy, how it’s managed? They think in consular terms, okay, if I get in trouble abroad, my government will look after me and bring me home. It’s really not that simple; we know that. And on foreign policy we have to be represented everywhere. All of this costs money; that’s the other argument you get. I’m wondering what you are hearing across the country.
To Mr. Guimond, you are, of course, teaching younger people to have a knowledge of foreign policy and what Canada does in terms of its presence. I would welcome comments on your part.
Mr. Rowswell: Thank you so much for that opportunity. We ran an exercise in deliberative democracy called Foreign Policy By Canadians, in which we asked an exactly representative sample of the whole population of Canada what they wanted our engagement in the world to be like. It was really quite an innovative way to go about asking the question, because it showed us when Canadians express issues in their own words how they talk about the world. We found a few things over the 12 hours of deliberation we held with these 444 Canadians, and I would be happy to submit the report for the record.
First is that Canadians are not just service takers whether it’s consular or what have you. Canadians, as citizens, I think, are generally — even those with lower education — conscious that their security and our economy depends on what happens outside of our country as well and are anxious for us to be as active and engaged in trying to shape what happens outside our country so that it helps us with the bottom line here in Canada.
We have found that something like 70% or 71% of Canadians are instinctively internationalist in their orientation, and that’s across all demographics and all areas. We found that they are open to spending on defence and development and diplomacy, most of all on security, I should say. But essentially the question they ask is: How does this advance our interests?
They have an acute sense of what our interests are. They recognize that it comes through connections with the world. But they seem to respond better when what we are trying to do in the world is brought back to how it might be —
The Chair: Thank you. I’m going to interrupt you right there to give Mr. Guimond exactly one minute to offer his thoughts.
[Translation]
Mr. Guimond: Universities don’t really teach Canadian diplomacy or foreign policy; they teach international relations much more. Canadian international relations is much broader than Canadian foreign policy. Canada has 250 groups with different linguistic or cultural backgrounds. They are interested in Canada’s international relations and the big issue — that’s why I talked about public affairs — is that you need to hire those individuals, like Ben Rowswell did at the Canadian International Council. All of this has to come through students. I was involved in recruiting new officers at Global Affairs Canada in 2019. You have to look at the quality of the young officers the department has hired, who are working on international tribunals and gaining a lot of experience. These officers have completed multidisciplinary studies to cover the areas Ms. Biggs mentioned.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We have a few minutes left and two senators have indicated they would like to speak again. I would ask each of them to take a turn to ask their question.
[English]
Colleagues, we have a few minutes left. We have two senators who have asked for second-round questions. I would ask each senator in sequence to ask the question, and then we’ll get the responses. That way, we can maximize the few minutes we have left.
[Translation]
Senator Gerba: My question is for Mr. Guimond or Mr. Rowswell. Observers have noted that some appointments to key positions, such as heads of mission, seem to be more political, and are not based on the skills and experience required for the positions in question. Did you witness any political appointments in the process?
[English]
The Chair: I would ask Senator Coyle to ask her question as well, and then we’ll get the answers.
Senator Coyle: Very quickly, Mr. Guimond, this is for you. You spoke about the engagement between Global Affairs Canada and the Canadian population in two different directions. You talked about ambassadors perhaps even travelling across Canada, engaging with Canadians, and you also talked about getting Canadians more involved in what Global Affairs Canada is doing. Could you speak to those two aspects, please?
[Translation]
Mr. Guimond: Thank you for the question, senator. On the first question about the appointment of heads of mission from outside the Canadian diplomatic community, Mr. Small spoke a lot about that earlier. I had the opportunity to work with former minister Lawrence Cannon, who was Canada’s ambassador to Paris. Mr. Cannon was exceptionally adept at working his way into French political circles. I can’t say it was a bad appointment. There are places where it’s very useful and there are places where it’s more difficult, like on small missions, as Mr. Small said. We’ve even had sometimes consulates run by non-diplomats, and that has made management relatively difficult. I don’t really have a strong opinion on this.
Senator Coyle, when it comes to engaging with Canadians, if we want foreign policy that reflects Canadians’ interests, that obviously has to come from the political parties in power, but it also requires day-to-day engagement. As I said earlier, there are 250 linguistic and cultural groups in Canada who are interested in international relations with a particular country or region of the world. So you have to nurture consistency, and it’s not as easy as you might think. We’re seeing some very important and compelling examples of these issues right now. In formulating policy and recommendations to the government, the department can do this kind of work if it has the resources and the expertise needed.
The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Guimond.
[English]
I’m sorry, Mr. Rowswell. There will have to be another time for you, I think.
A number of you had mentioned you might have some written comments or materials. Please, if you do, send them in to us via the clerk of the committee.
I would like to thank our witnesses on the second panel. Very informative. Very welcome comments so thank you very much.
Colleagues, are there any other items you would like to raise at this point? Okay. Our next meeting will take place on Thursday, April 28. The meeting is adjourned.
(The committee adjourned.)