Moved:

That the twelfth report of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade, entitled More than a Vocation: Canada’s Need for a 21st Century Foreign Service, deposited with the Clerk of the Senate on Wednesday, December 6, 2023, be adopted and that, pursuant to rule 12-23(1), the Senate request a complete and detailed response from the government, with the Minister of Foreign Affairs being identified as the minister responsible for responding to the report.

He said: Honourable senators, I’m very pleased to rise today as Chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade to begin consideration of the committee’s twelfth report, entitled More than a Vocation: Canada’s Need for a 21st Century Foreign Service, which was deposited with the Clerk of the Senate on December 6, 2023.

Colleagues, until this study, it had been more than 40 years since a substantive examination of Canada’s foreign service had been undertaken.

The last time was in 1981 when the Royal Commission on Conditions of Foreign Service — led by former Canadian diplomat, Pamela McDougall — was released.

Today, our foreign service faces new challenges.

The world of today is increasingly unstable and violent, with impacts on our trading relationships, supply chains, sovereignty, and our influence around the world. Also, there has been an increase in consular and humanitarian emergencies.

Our foreign service is under more pressure than ever, but it is full of dedicated and highly skilled professionals who work hard every day in service to Canada and Canadians.

That said, to be able to continue advancing and defending Canada’s interests at home and abroad, there is significant work to do to ensure our foreign service can meet the serious challenges of today, tomorrow and the decades to come.

The key question guiding our study was: Are Global Affairs Canada and the Canadian Foreign Service fit for purpose? The committee’s answer is yes — but with several caveats.

Over 16 meetings between April 2022 and June 2023, we were guided by 22 hours of testimony from expert witnesses, ranging from current and former ministers — including one former prime minister — to retired practitioners, academics, younger serving officers and members of employee-led networks within the department.

We made 29 recommendations designed to strengthen the already considerable abilities of our foreign service.

Among the committee’s concerns is staffing. The Foreign Service is still feeling the effects of a 10-year suspension in Foreign Service recruitment between 2009 and 2019.

We heard that Global Affairs Canada has been relying on short-term contractors and students, but this is not the way to develop an experienced workforce that can help Canada be a global leader in the 21st century.

One statistic that continues to stand out to me personally is that the average age of a foreign service officer below management or executive rank is currently 47.

In my view, this is a direct consequence of inconsistent recruitment and lack of planning and suggests that talent could be better managed.

Recent events have also underscored the importance of a foreign service that can respond with agility to emergencies. For example, Canadians have been evacuated from conflict zones such as Lebanon, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza — thanks in large part to our Foreign Service.

But we heard that what is known as “surge capacity” — that is, the ability to rapidly deploy resources to manage constantly developing events — should be increased.

Canadians abroad should feel confident that their Foreign Service will be there for them in their time of need.

The committee therefore strongly encourages Global Affairs Canada, in its ninth recommendation, to run an annual entry-level Foreign Service officer recruitment campaign to fill vacancies and create needed surge capacity.

Enhancing the skills and abilities of foreign service officers can be done through other initiatives as well. The committee has made several recommendations in that vein. For example, our witnesses told us there are many advantages to encouraging secondments and hiring people with different professional backgrounds, including people in the middle of their careers. At the same time, we heard the culture of the department prizes knowledge gained from experience in international affairs.

While I can certainly vouch for the benefit of such experience, international issues encompass a vast range of topics.

One way to encourage the development of expertise in different areas is captured by the committee’s twentieth recommendation — namely, that public servants should pursue temporary opportunities, such as secondments and interchanges, in and out of the federal public service.

There is a wealth of knowledge and experience across our great country, but leveraging it requires some out-of-the-box thinking not inherent to a department as relatively risk-averse as Global Affairs Canada.

Further, the committee, in its twelfth recommendation, urges Global Affairs Canada to recruit more mid-career professionals from other government departments and, importantly, from outside government altogether.

This would immediately help to broaden the department’s skill set and is another way of providing it with more tools.

Our study revealed that generalist knowledge is prioritized over specific thematic expertise. That is due, in part, to some of the staffing challenges.

A good generalist can move from one file to another as needed, providing the department with flexibility and adaptability in sometimes rapidly changes circumstances.

However, it is clear that specialists are vital to the mission of Global Affairs Canada. Russia and China will continue to hold the world’s attention for years to come. As such, Russia and China specialists — people with profound understanding of the languages, cultures and goals of these countries and their governments — are invaluable.

Developing these capabilities will take time and money, but the rewards would be well worth it. That is why the committee is urging Global Affairs Canada, in its eighteenth recommendation, to increase investment in foreign language training and provide opportunities for Canada-based staff trained in a foreign language to maintain their foreign language skills throughout their careers.

This also speaks to the committee’s seventeenth recommendation on the equal use of French and English within the department and to ensure that ab initio official language training is maintained for new hires.

In recommendation 26, the committee is also encouraging Global Affairs Canada to establish a pathway for specialists who would be expected to maintain, with the support of relevant training, specific geographic, functional and/or linguistic expertise.

The conditions of the foreign service could also be improved.

The Foreign Service Directives provide for allowances and benefits for staff serving abroad and are long overdue for review; again, much has changed since 1981.

This includes the unique needs of officers posted with families — including blended and separated families, ones with aging parents and children with special needs — officers with partners with their own careers, and single officers posted alone.

As such, the committee, in its twenty-third recommendation, strongly urges a complete modernization of the Foreign Service Directives to ensure they are adapted to the current and evolving realities faced by Canada’s public servants.

While good progress has been made in seeing our country’s diversity reflected among officers at the working level, it should also be visible among senior management and heads of mission. For example, I would personally like to see more representation of Indigenous peoples.

On the positive side, as of June 2023, half of all of Canada’s heads of mission were women. That is a big deal, but moving forward on diversity does not stop there. Thus, the committee is encouraging Global Affairs Canada, in its tenth recommendation, to identify and address barriers faced by minority groups in the department, including Black and Asian Canadians and Indigenous peoples.

Canada needs a strong and capable Foreign Service. Whether it’s negotiating free trade agreements, providing expert analysis on trends and issues or assisting Canadians fleeing conflict zones, the Foreign Service has a broad range of important responsibilities that affect Canadians here at home and around the world.

The vital work of Foreign Service officers is a big reason why several of our major allies, including Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, have also undertaken or are in the process of undertaking reviews of their own foreign services.

As such, the committee undertook two very important and productive fact-finding missions in support of this study: the first to Washington, in December 2022, and the second to London, Oslo and Berlin, in September 2023.

A question the committee kept in mind as a reminder of why this study was undertaken was, “Why does the Foreign Service matter, and why should Canadians care?”

It is exactly because of the broad range of duties of the department and the Foreign Service specifically that Canadians must care about their Foreign Service being ready to serve them now and in the future. What happens around the world impacts us here at home, from economic security to physical security. Canada’s Foreign Service is at the forefront of mitigating negative impacts and taking advantage of opportunities.

This goes to the very heart of the committee’s first recommendation — that Global Affairs Canada must do a better job of communicating to Canadians what it, and the Foreign Service specifically, does. There can be little understanding of the role of the Foreign Service without public outreach by the department. It is true that our Foreign Service faces many challenges, both internally and externally, but, as I strongly believe, Canada’s Foreign Service officers are the best in the world at what they do.

There is hard work ahead, and what the committee recommended is not the end of it. We did not even get into costing issues. The department also knows that the path ahead will not be easy, having launched its own internal review in May 2022.

I have every confidence that the government will consider our report seriously and take appropriate action, informed by the committee’s recommendations. Some of those echo ones made by Ms. McDougall and the Royal Commission 43 years ago. That should tell you something.

We need to ensure that our talented people have the tools, skill sets, funding and consistent non-partisan political support to do their jobs. It is often said that foreign policy is rarely, if ever, on the ballot, but Canadians would certainly notice if we did not have a foreign service. That is why the Foreign Service matters.

The committee launched this study in April 2022 with the goal of completing a thorough and thoughtful review of Canada’s Foreign Service and the foreign policy machinery at Global Affairs Canada.

As chair, I am very proud of the result of that study — this excellent report — and see it as a road map the department can use to modernize the Foreign Service as it considers lessons learned during its own Future of Diplomacy review.

I wish to thank my fellow committee members, including deputy chair, Senator Harder — who was at one time my boss at Global Affairs Canada in our previous lives — and other senators who participated in meetings over the course of this study.

I must also acknowledge our own highly skilled and dedicated professionals who worked so hard to make this study and report happen.

In no particular order, I want to thank our committee clerk, Chantal Cardinal, and our former, now-retired clerk Gaëtane Lemay, as well as their teams in the Committees Directorate. I thank our Library of Parliament analysts, Nadia Faucher and Brian Hermon, and my Director of Parliamentary Affairs, Christina Cail.

On the final report itself, I want to thank the committee’s communications officer, Amely Coulombe, as well as Michel Thérien, the graphic designer at Senate Communications who came up with the idea for the report cover’s much-discussed image of a pile of obsolete floppy disks.

Finally, while you will not see the names of senators’ staff in committee reports, I wish to thank the staff of members of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade for their own hard work and contributions to our study and to this report.

Colleagues, as consideration of this report continues, leading to its adoption and a government response, I encourage my fellow committee members and other interested senators to speak to it here in the chamber.

Just as the Foreign Service would benefit from the perspectives of people beyond Global Affairs Canada, this report would benefit from the perspectives of senators beyond members of this committee.

As chair of the committee and as a former career Foreign Service officer deeply committed to helping ensure our Foreign Service succeeds now and in the future, it was my honour to lead this generational study. Thank you.