Jordan appointment another ‘slap to the pinstripes’

The news last week that the current chief of the Prime Minister’s security detachment, RCMP Supt. Bruno Saccomani, is to be named Canadian ambassador to Jordan and Iraq has caused buzz, not to say incredulity, around the media and the Canadian foreign affairs commentariat.

Mainly, people have either questioned his credentials or defended them, in either case because he is not a career diplomat. One commentator noted that “This is getting into what I would call the Upstairs, Downstairs category.” To rephrase that less elegantly, ennobling the captain of the guard is the sort of historical trope we tend to associate with good old-fashioned personal direct rule.

In the past there have been a couple of former military appointments to Head of Mission (Gen. John de Chastelain comes to mind, but de Chastelain lateralled from chief of defence staff — and then back again. When Gen. Rick Hillier was CDS he raised diplomatic hackles by appointing serving officers to senior political advisory roles with the government of Afghanistan.

A story late last week suggested that no RCMP officer had ever been appointed head of mission. Actually there has been at least one: former RCMP officer John Timmerman served as consul general in Chicago in the early ’70s. Before taking that post he had spent time in (then) External Affairs as head of security and intelligence liaison, and wrote the Security Manual of the day. Interestingly, he had also served as assistant commissioner of police in Kenya during the Mau Mau insurgency in the ’50s. He was the man who arrested Jomo Kenyatta (incidentally affirming that one generation’s security is another’s repression).

Why the government would have appointed anyone with Timmerman’s background into Chicago rather than a high-security-profile post — in, say, Amman — is at least as much of a head-turner as this latest one. But that could well have been an early case of the “Upstairs, Downstairs syndrome,” since the Canadian Foreign Service of the day was a great deal more hierarchical (and, be it admitted, clannish) than it has since become. Or it may simply have been what was available.

There have been many non-Foreign Service appointments over the years, many political, not all wellsuited to their assignments (the quip that “there’s something rotten in the state of Denmark” made the rounds after one such), and more than a few made straight out of assorted prime ministers’ offices, so one can’t help but feel that the reaction is at least partly tied to tribal animosities. Over the years, there have been some legendarily infamous career diplomat appointments, too.

A colleague notes that former PM Jean Chrétien made at least two head of mission appointments directly out of the PMO during his time. But, as the colleague added, in Chrétien’s hands it “just seemed like patronage” whereas coming from the current PMO “it seems like another slap to the pinstripes.”

Defensiveness on the part of the professional foreign service when faced with outside appointments has been around for as long as there has been a professional foreign service, and is understandable. Part of this is historical accident; for at least 15 years after the Second World War, Canadian professional foreign service officers not only made huge contributions on the world stage, but also occupied top positions in the Canadian government, and the service did begin to show the signs of a closed shop. Professor Kim Nossal of Queen’s University has written extensively on the closed nature of foreign policy influences in Canada for many years. (Not that re-seating those influences to another locus within government might necessarily make them more accessible.)

But it is pretty much an open secret that the current Canadian government and the Canadian foreign affairs establishment have never gotten along either on processes or policy, Middle Eastern policy being one of the more visible points of contention.

The general impression under this government is of determination to wrest the levers of foreign policy out of the hands of the Department of Foreign Affairs Trade and Development and subject it to more direct central control — no unique theme in Ottawa these days. It’s worth remembering that originally, heads of diplomatic missions were trusted personal emissaries between potentates. This government is also willing to try other, quite creative channels, as in its use of MP for Yellowhead Rob Merrifield as a sort of emissary-without portfolio to Congress.

What makes the current nomination especially piquant and/ or ominous, is the fact that it coincides with a labour dispute between the government and the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers.

For the past few weeks, PAFSO has been taking job action, including “wearing creative clothing” now that the government has cracked down on out-of-office replies over official email channels.

It’s far too easy to read hidden meanings into even mildly unusual appointments by a government. But somehow one gets the impression that this may not be the best time for the foreign service union to get into a head-banger with this government. Somehow the wind seems wrong.