Conservative government ‘suppressed’ diplomats: PM’s adviser

Key bureaucrat criticized tight message control

• Canada’s G7 sherpa says the previous Conservative government “suppressed” everything diplomats tried to do during its decade in power.

Peter Boehm said the fact that the foreign service is now able to speak freely will help advance the feminist foreign policy of the current Trudeau Liberals.

“I don’t want to get political, but I will for a moment. So for 10 years, anything that the foreign service was doing was suppressed in our country,” Boehm said Friday during a panel discussion in Ottawa hosted by the United Nations Association of Canada.

The career public servant is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s top adviser for the G7 leaders’ summit he is hosting in Quebec in June, and where advancing gender equality and empowering women is a key theme.

“With the current government we have an opportunity to put our best foot forward to show what it is we can do, to highlight our professionalism and I think this is happening,” Boehm said.

“This inspires the next generation.”

The panellists were discussing how to overcome barriers for women in their various diplomatic corps and Boehm said one way was to allow female diplomats to talk about their jobs publicly, so they can be role models.

Boehm confirmed after the speech that his complaints of suppression referred to the 2006-15 tenure of the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper.

Others have complained that the Conservatives shackled senior public servants and foreign envoys and required them to clear almost all public communications with their political masters in Ottawa.

The message control including having speeches vetted and meetings approved by Ottawa, as well as the crafting of detailed talking points for events in which Canadian diplomats participated in on foreign soil.

On the day he was sworn in as prime minister, Trudeau sent Canadian diplomats a letter telling them “a new era” had dawned and that the strict message control was a thing of the past. The prime minister told them they had a critical role to play in communicating the foreign policy of their country.

“Our heads of mission now are encouraged to engage on social media, to make statements on government policy and in fact to, wherever they are, engage with the media — the hard media — not just social media,” Boehm said in an interview after his speech. “This is something new. My point is this gets the message out in terms of our vocation.”

In the context of Canada’s G7 chairmanship, that also means being able to highlight the stories of female diplomats, he said.

“Part of what we need to do is provide fearless policy advice and loyal implementation and we had lost the capacity,” Boehm said.

“Those muscles, those policy muscles had atrophied to a degree and now they’re active again and on gender equality this is but an example of that.”

Four of Canada’s six G7 allies are now represented by female envoys in Ottawa.

British High Commissioner Susan le Jeune d’ Allegeershecque said gender equality is at the heart of what her country is trying to accomplish internationally, including eradicating sexual violence as a weapon of war, forced marriage and female genital mutilation.

She said it is important for gender issues to be “at the heart of the G7 agenda.”

“The battle is not won,” she told the gathering. “There are forces out there that are trying to take us in the opposite direction.”