Canada is bad at helping citizens abroad

Auditor general says consular officials too slow to address abuses overseas

The auditor general has found that it takes months for Global Affairs staff to formally report instances of torture abroad, and does not always contact those who have been arrested or detained. This is the kind of finding that ought to be reported in 48-point font, or at least in ALL CAPS, or perhaps accompanied by a man from 12th-century England with a bugle.

Taking more than a month to do anything generally indicates that you feel you are extending a favour rather than fulfilling a duty. But if a government has any duty, is it not to take every reasonable action to prevent its own citizens from being tortured or held unjustly?

It fulfils less palatable duties with less foot-dragging. If you drive like a maniac and plow into a tree, you can expect to see a doctor. If you throw a vase at your dear old Aunt Becky, you can expect to be given anger management training. If you murder a golden retriever puppy and accidentally drop your wallet in the grave you dig for it, you can expect to have publicly funded legal counsel.

But if you visit your mother in Iran, negotiate a business deal in China, conduct a human rights inquiry in Turkey or single-handedly keep the tourism industry running in Mexico and you’re duly taken in or tortured, do not expect Canadian officials to trouble themselves to assess the torture quickly enough to help prevent more of it, or even to pick up the phone.

While Bob from Saskatoon is having his fingernails manually extracted in Riyadh, Canadian officials are taking anywhere between 30 to 180 days to figure out how to fill out the report, a task that according to the auditor general they complete by drawing on some one-hour sessions that teach them how to conduct prison visits but not how to assess possible instances of torture. And they’re not calling all those detained, and not always saying why.

Could the government not at least guarantee that all anti-torture-related services be provided by end-of-month?

If not, at least we can take comfort in the knowledge that is only because they will not guarantee much of anything overseas, except to inform Canadians when they perhaps ought not go overseas. Global Affairs is quite good at providing advisories to stay home.

It didn’t even track its performance for 49 of its 52 advertised service standards.

It all raises the question as to whether the Canadian government is under the impression that it deploys the foreign service to hand out sightseeing maps.

But I suppose the government — this particular one or any government before it — isn’t completely at fault. It’s more the fault of whoever has given governments the impression that if someone ventures abroad, they have whatever is coming to them. The problem is us. Our weird mistrust of trips abroad is even weirder now that we’re taking 55 million of them a year, up 20 per cent from 10 years ago. If it is our own trip that results in arrest and torture though, we might expect some assistance, which we might greet with a sense of expectation rather than obsequious gratitude. This expectation is quite right in the sense that our government’s timely response to torture is entirely necessary, and quite wrong in the sense that a timely response is often not given.

It makes it hard to know how we, in turn, should respond to difficulties abroad. When I was interviewing slaves in Qatar last year I was detained by a couple of police officers who told me I was lucky it was them taking me into the station and not the guys on the next shift. They let me go later that night. “A favour,” one of them called it.

He didn’t extend the same generosity to my recorder. It seemed prudent to let someone know what had happened, and there was only one call I expected might result in timely, effective assistance if the police came back for me.

And really, I appreciated my editor expressing concern.