The forgotten side of foreign service is finally getting some love

Canada’s normally discreet diplomats sometimes tell their tales. There was the time Ron Berlet spirited a two-year old out of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia. Or the shipwrecked Canadian marijuana smuggler assisted by James Elliott, our man in Bogotá. Lawrence Dickenson, temporarily trapped in Bahrain during the first Gulf War, came up with gas masks for children.

These former envoys recounted their experiences on the consular side of diplomacy in a 2016 book called Declassified, a broad collection of memoirs by retired senior foreign service officers. It offered a glimpse at a side of public service few of us think about. It’s time we did.

If you’ve ever lost a passport abroad (I have), or been robbed (ditto), or suffered a medical emergency or been trapped in the midst of a coup or natural disaster, it’s consular folk who help you out. Since millions of Canadians travel outside this country each year, the consular job is crucial.

The federal government’s attitude to this work is crucial as well. For example, are Canadians who get into jams abroad — maybe arrested in some hellhole or kidnapped for ransom — treated equitably by our government, or does it aid some more than others? One-time consular affairs director general Gar Pardy produced a thoughtful study of this question last year, concluding that the government’s enthusiasm for helping beleaguered Canadians abroad has sometimes varied widely. Is that good or bad?

Meanwhile, in 2016, Canadians learned of the beheadings of kidnapped Canadians John Ridsdel and Robert Hall in the Philippines. We also became familiar with another sobering case: the kidnapping of four Canadian children by their Iranian-born father, Saren Azer, who whisked them back to Iran, leaving their Canadian mother, with legal custody here, all but helpless. And by now, we’ve read about dual citizen Huseyin Celil, imprisoned in China and out of reach of our consular officials for the last decade.

This is all the realm, initially at least, of consular services. It’s a bit shocking, given these stark examples, that it hasn’t gotten more attention. Until now.

Though foreign policy experts are focused on the latest Trumpisms, NDP MP Hélène Laverdière nonetheless convinced the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development this week to begin a proper study Canada’s consular apparatus.

Laverdière’s interest is twofold: like other MPs, she gets consular cases referred by constituents. But she sees even more since she’s also her party’s foreign affairs critic. She quickly realized our understanding of the consular system is patchwork.

Canada needs to review what it has done wrong in some consular cases, and what it gets right, she says. And it needs to examine how consular cases are treated across government departments. It’s not just Global Affairs Canada that gets involved in certain cases: the RCMP, CSIS — many different agencies can dip in, not always with good results. Think: Maher Arar.

Government officials also need more guidance on how to communicate about consular situations, Laverdière notes — both to families of those affected and to the public.

On the flip side, ordinary Canadians consistently misunderstand what our diplomats can actually do if we run into difficulty abroad. They can’t just spring you from jail if you’re charged with breaking another country’s laws, for instance. They can’t just buy you a plane ticket home.

With our heavy immigrant population, dual citizenship is common, but it can cause even more headaches when Canadians travel. Go back to your home country for a visit and it may not recognize your Canadian status at all; zap, you’re drafted into the army. Try to get into the United States under Trump-style travel policy in future and — well, who knows what you might bump up against?

Over the next while, the committee will look into all these matters, and presumably share its finding with Global Affairs Canada, which has long intended to revisit consular policy.

Aside from being Canada’s sesquicentennial, 2017 happens to be the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Canadian Consular Service in what was then the Department of External Affairs. It’s also the 50th anniversary of the coming into force of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations — which doesn’t actually contain a lot of fine detail about travellers’ rights. Let’s start by better understanding how Canada sees them. And travel safely, everyone. Christina Spencer is the Citizen’s editorial pages editor.