Alumni of the Foreign Affairs Department are calling for a “major restructuring” of the federal office due to unnecessarily high numbers of employees, many of whom do not speak a foreign language, says a report submitted to a parliamentary committee.
“The current situation in the department is dire,” wrote retired staff of the department, who are part of the Foreign Service Alumni Forum, in a submission to the Senate foreign affairs committee, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.
“The department requires major restructuring to reduce its enormous and unwieldy senior management complement at headquarters and to focus its energies on priority issues and priority missions abroad,” it continued, adding that a number of the department’s senior managers possess “little or no knowledge of international affairs.”
The report also noted that the federal office, which is overseen by Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, employs 18 assistant deputy ministers and 90 directors general, and had a total of 12,500 employees last year.
“[The department has] a disproportionately high number of headquarters officers chasing a diminishing and insufficient number of assignments abroad supervised by an extraordinary number of largely inexperienced senior managers,” alumni wrote.
The report also noted that many diplomats cannot speak the local language when assigned to missions abroad, and that “minimal numbers” are trained in pivotal languages such as Mandarin, Russian, and Arabic.
“It has a woeful number of officers who speak Korean, Turkish, Farsi, German,” it said.
The submission also called much of Canada’s diplomatic presence in foreign nations “a Potemkin village.”
‘Must Adapt’
Joly told the House of Commons foreign affairs and international development committee last March that the government “must adapt” in terms of its foreign policy due to rapid changes across the globe, particularly due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“We need to make sure we adapt to these challenging times, therefore I personally think that it is important to do more on the military side,” she said on March 24, 2022.
“I think it is also important for Canada to be ready on the diplomatic front.”
In their committee submission, foreign affairs alumni advocated for a reform of the department to be carried out over the next several years.
“We urge a major reform effort carried out over the next five years,” they wrote. “Reducing the numbers of senior managers, increasing delegation of authority and enhancing internal communications would also streamline the department in ways that would free up resources for other requirements.”
