First Days at External

At my desk in Fort Pearson, 1990

When I moved to Ottawa to join the foreign service I spent my first night in a jail cell. It was May 1990, and I had taken the bus from Cambridge, Ontario, an eight hour journey. I arrived with a large suitcase containing one suit, two new sports jackets, three new pairs of dress pants, five shirts, a half-dozen ties, two new pairs of leather dress shoes that hurt my feet, plus whatever other clothing I could stuff inside. I was mostly broke and didn’t know a soul in Ottawa, so after arriving at the bus station I made my way to the youth hostel on Nicholas Street, which was once the city jail. My bunk was in a cell down the hall from the scaffold from which condemned prisoners were once hanged; a new noose had been added to it for macabre effect. The hostel was quiet, and my only neighbour was a Japanese student who asked me to teach him the words to 'O Canada'.

The following day my new employer – officially known then as External Affairs and International Trade Canada, but referred to by everyone in Ottawa as simply “External” – gave me an advance and hired someone to help me find an apartment with immediate occupancy, so I only had to spend a couple more nights on death row. I rented an unfurnished, ninth-floor, one-bedroom apartment with new hardwood floors, relatively few cockroaches, and a spectacular view of the Gatineau hills to the north. At the old Home Hardware store on Elgin Street I bought a patio table and chairs to stand in for a dining room set, literally rolling the round table home on its edge. I then rented a van to drive back to Cambridge to retrieve some very old pots and pans, a second-hand couch and lamps, and a well-used futon mattress passed along by a high school friend who apologized for the period stains she couldn’t get out of the fabric. My new apartment was spartan, but it was steps from the Rideau Canal, and a pleasant half-hour walk along Sussex Drive to the Lester B.Pearson Building, External’s headquarters.

It was a big change from where I’d been the month before. In April I was writing final exams at the end of my first year of law school at the University of Western Ontario. I liked law school well enough, and had good enough grades to make the Dean’s honour roll. But when in January of that year I’d received a phone call from Ottawa offering me a gig in the foreign service, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. After all, you can always go to law school, but how many people get a chance to try being a diplomat? The caller had asked if I could start right away, but I put them off until after exams, so that I could qualify for a year’s leave of absence from law school in case the diplomat thing didn’t work out.

I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived to work at the Pearson Building. It’s sometimes referred to by its denizens as “Fort Pearson”, which is an apt description. It’s a giant brown structure shaped like an assembly of odd-shaped shoe boxes piled in a heap (or maybe something a kid would build in minecraft), situated on a sort of island between the Rideau River and the six lanes of traffic roaring to and from the bridge to Gatineau, Quebec. Access is limited to a small turnaround that leads from Sussex Drive to the front main doors, and a parking garage below the building that’s approached from the rear. There are no walls or fences surrounding the building, for there is no need. There are no main floor windows. Instead, the brown walls of the building sort of erupt out of the ground and stretch up ten or fifteen feet before the first row of hermetically sealed tinted glass appears.

When you enter Fort Pearson there’s a large atrium with flags and large works of Canadian art. I think there was a GordonSmith painting hung prominently when I worked there. In my memory the atrium was huge, but I was back for a meeting at recently, and it turns out it’s smaller than I remembered. It also appears to have the same brown leather couches in the waiting area as it did in 1990, but maybe I’m mistaken. Front and centre is a reception desk where visitors check in, and behind it, to the left, a large cafeteria, where at certain times of the day certain high ranking officials would sit at particular tables and have coffee. Sort of like high school, where the senior students had their table and any grade nines foolish enough to sit at it would be glared at by other students until they relocated elsewhere.

The offices in Fort Pearson are situated in four “towers” or elevator banks; only the ‘A’ tower, which has the Minister’s office in it, is truly a tower. After I’d been working at External for a couple weeks, my director general at the time took me and another newbie, my great friend Sarah, on a tour of the Minister’s office. The Minister at that time was Joe Clark, who had once briefly been Prime Minister, but he was nearing the end of his run at External, soon to be replaced by Barbara McDougall. The Minister’s office was spacious, and I recall three specific things about it: the private bathroom, the large balcony, and the brown leather furniture (I was told Mr. Clark was fond of brown leather).

Unlike the Minister’s office, the rest of the building was a rabbits’ warren of corridors, small offices (many of them windowless), and walls of a post-industrial hue of greenish-beige that put your stomach slightly off on cloudy days. There were two or three times the number of employees working in Fort Pearson than it had been intended to house when it was constructed in the late 1960s. The building was designed with thin interior walls made of metal that could be moved around, though not quickly or easily, to reconfigure working spaces and offices in response to changing needs. Perhaps the only tangible benefit of metal walls was that magnets could be used instead of pushpins to hang things up.

In my first weeks I was assigned to an administrative unit responsible for paying out benefits to diplomats overseas – things like allowances for supplemental vacation travel, sending kids to private schools, unusual medical expenses, and so forth. It was pretty dull stuff, but the idea was that it allowed me to get my feet wet and learn a bit about departmental culture. There were three of us newbies in that unit – known collectively by our job classification, “the FS1D”s –and we became fast friends. One was a Nova Scotian who had previously worked in a mental hospital where he had once had to tend to a former Canadian boxing champion who spent some time there as a patient. The other was a young woman, fresh out of university like me. My starting salary was slightly more than $21,000 a year; hers was two or three thousand dollars less, because she had never had a job of any kind previously. I had worked in factories every summer and most weekends since I was sixteen, and my very gracious personnel officer counted this as “relevant prior experience” when calculating my salary. And in hindsight, I would argue it was indeed relevant, if only because in the factories you learn not only how to work hard, but also how to put up with difficult people.

So that, then, was me at 23: new job, new apartment in a new city, new friends, little clue as to what I’d gotten myself into, and no money. I was a bit lonely and very lost, but overall very happy.