How I got my gig as a diplomat

By the start of my third year at the University of Western Ontario I’d decided I wanted to go to law school. I was enjoying my undergrad program in Resources Conservation, but I figured the money and job prospects were better for lawyers than for people coming out of geography departments. I planned to write the LSAT that fall. One day in September while passing time between classes in the student centre I noticed a flyer saying that someone from the government of Canada would be on campus the next day to give a talk on how to become a diplomat. Had that single flyer not been posted, I might now be writing wills instead of this blog.

The speaker explained that the first step in getting into the foreign service then – and I believe it’s the same now – was to write the foreign service entrance exam, which I did that same fall. The exam then consisted of two parts. The first was sort of like the LSAT – lots of logic questions, of the type, “Five people wearing hats are standing in a line. One has a blue hat, one has a red hat, and three have yellow hats. How many ways can you arrange them so that the person in the red hat never stands next to the person in the blue hat?” The second part of the exam was on current affairs and world issues. It asked what acronyms like UNEP stand for, what happened at Bretton Woods, and who scored the winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series. I watched the CBC national news fairly often and, I’m a geographer after all, so I didn’t find the test to be any more or less challenging than the LSAT, which I wrote a around the same time.

The absolute value of your score on the foreign service exam is meaningless, what’s more important is how high you score relative to others who wrote the test. The test is simply a screening tool. Each year the government decides how many new foreign service officers it wants to hire (some years dozens, other years only a few) and selects an appropriate number of people to interview from the top of the test results. Some months after I wrote the exam – I don’t recall exactly when – I was notified that I would be interviewed on the Western campus, and that I should bring a lunch because it would take all day.

I showed up that Saturday in my high school graduation suit and tie with a lunch and a book. I really had no clue what to expect. I learned later that many people write the FS exam year after year in hopes of getting an interview, and that for many it’s a life’s dream. I was merely following the process along, keeping my employment options open. I think maybe the fact that the test and the interview took place on my campus left me especially unprepared for what I encountered wen I got to the waiting room. There were several people already there, and more subsequently arrived. All were older and more sharply dressed than me. I recall asking the woman seated next to me what she studied (thinking maybe she was a grad student) and she replied flatly, “I’m an accountant”. Looking around the room reminded me of the old poker players’ saying that if you look around the table and don’t see any easy marks, you’re the easy mark. Rather than making me nervous, however, the realization that I was the least experienced person in the room relaxed me. When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, wrote Bob Dylan.

My interview was conducted by a group of five people, three or four of them current foreign service officers, and at least one an HR specialist from the Public Service Commission. It started with some general getting-to-know-you questions, but quickly moved on to talk about my experiences, which weren’t exactly impressive given that I was only 21 or 22 at the time. I told them about working in the factories around Cambridge and Kitchener making auto parts. They wanted to know about my travels. Fortunately my parents thought nothing when we were kids of loading up the station wagon, hitching up the tent trailer and driving to Nova Scotia or British Columbia or Florida for a summer holiday, so I could say with a straight face I’d visited nine provinces and a dozen US states. Also, the previous year I’d blown some of my OSAP money on a spontaneous trip to Italy to visit a girl in Turin who was a “pen pal” – which can sound impressive if you tell the story the right way, and I did.

Next came the scenario questions, of which there were several. The one I remember most clearly was, “Imagine you’re the consular officer at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico. A Canadian man shows up in a panic, his nineteen year old daughter had been at a Mexican beach resort for spring break, was caught buying drugs, and was now in a Mexican jail. Her father wants you to help him bribe some Mexican officials to get her out. What do you do?” This is an easy question, especially if you’re a student who had on two previous spring break trips to Florida consumed enough cheap vodka to have easily run afoul of the law but, thankfully, had not. So I responded without hesitation, “Yes, I’d certainly try to help him”. This prompted the interviewers to start scribbling furiously on their notepads, so I though that I’d best add a few details. I added something to the effect of, “I mean, I know it’s wrong and probably something Canadian officials shouldn’t be doing, but I don’t think a Mexican prison is a safe place for a young Canadian girl”.  It must have been a good answer, since I did eventually get the job.

After the interview, I was sent off to eat my lunch and return in the afternoon for the second part. This took place in a board room, and all the other people who I’d seen in the waiting room that morning were now seated at the boardroom table, and the interviewers were seated around the perimeter of the room. This was to be a role play, with the interviewers wanting to observe our interactions with one another. The scenario was something like this: we were to imagine we were Canadian Embassy staff in a Caribbean island country. The government of Canada was providing development assistance to this country, and had allocated up to $200,000 for spending on new development projects on the island. Each of us was given a file folder containing the description of a possible project option. We were to present our project to the group, and then collectively we were to decide which projects would get funded. We were given a few minutes to read our files and prepare our presentations.

Mine was a real dog of a project: the island’s revenue agency was requesting $150,000 to spend on new computer software to help them improve their efficiency in collecting taxes. Even I could see this was a loser. So when my turn came to present my project, I gave a simple synopsis, its strengths and weaknesses, and concluded by recommending we fund the sewage treatment plant someone else had presented moments earlier. After everyone had made their presentations, the discussion quickly began to focus on the relative merits of two particular projects. I didn’t interject too much; a few of the interviewees were dominating the conversation. Things seemed deadlocked, since the two projects together cost more than $200,000, meaning only one could be funded. I did some rough calculations on my notepad and saw that if one of the line items in one of the projects could be reduced by a certain amount, the sum of the two projects would be exactly $200k. So, I proposed we go back to the fictitious island government, ask them to modify the pitch for that project accordingly and, if they agreed, fund both. Everyone around the table agreed, and we were done.

Some weeks later I received a letter from Ottawa saying that the recruitment process was still ongoing, and could I please complete the enclosed forms as they wanted to do some background checks on me. More weeks passed. One of my professors saw me in the hallway and mentioned cryptically that strangers had been asking after me. My high school basketball coach phoned to say that some plainclothes policemen had come to see him about me. My parents’ neighbours reported the same thing, and finally my girlfriend’s parents did, too. These were actually CSIS employees going around to make sure I didn’t have any bad habits or skeletons in my closet, since foreign services officers typically receive “top secret” security clearances (i.e. they have access to government documents classified up to the Top Secret level).

Months passed. In the meantime, I started law school at Western. More than halfway through my first year, and probably about 16 months after I wrote the FS exam, I got a phone call from Ottawa offering me a job as a foreign service officer in the “social affairs stream”. There were four streams in the foreign service in those days: political reporting, trade promotion, development assistance work, and social affairs (i.e. immigration, refugees, and consular work). I was asked if I could start right away, which struck me as kind of weird, since it had been a while since I’d last heard from them. I struck a deal to move to Ottawa as soon as I’d finished my final exams. And that is how I came to be a foreign service officer.