Canadian Administrators Of Volunteer Resources: Fill & Download for Free

I was a Canadian foreign service officer from 1978 to 2009. I was a visa officer, but Canadian visa officers hold diplomatic passports and have full diplomatic privileges. In fact there are a lot of Canadian diplomats who do not do diplomacy. Trade and aid officers, and also, the Canadian administrative officers who go out to manage Canada's missions overseas, are diplomats too. It is the same for a lot of other cultures.Depending on what you are doing at a given Canadian mission, your interpersonal contacts will differ. In a visa section, there will be Canadian managers and visa officers, locally-engaged staff or staff from third countries, who happen to be residing in the city where the mission is.Only the most senior visa officers at the mission, would have much in the way of work-generated contacts, with people outside of the visa section. If you are posted in a country that is “visa hungry”, associating with local people will mean innumerable requests for visa favours. You quickly get fed up with it.They Say No, But Not As Much NowadaysOf course, you get security briefings as a foreign service trainee. And, Canadian diplomats have to be classified to the Top Secret level, which isn't so easy to get.When I started, the two pillars of concern about you were, communism and homosexuality. When I had my security briefing, the advice was, homosexuals ought to leave. If you had taken to listening to “Moscow Mailbag” on the shortwave, you didn't want them to know about it.I am sure that, nowadays, things are different. I doubt that being a comsymp would be that much of an issue. However, I wonder if “dual loyalties” is still in fashion. In those days it was assumed that us Jews had it. But, the Canadian foreign service has been compelled to become more diverse in recent years. Particularly when one speaks of officers whose heritage lies in the developing world, there are all kinds of people to be suspicious of.Now, the homo/queer thing. Generally, the foreign service would like to know every blessed thing about you. But, that could put your Human Resources section, and your posting officer, on a collision course with the federal Privacy Act and the Canadian Human Rights Commission. You are kind of expected to volunteer the information, on the grounds that your gender preferences might cause you “difficulties” at certain posts. An ultra-conservative host government might choke on you being there, unless you make a prior commitment to your posting officer to run back into the closet. There can be a feeling that our locally-engaged staff at conservative country missions, are rather fragile, and could be deeply disturbed if they found out about your lifestyle. I suppose some of these concerns could be alleviated by promising your posting officer that you won't dress up, won't put up an assortment of Pride posters, or, if you are a male alternative person, will ration out any lisping and wrist-waiving that you might feel the urge to do, or at least do it in a way that will make the locally engaged staff giggle.Towards the end of my career, I began to feel that any posting that didn't offer at least one gay bar, was hell on earth.Use Your Common Sense, If You Have AnyActually, the politically correct social views that we are indoctrinated in, in Canada, are a good, cautious, start to your attempts at social life, in whatever, potentially dystopic place you land up in. Make no comments about gender, race, social class, political views, appearance, and ask no personal questions, to anybody about anything. You need to find out what gives, at your new home for the next few years.Granted, that type of caution can slow your social adjustment. If you are there with your dependants, it may have the effect of putting all of you on a social desert island. But, you have each other. And, nowadays, with Skype, etc., you can lay you troubles on your family back home, and do some venting.(Just don't do it on Facebook or anything like it. Big Brother employer is watching you and your big virtual mouth.)But, in a way, your posting is a sort of a mini-life. A given Canadian overseas posting doesn't normally last more than four years. Unless you are going to do spend the whole time in the social penalty box, hopefully early, you really do need to come out swinging, socially. An enthusiastic people, people, outgoing personality may make the difference between having a social existence, as opposed to spending your evenings and weekends doing family feuds, or watching pirate films on You Tube, or studying the most erotic Internet materials the local regime will let in.Butch In The CabanaI hope that some of the Canadian foreign service social attitudes, and personal self presentations, that I had to put up with, have at least attenuated.Despite the diversity initiatives, the Canadian foreign service is not a random representation of Canada's population. Aside from chilling out your swishiest behaviour, you have to pass whatever the employment requirements for whatever work you want to do, but also the obedience ones too. Traditionally, the Canadian foreign service has been very, very hierarchical, very classist, and not so pleased with personal manifestations of multiculturalism, (You are presenting Canada, eh, not downtown Tel Aviv!), or alternative lifestyles. People who you might nowadays want to define as “progressive”, were not welcome. (After all, you could have been a Communist for the Saskatchewan Cooperative Commonwealth Federation Party.)If you do not see yourself as wanting to hang out with Canadians who have these sorts of attitudes, you are going to be lucky to land up in a post, where there is not a social scene at the Canadian mission. You are lucky, because the other Canadians at the mission do not expect to see you outside of working hours.But, New Delhi was terrible that way. The local culture was profoundly different from most of any culture in Canada. Even if you were not a visa officer, understanding the local people enough to have deep friendships with them was very difficult.Our High Commission in New Delhi, had a Cabana, outdoors, in the 45 Celsius heat, beside the swimming pool, with duty free alcohol. A lot of the Canadians would clump up there, drinking copiously of an evening or weekend. You had people with views that were so conservative, that they would scare the hell out of Jason Kenney. Of course, being a diplomatic passport carrying person, in a country where most people are dirt, dirt poor, compared to you, can make your head swell. (Yes, yes, even I, with all my culturally-learned humility, could feel a little proud of myself. Try waltzing through a third world airport, waving your diplomatic passport, and whipping quickly through the diplomats only inspection line, and your cognitive image of yourself can get maybe a little bit distorted.)I got to watch for the real bad signs. Christmas time is approaching, and your Canadians, isolated in some remote, determinedly non-Christian place, would talk about the embassy Canadians being a “family”. That meant to me, head for the social hills. Remind the Christmas familizers that their family includes, a Jew, and they may get destabilized.Hang Out With The Boss, Although You Really Don't Want Too?Take that family thing to its local conclusion, and you end up hanging out with your supervisor and the visa office manager. Line level visa officers do not get to attend too many of the famous diplomatic cocktail parties, but, if you get roped in, there is your boss, who may want to monitor every word you say. (These diplomatic social duties tend to fall within a grey area in terms of your job description, but watch your supervisor stuff them on to your annual performance appraisal.) You do not get laid back and all friendly in an environment at that.Or, your nosy supervisors and your other fellow Canadians, may wonder where you “vanish” to on the weekends. I was on temporary duty in Bucharest, and, after intense research, had found the city's one and only gay bar. I met some very nice people there, and an evening in the bar was a really good hangout, but it was nothing I wanted to share with the folks at the mission.So, It Is Absolute Social Hell?You can navigate a bit. When I was posted at New Delhi, we had admission privileges to the bar, restaurant, bowling alley and baseball park at the United States Embassy compound. Sorry, Canadian nationalists, the Americans were some of the nicest, most interesting people I ever met. I used to hang out with the United States Marines. They were impressive people, although I sort of felt like a bit player in a Rocky Balboa film.Or, seek out the British people. We had similar access to the facilities at the British High Commission. A Canadian abroad can open their heart to a Brit. They have been Expatting for a long, long time, and had Rudyard Kipling to prove it. It is almost impossible for a Canadian to offend a Brit. They are very, very confident, and they will not be disturbed by meaningless babbling from a colonial.Occasionally, the Australian High Commission guys would show up at our High Commission restaurant and bar. (It was air-conditioned. Australians understand heat, and they are not so keen on staying outside long enough for a self-roast.) The Australians would engage in informal beer-drinking contests with the Canadians. Booze isn't my thing, but, in an extremely boring environment, it was diverting.Do I Want To Make Recommendations?Canadians, are you thinking of applying to join our foreign service? I hope that it is not as extreme as it was when I was there, but, socially, it is restricting. It isn't nowadays so much that, on training, you get a stringent warning about horrid Russkis, or they tell you that, if you are a boy, you are not going to be wearing a dress, but there are plenty of other things to get restricted about.One might think that an introverted, or self-sufficient person, might benefit from not being socially desperate. But, your fellow Canadians will not like it, and they may get on your case, and get it on your performance appraisal. Once that happens, your life as a diplomat can be rough.What worked for me, was a lot of dodging and weaving, and tons of patience. You do not want to blow, the tenth time somebody asks you to go to a conservative, drinking party. And, prevarication skills really helped. You can say stuff like, on the weekend, I was “touring the city”, and went out to a restaurant. Let them think that, on Saturday night, you go to bed at 10 PM. If your best social access is to your local Expat community, remember that degeneracy thrives there. Don't show you are shocked, and do not waste your time on judging.Canadians who are currently in our foreign service. I would be highly interested to know if things have gotten better. But, if, in your view, not very much, I would not expect you to say it in a public forum.And, if you are a conservative, love authority, go with the group, Christmas family foreign service person, and you would like to disagree completely, I do not need to hear from you. I have heard enough already.Martin Levine

The other answers here are fundamentally correct so I’d like to add detail.A Korean war vet told me that whenever a Canadian unit was on their flank he felt safer. He quoted a US study that out of 100 troops some 80 would be draftees and 20 volunteers. When the enemy hit 10 of the 20 volunteers would fight while only 10 of the 80 drafted would, for a group average of 20 out of 100. Canadians, being all volunteers, would theoretically have 50 out of 100 fighting back but it was his belief that the number would be much higher. He was also aware that all Canadian army personnel are trained to fight and carry a weapon, whereas those like cooks or truck drivers in the US were not trained much and did not carry weapons. He also noted that the administrative tail of a division of Canadians was a lot smaller that for US combat troops. He put a combined value of all these factors as making 1,000 Canadians on his flank as being the fighting power of 3–6,000 US troops. Since then from other sources and from my own time in the Canadian army I have decided that he was fundamentally correct. Pipers and other bandsmen in the Canadian army must know how to fire an anti-tank rocket, must practice manouvers, etc., to give an example.A practical Canadian military thing was and is to use civilian skills whenever possible, saving the cost of training and utilizing what could be many years of peacetime experience. General Curry was in insurance plus the militia and before every battle in WW1 would calculate statistically what the losses would be. He was usually close, a comment about an insurance agent vs. a military academy grad. His most famous result was his planning of the attack on Vimy ridge where he took it with ~10,000 casualties amongst 40,000 troops compared to previous French and British losses of 200,000 and failure to take the ridge.Before my father volunteered in 1939 for the air force he was a professional radio operator on a ship where the ability to repair was vital. After basic training he was put in an electronics technicians group, expecting to service radios. When they arrived in England they were billeted then offered a tourist flight around the country. The guide would point out things like Sherwood Forest as they flew by, to much excited chatter by his group. One of the men pointed out an instrument, an oscilliscope, on a rack overhead. From then on and through supper none of them said a word. Only after they returned to their barracks did one of them say to the rest “it seems that radar is no longer science fiction”. The oscilliscope had had a horizontal scale marked in miles. The next day they became Canada’s first radar technicians, servicing night-fighters. They had all arrived with rifles and pistols that they had to give to the British army due to losses at Dunkirk so dad paraded with a piece of angle iron on his shoulder and a screwdriver sharpened to a point in his holster. This stresses the earlier point that all those in uniform had combat training. As far as I know the entire Commonwealth was similar, like the British using miners as tunnelers in WW1. By contrast I give a story about a US ham radio operator I knew who, preparing for Viet Nam duty, was tested for his skill in Morse code. After he passed perfectly he asked “does that mean I become a radio operator”? The answer was no, that the US army preferred to train green people in their methods to avoid conflict with ideas from previous experience. What a waste of human resources!As others pointed out, the lack of noble families aided Canada. British generals, often from noble families, or who thought that being generals made them noble, refused advice and would throw thousands to their deaths in senseless battles that were repeats of previous tactics. The same was true for Russian troops and probably the French. The Us, on entering WW1 also repeated the same mistakes despite advice from their allies, so it may be more of a military thing than a class thing. Then again, the US officer class was a reflection of the monied families. When Canada insisted on control of it’s divisions from the UK in WW1 it chose decision training at the squad level as being the best, recognizing that the loss of communication, loss of officers, unexpected events, etc. required the ability to make decisions at the squad level. In reality Canadians fought by their own wits and experiences while generals or upper class snotty noses were meaningless.

The Trans-Appalachian territories of the west were a problem for the British and had been a problem for a decade before the Revolution began. The British just could not foresee a means of policing such a territory from their foothold in Quebec without the expenditure of massive funds.Moreover, the government ministry and many members of Parliament were much more invested in trade with the East (particularly India) where many entrepreneurs were coming home with immense fortunes. There was little or no prospect of making a fortune in the Ohio country — only a slow drain on imperial resources. There were no resources in the Ohio that the British did not already have in “Canada”.The Native tribes — particularly those so-called Ohioans under Pontiac in 1864 — had proved problematic. The British had lost all but two of their forts (Detroit and Pitt) to Native forces in the uprising. The formal treaty between Pontiac and Sir William Johnson in July 1764 had hardly been a peace, much less a surrender. No lands changed hands, no hostages were taken, and no white captives were returned — all characteristics of previous agreements — and raids by disparate groups of recalcitrant warriors continued. The revolution in the Northwest was essentially a draw between the Americans and the British, but any territory once claimed could not be withheld from the tribes without tremendous effort. Herein, the British were probably correct in their estimation, as the Americans would be forced to deal with the Nations for a generation before “pacifying” the region.Finally, the Americans already had a strong foothold in the region and had taken many of the British garrisons there. With a company of volunteers, George Rogers Clark had captured Kaskaskia, the chief British post in the Illinois Country and later secured the submission of Vincennes. The Americans had successfully defended Kentucky and increased their settlements there. They had cut off the British administrative center at Detroit, and they held Fort Pitt.In the final treaty, the Ohio Country was signed away by Britain to the United States, even though "not a single American soldier was north of the Ohio River when the treaty was signed". Britain had not consulted the Indians in the peace process, and the Indians were nowhere mentioned in treaty's terms. The British had been proven unable to defeat the Americans on the coast with even an overwhelming advantage in naval forces. Hemmed in on all side by Spanish Louisiana and Florida as well as a nascent American republic, what could they expect in the interior where the experience of their land forces was one of multiple failures? (Edward Braddock at the Monongahela, James Grant at Duquesne, the loss of Forts Presque Isle, Le Boeuf, and Venango, etc.)Nonetheless, British agents continued to operate in the western region and attempted to influence its Native residents against the Americans. Moreover, the British were careful to maintain their right to navigate, fortify, and police the Great Lakes. Lying along the border between a newly independent United States and the British-controlled Canadian provinces, the Great Lakes were perhaps the most remarkable geographic feature of the Northwest Frontier. Not until the 1818 Rush – Bagot Treaty, after the end of a second war (War of 1812), did the United States and Britain begin the diplomatic work of demilitarizing the area around the Great Lakes.See:How The East India Company Caused the American RevolutionandA Leatherstocking Companion, Novels and Narratives as History