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David Manicom
Acceptance Speech by David Manicom - June 12, 2003
Thank you. Distinguished guests, colleagues, friends. This is a moment of great pleasure for me this evening, to be among you. I am honoured and humbled. Looking around this room I have only one thought: there is some sort of mistake, they got the wrong guy.
There are various awards in the civil service, but this is the only one I really want. And now I have it. I’m delighted. I guess I should immediately announce my retirement.
Somewhere in the world, always, the Immigration service is at work. Right now it is 9 am in Beijing. 120 members of the visa section are dealing with hundreds of visa cases involving the fates of hundreds of people. These colleagues are Canadian, and they are Chinese. They are also expats from many different countries. We can find someone in our visa section to provide you with service in 38 languages, including Uighar, Finnish, Arabic, Russian and Tagalog. They are a magnificent team. They are doing the real work. Absurdly, I am here sipping good wine, eating good food, chatting with good friends, collecting the credit. All of the honour belongs to them.
So: I considered all the possibilities. What subject, for a speech, tonight? Perhaps I should discuss the duty of a public servant, of a diplomat?
But that seemed a bit heavy, maybe a little boring, no? Surely too serious? So I am going to ignore my duty, and speak, rather, about people.
I cannot thank everyone I should thank. But I would like to name names, and beg forgiveness of many others to whom I am deeply indebted. Given the shortage of time, I want to mention some people from early in my career, and some more recent, people who have helped not only me but so many others.
My first trainers were Claudette Deschênes and Joan Atkinson. I've often wanted to be more like these brilliant executives. Now they are DG s and ADMs. They taught me a lot of what I know, and every time I say something stupid, its their fault.
On my first TD assignment in Washington, I met Alain Théault and Leslie Toope. They taught me that there is no contradiction between being an expert manager of files, and being human and fair. From that moment on I wanted to be more like Alain and Leslie.
I must thank the troika who worked on the Legislative Review Advisory Group, 1997, precursors to the new Immigration Act: Susan Davis, Rosalyn Kunin, Robert Trempe. They taught persistence. Draft 10 of a chapter could be better than draft 9. A box was something to be thought outside of.
I am very proud of the Immigration office in Beijing, of what it accomplishes day in and day out on behalf of Canada, in spite of never-ending challenges. But if it is one of our best offices -- and I think it is -- it is due to several generations of determined managers and staff. Four years ago I arrived in Beijing, to an immensely challenging program. There I inherited two different jobs so well done by Renald Gilbert that I always felt my main task in Beijing was to not screw it up. My first program manager in Beijing, Susan Gregson, taught me how to manage from top to bottom, how to achieve through the work of others, and gave me ridiculous amounts of responsibility and trust. Renald, Susan, thank you.
And my current boss, Dennis Scown, the instigator of the mad plot to nominate me for this award. How can I thank Dennis enough for the confidence he has shown in me, and for his daily insistence that we must seek out the absurd in our bureaucratic universes and exterminate it, and work hard and have fun simultaneously rather than one after the other?
So, perhaps now I should discuss the duties of a diplomat, give you my philosophy, my words of wisdom?
Nope. I prefer to tell you about other things: privilege, pleasure, fear.
How lucky I have been! I have driven to work while tanks lobbed shells at the White House in Moscow, rattling the embassy windows, but I have also eaten bliny and caviar at the Astoria in St Petersburg and walked its white nights, I have searched for snow leopards in the ice fields of Kazakstan, and met both Mikhail Gorbachev and, more importantly, Vladislav Tretiak. I have driven with a colleague in search of her daughters after the bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, not yet knowing if they were alive or dead. But I have also walked the terraced fields of the Swat Valley amidst the apricot and cherry blooms in the Hindu Kush, stood on the Great Wall, and Tiananmen Square. I have heard the heart-rending voices of the orphans of Mongolia in the steam tunnels beneath the streets of UlanBataar, but also ridden Tibetan ponies to the snow fields of Sleeping Dragon Snow Mountain. And, for these past four years, I have helped welcomed scores of visitors of all ranks to Beijing and taken them to the best damned Sezhuan restaurant in the world, the cheap joint on Heping Li, and eaten until we could eat no more.
So maybe I should finish by talking about duty? Maybe for one minute, if you will forgive me.
The subject is too large. Any attempt at an answer would be pure arrogance. So just a thought. Maybe today we have two main duties. One: everytime someone says, perception is reality, to say no, it isn't. Two: We must reject society’s current hunger for zero risk.
Canada is a nation of immigrants and a trading country par excellence. Openness, in all its senses, is our national interest. Let’s stop pretending we can reduce risk by reducing travel. This, to a visa officer, is a great heresy, but it is becoming dangerously trendy.
Somehow, these duties seem more important than it did even a few years ago.
We live on the edge of the Empire, at a great hinge between eras. Do you ever feel like the Enlightenment is slipping away, and the age of superstition is making a comeback? As a global society we focus relentlessly on microscopic risks like school playground equipment and one-in-a-billion Mad Cows and SARS and terrorism, in a world where tuberculosis kills 8000 people a day and no one seems to give a damn and the eradication programs are underfunded. You can’t fight TB with a cruise missile, baby. Terrorism is a tiny threat? You bet it is. 9-11 tragically killed 3000 Americans; many times that number have now died in the counterproductive wars in response; murder kills 20,000 Americans every year and man, that ain't a priority; war in the Congo kills 3 million... and Sudan.... Yet every poll will tell you: people aren't travelling due to: SARS and terrorism. People accept limits on travel, exchanges, commerce, basic human rights, due to: SARS and terrorism. The economy is slowing globally: due to SARS and terrorism.
In the true scale of things, SARS and terrorism are so small they do not require measurement. They aren't nothing, but they are little league, small stuff, part 6 of appendix D, back of the class, bottom of the list, priority 42. You are all saying, what a tiresome man. Doesn't he know that people's fears may be irrational, but they are still afraid and we have to deal with it? Doesn't he know perception is reality.
No. Perception is not reality. Maybe our culture, including our Canadian government culture (Canada: king of the travel advisory: stay home citizens, it's dangerous out there!), is paying far too much deference to perception, to irrational fears. A little stiff upper lip is in order. A little dogged belief in just the facts. We all know that it is not dangerous to travel as a tourist or businessperson to China, and that it never was. Not as dangerous as driving on the 401. So why do we, as a government, do our best to convince our citizens of something we know to be false?
Our colleagues and our citizens have no right to their irrational fears and their false perceptions of relative risks and real costs.
So what’s a Canadian diplomat to do? Well, just to start with, when someone says perception is reality, say no, its not.
I do policy now. I help manage an operation with a hundred staff. I've drafted memos to cabinet. But hey, what I really am is a visa officer. Not just a visa officer, because it is a wonderful calling. Our files are people. We deal in dreams, and disappointments, ambition and fraud, brilliance and lies, day in and day out. The people want to come to Canada. I sometimes think, and dare to hope, that they want to come to a place where holy warrior is an oxymoron, where there is no city shining on a hill, where the truths aren't black and white, and where perceptions have some explaining to do.
Thanks again.
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