Thank you, Chair.
In an increasingly globalizing planet--and the rate of globalization is accelerating--our embassies and their consular sections' trade desks are to play a critical role for Canada. It's discouraging, when you read this report, that we find such serious human resource issues. They seem to be twofold. We have an attrition rate that exceeds our recruitment rate, and then secondly we're filling slots with people who don't have adequate capabilities.
When I look at exhibit 3.1 in the Auditor General's report, under “Foreign language requirement”, it says “Required for some postings”. For not all foreign postings is language knowledge required.
Then I go to paragraph 3.63, and the Auditor General notes that only 16% of people occupying the posts where there is a language requirement meet that language requirement. In fact, among incumbents, only 33% have undergone language testing.
Then I look and I notice that among western democracies we have the highest rate of hiring locally. I can't help but be puzzled by this disconnect, that certain western democracies are better able to place people. I've travelled to many countries and been to many embassies, and they were able to find people to staff them in the local language, yet in Canada, a multicultural country where we have this huge reservoir of human capacity--you just have to go to any of our urban centres and you'll hear every language of the world being spoken--we can't find those recruits for these critical positions.
Is that an issue of your department, having this residue of a closed-shop, elitist attitude in terms of its recruitment, or is it something like what I encountered in the former East Bloc when embassies were being set up? Over and over I was told, “Well, we can't recruit people who have this ancestral homeland for the top positions, because we're unsure of what particular biases they may have.”
I'd like you to address that particular issue: how is it possible, when we have this reservoir of capacity within our country? Have attitudes changed since the early nineties, when I heard on numerous occasions within DFAIT, “We can't hire people from those particular communities, because they may be biased in their points of view if they work in the top positions in the embassies”?