many lives would you need to save to accept the information?”
“The circumstances would have to be exceptional.”
“There you go again, Mr. Cadotte, invoking exceptional circumstances. According to your file, you are Roman Catholic and were once an altar boy. Now despite your Christian upbringing, you claim everything depends on the circumstances. Are you a relativist? Don’t you believe in absolute values? Your church expects its members to accept absolute moral values. I think you are stalling, Mr. Cadotte. How many lives saved would make the use of torture exceptional, Mr. Cadotte?”
“Maybe one hundred lives?”
“Why not fifty?”
“My moral compass would allow me to accept one hundred lives saved but not fifty.”
“But the moral compass of someone else, another Canadian Foreign Service officer for example, might allow him to accept fifty?”
“Maybe.”
“Ten?”
“Maybe ten for some people. Maybe a thousand for someone else. It would depend on their definition of exceptional circumstances and the moral compass of the person concerned.”
“What if the Department expected you to do things not involving torture that were in Canada’s national interest but were of doubtful morality?”
I had no idea where Longshaft was going with this line of questioning and looked around the room at the other board members to gauge their reactions. Hunter was slouched forward in his chair, a faint smile on his lips, concentrating his gaze on his clasped hands stretched out on the table in front of him. The others had been watching me intently ever since Longshaft had started asking me questions, like so many hungry cats observing a mouse caught in a trap.
“Could you be more specific?”
“We live in the real world, Mr. Cadotte. Have you heard the old expression? I imagine you have, ‘A diplomat is an honest man sent to lie abroad for his country.’ That’s an exaggeration of course. After all, diplomacy relies on honest dealing to accomplish its ends, but not always. Sometimes we are expected to lie a little or a lot to advance and protect Canada’s national interests. We live in an imperfect world, Mr. Cadotte. Are you aware, that in many countries of the Third World, Canadian diplomats help Canadian companies bribe local officials to award them contracts even though the costs of the bribes are passed on to the people of those countries? And that in many of those countries the mass of the people live in grinding poverty and can ill afford to pay the added costs? The diplomats do it because the contracts make money for the Canadian companies and provide jobs to Canadian workers. And when they make Canadian businessmen happy in this way, the businessmen tell the Department that their representative in country X is doing superb work and the officer concerned is rewarded by being promoted. Would your moral compass allow you to help a Canadian company obtain a contract through bribery?”
“I would never do such a thing.”
“Even if Canadian jobs were at stake?”
“No, I still wouldn’t.”
“Are you aware that the Canadian government, at this moment, is helping Canadian asbestos companies market their product overseas when they and the companies know asbestos causes hundreds of thousands of lung cancer deaths each year? What would you do if you received instructions to promote asbestos in the country of your accreditation?”
“I wouldn’t do it.”
“What if you were told you would be fired for insubordination if you didn’t do as you were told?”
“I still wouldn’t do it.”
“Are you saying the exceptional circumstance argument doesn’t apply to asbestos sales but does when it comes to accepting information derived from torture?”
“That’s right, torture is acceptable in exceptional circumstances but selling asbestos is an absolute abomination, and always inexcusable; lung cancer is a horrible disease.”
“I think we’ve gone as far as we can in dealing with these issues,” Longshaft said. “Unless there’s a member of the board who has something else to ask Mr. Cadotte on this topic.”
Without looking up from the table, Hunter mumbled something nobody understood. “Please speak up, Jonathan,” Longshaft said. “We would all benefit from your views.”
“With the indulgence of the board, I’d like to repeat a little joke attributed to Winston Churchill, which has some relevance to this discussion. Churchill said to a socialite: ‘Madame, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?’ To which the socialite responded, ‘My goodness, Mr. Churchill … Well, I suppose … we would have to discuss terms of course….’ Churchill asked, ‘Would you sleep with me for five pounds?’ and the socialite responded, ‘Mr. Churchill, what sort of woman do you think I am?’ To which Churchill said, ‘Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.’ ”
Nobody laughed, and I could tell from the angry looks the others directed at Longshaft that he had violated some sort of understanding. Maybe they didn’t think the topic was fit to be discussed with someone who wasn’t yet a member of the Department? Maybe they didn’t want to be reminded about the disagreeable things Foreign Service officers were sometimes required to do?
Whatever it was, Burump, his jowls quivering, reacted badly, telling Longshaft, “I don’t have anything else to raise with the candidate, but there is something I must say to you, Theodore. In more than three decades of service at Ottawa and abroad, I never once came across a case where a Foreign Service officer was asked to pass to headquarters information derived from torture by an institution of a foreign government. I have never heard of a case where one of our officers helped a Canadian company bribe a local official to obtain a contract. I admit that we are all instructed to promote the sales of products like asbestos and tobacco, which are not good for anyone’s health, and we sell automatic weapons and light armoured vehicles to governments that will use them against their own peoples, against oppressed minorities, or in wars against neighbouring states. We obey because we realize we live in an imperfect world and if we didn’t win those contracts, then someone else would. But the Department I know and love is staffed by decent, law-abiding and loyal officers, not by a gang of goons.”
“Maybe if you had to deal with the sorts of things that come across my desk every day, you wouldn’t feel that way.” Longshaft responded. “I deal with the underside of life and you work on the sunny side. Now back to business. Mr. Cadotte, as my last question, please discuss the issue most likely to trouble domestic peace in Canada in the years ahead — take all the time you want. Then you’ll be free to go and we’ll break for the day.”
I knew the board expected me to talk about the Quiet Revolution in Quebec — the struggle of Quebeckers to carve out a new place for themselves in Canada after centuries of corrupt priest-ridden governments and two hundred years of domination by English-speaking business elites. It had been the issue that occupied the headlines, the editorial pages, and the debates in Parliament for years. Royal commissions had been struck, and a new national flag thought to be more in tune with the times adopted. English-speaking Quebeckers, unwilling to make an effort to learn French, and afraid they would have no place in the political order, were abandoning their Montreal enclaves of privilege to make new lives for themselves in Toronto. At the same time, a terrorist group, the Front de libération du Québec, the FLQ, emerged from the shadows to try to
