operations. Nobody, however, took them seriously. After all, Canada, Quebec included, was a liberal parliamentary democracy. The FLQ was an anomaly which would eventually just fade away.
I was confident I knew the issues thoroughly and would have had no problem laying them out to the board and fielding any questions they might have. But I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to talk about the condition of Aboriginal people in Canada, especially the Métis, but I didn’t think the board would be interested. I was also still under the shock of Longshaft’s relentless Jesuitical examination of my moral compass. He had opened up my soul in the company of strangers and found it wanting. With his little joke, Hunter had insinuated that I was no better than an intellectual whore, ready to trade lives if the price was right. I didn’t know why I had allowed myself to be drawn into a repulsive debate on the costs and benefits of torture in the first place.
Glancing around, I saw the board members looking at me as if I was some country hick, too naïve to understand the complex nature of the world and the moral compromises officers of the Department had to make to save Canadian lives and sell Canadian goods. Suddenly, I felt out of place in this room of sophisticated, cynical senior officers and didn’t want to subject myself to another cross examination on an issue closer to my heart than to theirs. Perhaps I would go to teacher’s college after all and go home to Penetang to teach at my old high school.
“I think I’ll withdraw my application to join the Department,” I said, and got up and left the room.
3: Unreasonable Expectations
The next evening, to my surprise, Burump called me at my rooming house. “I wasn’t at all happy with the way the interview went yesterday, Dear Boy,” he said. “I’d like you to come see me before you make up your mind about a career in the Department.”
By that time, I was having second thoughts about leaving the conference room in a huff. By giving way to a fit of childish pique, I had turned my back on the career of my dreams and I hated the idea of becoming a teacher like Angus Fairbanks in small-town Ontario. I was thus delighted that such a senior officer had taken the trouble to call me and hoped he wanted to give me another chance.
“I didn’t know I was getting an offer.”
“Don’t be impertinent with me. I’m on your side. Come see me in my office in the Daley Building on Rideau Street first thing Monday morning. There are a few things you should know.”
I was standing outside his door when Burump arrived for work and he told me to accompany him to get a cup of coffee. A few minutes later we emerged from the elevator into a windowless basement snack bar.
“This is our gourmet restaurant,” he said. “The specialties are always the same — fried-egg sandwiches smeared with ketchup, baked beans, and buttered toast; french fries with salt and vinegar; hamburgers with the works; hotdogs with mustard; apple and raisin pie; muffins; and awful, tepid coffee. The odour of boiling grease and burnt toast adds to the charm.”
As we waited in line to buy our coffee, a steady flow of people passed by carrying food back to their offices. Without exception, they took the time to greet Burump — some nodding their heads in recognition, others stopping a minute to comment on the weather, and others to share a joke. Burump laughed at all the jokes good or bad, delighting in the human contact, addressing everyone, man or woman, indiscriminately as “Dear Boy,” and in some cases introducing me as a future member of the Department.
“This may be a greasy spoon,” he said when the parade of admirers trailed off momentarily, “but the greatest people in the world come here every day for coffee — people whose first love is the Department, people who aren’t afraid to pack their bags, gather up their wives and their children, and leave to spend the best years of their lives in the hottest, most unhealthy and crime-ridden parts of the world. In this place, former ambassadors mix as equals with secretaries and clerks and communicators. Sometimes the minister comes over from the East Block to shake hands and say hello.”
Just then I spotted Longshaft coming our way, a cup of coffee in his hand. “I hope your presence here means you haven’t given up on us,” he said.
“Mr. Burump wanted to see me.”
“Oh, did he now?” he said, nodding to Burump who nodded back. “Well, don’t believe everything he tells you. And now that you’re here, you might as well see me as well. My offices are on the ninth floor. Tell the guard at the door I told you to drop by.”
On our way back to his office with coffee and muffins, Burump continued greeting friends and acquaintances. “This is one of my oldest friends” he said, introducing me to a middle-aged woman who stopped to ask him if he had opened his cottage for the season. When the friend departed, Burump told me he had served with the woman in New Delhi after partition. “It was a dreadful time, the Hindus were slaughtering the Muslims and the Muslims were doing the same to the Hindus. Millions were killed. Trains would pull into the railway station in New Delhi filled with the corpses of men, women, and children slaughtered by their communal enemies.”
Another person, a registry clerk, had been with him in South Africa. “Do you remember,” Burump said to his former employee, more for my benefit than for his, “the Afrikaners were introducing Apartheid. The African National Congress was fighting back under Nelson Mandela, the greatest man who ever lived. They caught him and jailed him on Robben Island where he remains to this day. It was heartbreaking to witness the black people being rounded up and transported like so many cattle to far-off townships, out of sight of the whites, and there was nothing we could do about it.”
“Now come in and make yourself at home, Dear Boy,” Burump said, when we reached his office. I took a seat in front of his desk but he sat down on a sofa, took a sip of his coffee, and waved me over to join him. “This is where I receive my special guests,” he said. “And you are more special than most. Do you know why?”
I was put off by the overly intimate tone, and so I fixed my gaze on a half dozen framed photographs on the opposite wall and waited for him to answer his own question. The pictures were impressive. In one, a much younger Burump, in the World War II battle dress of an officer of the Canadian armoured corps, was poking his head and shoulders out of the turret of a tank somewhere in Western Europe. In another, in formal diplomatic attire, he was shaking hands with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. In still another, he was having coffee with a smiling Nelson Mandala.
“I’ll tell you why, Dear Boy,” Burump said, after giving me time to admire the pictures. “I’ll tell you why you’re special, and I think you’ll be pleased. It’s because you’re a Métis, that’s why.”
“What’s so special about being a Métis?” I asked, afraid of the direction the discussion would now go.
“I don’t want to sound patronizing, but a lot of us here in the Department have long believed that Canada will never live up to its potential as a force for good in the world if the voice of its Aboriginal people isn’t heard.”
“That’s not the fault the Aboriginal people.”
“I know … I know the history,” he said, cutting me off before I could get launched on Louis Riel, the Indian Act, and residential schools. “Your people were treated badly by settler society and are still subject to discrimination. But in a perverse way, as a result of your history, you’re in a better position than someone like me, who comes from a long line of Scottish-English lawyers, to understand and show compassion to the downtrodden people of the Third World. At the moment, many of them feel compelled to take up arms against their governments to obtain equal treatment. Even in Quebec,
