The Tar Sands Diplomat

CHAPTER ONE

Oil and murder, Canadian-style

Damn Lafranc for leaking the draft of this memoir.

I don’t think the Canadian media even remembered we had a Foreign Service but, once reminded, they were delighted to copy and paste all the sensational details onto the front page. My story had it all: bribery and sex in exotic European capitals, the tar sands, billion-dollar pipelines, a mad Russian oligarch and brutish blond stormtroopers from the Prime Minister’s Office. Oh, and mostly forgotten in the hubbub, the murder of one of the finest young foreign service officers the Department had tricked into joining in years.

I know Lafranc was trying to help. “Macgregor, you’ve got to get your side of the story out,” he would say as he swirled his Laphroaig. “Don’t let the bastards get away with this.”

I admit that I enjoyed the spectacle of our minister in Question Period claiming simultaneously that the draft was a forgery, and also not authorized for publication. On television, he kept glancing nervously over at the Prime Minister as if he was afraid his leader planned to order someone to put the proverbial nine grams of lead into the back of his neck. Which was probably exactly what the PM was thinking about.

Of course Lafranc wasn’t the one who had to sit through the interminable meetings that followed at the Department. I denied everything of course, despite being tortured with stale donuts and insultingly incompetent investigators who couldn’t have found a leak in the men’s room.

They knew it was me, but couldn’t prove it. I had heard how the jilted ex-first lady of French President Hollande kept her tell-all memoirs from leaking until she wanted them to. So I typed mine on a new laptop purchased with cash and which I never connected to the internet.

Security Division tore the computers they knew about apart and all they found out was that people in the Minor Eastern European Statelets Section have to go to a lot of very boring meetings.

They did find a few hasty and, in retrospect, excessively bitter emails about Duncan “Duncecap” Kentey getting promoted instead of me. Never send an email you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper, as they say. Or, as adapted for the Department, never send an email you don’t want vengeful Security Division people forwarding from your account.

In retrospect, describing Duncecap as an “inactive volcano of Powerpoint slides” and someone “who never disagreed with anyone paid more than him” probably just confirmed to my superiors that they had picked the right man.

Security also found a few embarrassing messages I sent my wife Elizabeth shortly after she emailed to say she was leaving me to move in with, believe it or not, an economist from the Department of Finance. My views on middle-aged economists who read the Ottawa Citizen in New Edinburgh cafés while wearing spandex jogging gear are best kept to myself. Somehow, again despite our multi-binder privacy policy, my emails were soon circulating around the Department and people were asking me about fitness apparel in the elevators.

It is clear that the top mandarins at the Department were more upset about an embarrassing leak than Julian’s murder.

Now that the draft is out there, I will finish the job. Like most reporting telexes, the official report on the incident leaves out all the good stuff. No one ever got posted to Greenland for suppressing an embarrassing fact, to quote another Departmental aphorism. My superiors have edited dozens of my reports into meaninglessness over the years, and shredded many more. If you read our archives, you’ll have trouble finding a time we were out-voted at the United Nations, out-smarted in Paris or out-muscled in Washington.

This time will be different. This document will be my attempt to tell it like it really happened. No one will be able to shred it, since I don’t intend to submit it officially. It can circulate clandestinely inside the Department and among friends, passed hand-to-hand like an old Soviet-era samizdat copy of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. If I end up getting blamed for the whole affair and transferred to the Culture Division, this may be the last thing I write that anyone ever reads.

CHAPTER TWO

I am drawn into l’affaire tar sands

My involvement in l’affaire tar sands, as one of the Paris papers called it, began innocently enough.

I should have known it was too good to be true. One minute, my career and I were stuck in the Minor Eastern European Statelets Section. The next, our new uber-Assistant Deputy Minister Alan Dorf was offering me the plum posting of political counsellor in Brussels; well, political counsellor ad interim, until Cameron Fanshawe recovered from his gout.

I should have been offended, and perhaps worried, that I was his sixth choice for the job. At least that’s how it appeared as I read his notebook upside down across the desk.

There was a list of six names. Five of them were crossed off with various acronyms beside them: Desjardins – NATO; Cumberland – LOA; Fritzle – DUI; and so on. Smedling’s name was scribbled over particularly violently. My name was at the bottom, written in a different colour as if added later.

Dorf was new to the Department. He had been sent over from Finance to stiffen our spines. I had hardly spoken to him, although I noticed his eye tended to linger on me at branch meetings when made incomprehensible remarks about “focus” and being more “impactful.”

Eastern European files didn’t seem to interest him. In fact, Dorf hadn’t even invited me the only time the Minister had to be briefed on my issues. It wasn’t an entirely bad thing, since I probably wouldn’t have been able to resist saying something career-limiting when our Minister asked the Azerbaijani ambassador why people from the Caucasus didn’t look more Caucasian.

“I didn’t even know people got gout anymore,” complained Dorf, looking at his list and adding a gratuitous exclamation point beside the word “gout” at the top of the page.

“It’s more typically known as the disease of kings, not mid-level Canadian foreign service officers,” I agreed.

Poor Fanshawe. He was sent home from Brussels to a clinic in the Gatineau hills where sawdust cereal replaced his Poêlée de ris de veau aux truffes fraîches. This is as close as Canada gets to the old Soviet habit of inviting diplomats home for “consultations” and then shooting them.

“And Smedling! A skiing accident this morning! In June!” complained Dorf, striking out Smedling’s name again.

Like certain Finance economists I loathe, Smedling was a fitness fanatic. They didn’t have spandex when Shakespeare wrote, but if they did I’m sure Julius Caesar would have mentioned it when he was telling Mark Antony not to trust thin people.

Smedling was always boring you to death about running the Marrakesh Marathon or some other “extreme sport” ego romp through Al Qaeda-controlled malarial swamps. Apparently he had begun training six months early to do the Gold Coureur du Bois level of the Canadian Ski Marathon, which involves skiing 160 kilometres over two days with a frosty outdoor bivouac in the middle. He was training on the Gatineau Parkway with those skis with little wheels, going downhill at full speed, when he ploughed into a van parked on the shoulder.

Apparently his head badly dented the van’s rear door.

“That’s why I don’t listen to Scriabin,” I observed to Dorf. He stared at me blankly. “Smedling likes the atonal stuff, like the White Mass sonata. He probably couldn’t tell the difference between the music on his headphones and people honking at him.”