
I started as a summer student in 1994, as the receptionist in the President’s Office. I was a 22-year-old kid with a CV that featured selling running shoes. At the time, Pauline Robert-Bradley and Wendy Mathers took a chance and hired me after my second year at Carleton University. I learned not only the basics of working in an office, but was also exposed to wonderfully professional and gifted international development practitioners like John Hardie, Tim Dottridge, and Rob Robertson, who became role models for me.
From there, I would go to work in the Agenda 21 Unit with Theo Carroll-Foster and eventually became a full-time, permanent employee of the Centre working with Salama Fahmy and Brent Herbert-Copley as a Research Officer. My final post was in Internal Audit under Jorge da Silva. I eventually left IDRC in 2002, well on my way to a public service career.
With IDRC, I got to see parts of the world I could only imagine. This not only opened my uninformed eyes to the scope of the world’s challenges, but also exposed me to regional program officers who were world renowned. I will never forget arriving in Cairo at 2 in the morning to a small hotel with David Brooks, exhausted after long flight delays, only to be greeted with one bed. David looked at me, and said “Well, I guess we know where you’re sleeping,” and promptly watched me make a bed of pillows on the floor. He quipped about having a bodyguard sleeping on the floor at the foot of his bed. It was a good laugh and the first of many tests of resilience traveling internationally.
Perhaps the work I enjoyed the most was with Salama, who tasked me with exploring what potential there was for the commercialization of IDRC’s many technology projects. From fog catchers to eco-friendly tropical fish harvesting, I had a crash course in the many weird and wonderful things the Centre had funded. But my fondest memory was meeting Michelle Charest, who worked in the Conferences and Travel Unit, and would eventually become my wife.
My career has taken me in a direction I could not have predicted. Working in Internal Audit, I learned how to think critically and write a compelling, accessible story. I loved the profession because, as a non-accountant, it was like investigative journalism: pull something apart and figure out what’s not working and why.
When I joined the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) in 2005, after stops at Export Development Canada and Parks Canada, I was hooked by the operational nature of the work: food safety, animal health, plant health. I left CFIA Internal Audit and joined the Operations Branch in 2011, where I have since had roles in national enforcement, applying my audit background to being the CFIA Inspector General and now serving as the Assistant Deputy Minister in the Operations Branch.
Much like my time at IDRC, I am surrounded by brilliant scientists and ask myself regularly how I ended up leading hundreds of veterinarians and food-safety experts. It is high-profile and meaningful work that touches every Canadian, from food safety investigations and recalls to managing the avian influenza outbreak, the largest animal health disease response in Canadian history. I white knuckle my way through many days but enjoy the adrenaline-infused work.
Final thoughts…
As I approach the date that would allow me to retire, I am undecided on what comes next. After years of emergency management and enforcement files, probably a break and then resume my work life doing something that is done by me and not to me. My public service career has been wonderful and rarely boring, and for that I am very fortunate. Life is wonderful in its randomness and consequences and likely may have taken me down a much different path if I hadn’t been in the right place and the right time and offered a government student job with IDRC.
Michelle and I have raised two kids we are both proud of and who are well on their way to becoming happy, productive members of the planet. A life that was for many years devoted to driving between hockey rinks is now spent on quieter pursuits like fishing, a Peloton bike and keeping two Australian shepherd dogs occupied. I am very proud to be an alumnus of IDRC, and very grateful to what the Centre taught me and gave to me. Leaders like Pauline, Salama, Brent, and Jorge taught me a work ethic, about accountability, and a commitment to learning, while IDRC showed me the importance of a people-first organization. These are all values I manage by and try to instill in the next group of students we hire for the summer.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with the student in our own CFIA President’s Office for the summer and told her “30 years ago I was you. It goes by fast and you never know where your career will take you.” I sounded liked the old-timers I once learned from at IDRC!
Bulletin 73
July 2024