Louise Frechette: A call for clarity

by Chris Thatcher

Forbes magazine called Louise Frechette one of the most powerful women in the world. Her 35 years of public service include ambassadorial posts, deputy minister of National Defence, Canadian permanent representative to the United Nations and, from 1998 until this month, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. She has championed many efforts at government reform, and witnessed many others. We spoke with her about accountability and reform.


What are your lessons learned on accountability and transparency?

First, don't be frightened by accountability and don't be so afraid of making mistakes that you don’t do anything. Second, be more aware of the need for clarity: clarity in terms of your own responsibility, clarity in terms of decisions, clarity in terms of processes. I think the rulebook is often very complicated. Practices develop in the workplace that are sometimes pretty loose despite the rules. In an era of very strict accountability, it’s better to have a little more clarity.

Accountability has to be the whole story, both what went well and what may not have gone according to intentions. It also has to be about the whole system. I see a tendency to try to pin mistakes on a single act or a single individual. In large organizations, where almost by definition what happens is a result of a collection of small decisions by a very large number of actors, to lose sight of the context, to try to personalize accountability, is often a mistake.

If you’re the deputy minister, the buck stops at your desk for many, many things, but the notion that deputy ministers can personally account for everything that happens in the department in a technical sense is not proper. A minister can be made to account in a political sense for everything that happens in the department and eventually it’s a matter of political judgment by the electorate. But in the case of the public servant, I’m not sure you can transfer that kind of logic.

The new Federal Accountability Act contains whistle-blower legislation, including a modest reward, provision of legal advice and an independent office to address complaints.

We just went through exactly the same process in the UN. Under my direction, we established a whistle-blowing policy that has many of the same features proposed in the Federal Accountability Act – except for the reward element, which we turned down. We looked at various systems in existence – some have rewards, some do not – and we decided not to put in a reward. But we put in some very strong protections including an independent office, since when penalization occurs it is often by the same person who is engaged in wrong-doing.

Whistle-blower protection is absolutely essential to ensure that someone who reports real wrong- doing is not penalized for doing so.

What is of greater concern, however, is the entire justice system that deals with the people who are accused of wrong-doing. In the UN, the system is very slow and is perhaps not as well equipped as it should be to conduct reliable and thorough investigations. It means that while you’re protecting whistle-blowers, the people who are accused and are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty are not as protected. They may see their career in limbo for a long, long time. By the time findings are made, their career is ruined, even if they were innocent. I suspect this is also a concern in Canada even though we may have more effective means to carry out rapid and effective investigations.

The Secretary General has released a report on management reform, Investing in the United Nations. What are the priorities for Canada?

Things never stop changing within the UN – like the Canadian government. During the current phase of reform Canada emphasied its support for a new human rights council, for the policy of responsibility to the protected to be enshrined, and for management reform, particularly the notion that the Secretary General needs more authority to perform his function properly.

In terms of management reforms, we think that everything in the report is critical, except perhaps alternative service delivery. All the other things are absolutely essential if we want the UN to be able to deliver the very complex mandate, the very operational mandate it has nowadays.

The UN has been taking on more operations: deployments, an investigative role in Lebanon and a governance role in Kosovo. Is it equipped to manage this dramatic expansion?

We do it. The UN keeps getting new mandates and it manages to deliver the goods. However, the systems and rules are not adapted to these new demands – that is the heart of the message contained in the report of the Secretary General. The good news is that the UN has been able to absorb that dramatic increase in the level of deployment – and that’s not only troops, the number of civilian employees has increased by leaps and bounds. We have more civilian employees in the field now then we have in headquarters. That’s an enormous management challenge for any organization and the UN has been able to do it.

The bad news is that it does it in a pretty haphazard way, without the proper systems to support it and, frankly, at an unacceptable cost to the employees. We wind up with an enormous number of people who are living very precariously on short-term contracts or not integrated into the system, people who are not treated on an equal footing. The people are both the ones who have made it happen and the ones who have suffered from the lack of adequate systems and policies.

Stephen Lewis suggested in our last issue that there should be an international organization for women, resourced much better than the current UNIFEM, to better deal with issues for half the world's population.

Stephen is very passionate about that idea. I talked to a lot of senior women about this before I left the UN and I must say that all of us were a bit sceptical. I think his diagnosis is right on. The priority given to gender inside the UN and in our work in the field is not sufficient, and it keeps slipping off the screen. But we’re not fully convinced that the answer is to create another organization or to upgrade the current organization. There may be other options, including perhaps a radical upgrading of the post of Senior Advisor to the Secretary General on Gender. I have respect for the women who have had this responsibility, but they are not women who have influence and leverage of their own. We need a very strong incumbent in that post, and I’m sure that if we had someone who was a real player in political terms, and was able to deal strongly on an equal footing with all of the senior managers in the UN system, you’d see a difference.

There are merits in Stephen’s idea, but I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s the best way to do it. To my recollection of the way in which things started to change in the Government of Canada, it had a lot to do with the political leadership that governments decided to show. I’m not sure I would have been appointed to my first ambassadorship had it not been for the fact that Foreign Minister Joe Clark made it crystal clear he wanted a lot of women candidates for posts at the ambassador level.

What you need is strong leadership to keep the issue on the front burner. If you made Stephen Lewis the gender advisor, nobody would forget for one minute that gender is a concern and they have to change their attitude.

Is there more Canada could do to influence UN reform?

Ambassador Allan Rock is in a very crucial position right now. He is one of the co-chairs of the mechanism that has been established to follow up on the report of the Secretary General. That requires not only very good knowledge and understanding of the reforms, but a lot of diplomatic skills to bring 191 countries to agree to the changes necessary, and I think Canada in that leadership position is playing an absolutely crucial role.

Also, we want the next Secretary General to continue to put managerial excellence at the top of the agenda – to care about managerial issues and be committed to continuing the modernization of the secretariat. Canada has been promoting a more open process for the selection of the Secretary General. We are suggesting candidates should at some point appear in public to present their vision and be ready to answer questions. I don’t know if there will be enough support for that, but it would be another way to test whether candidates are going to be good custodians of the machinery as well as being good diplomats.

What will you be doing in your new position with the Centre for International Governance Innovation?

I chose as the subject of my research the question of nuclear energy and proliferation. The starting assumption is that we’re likely to see an increase in the number of nuclear power plants around the world, and maybe more countries turning to nuclear energy because of the huge increase in energy demands and the high prices of oil. I want to look at the connection between that likely phenomenon and security issues. Nuclear power plants are targets, and there will be an increase in trade of nuclear material and technology. What are the implications for security? Do we have the right kind of prevention, detection, control and mitigation strategies? Are we well equipped internationally to deal with these issues?


For more on UN reform, see www.un.org/reform/investing-in-un.html.