Gilles Paquet: Homo hereticus

Chapter 8. Unbundling Paquet

 70  Chapter 8 Unbundling Paquet  Robin Higham I first met Gilles Paquet while completing the final months of thirty-five years with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Recycled as the “diplomat in residence” at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Canadian Studies, I had few acquaintances at the university. But Gilles was omnipresent on campus, and it wasn’t long before our paths crossed. I was pleased to find a home and took up his invitation to join his nascent Centre d’études en gouvernance. It was soon evident that I had a tiger by the tail and that my new colleague was a force of nature not just on campus among students and fellow professors but also within the considerable public policy community in the federal public service. In the weeks that followed, I learned that, throughout his long career as an academic, the uniqueness of his work placed Gilles in high demand as a lecturer and conference participant, as a media commentator on a wide range of social, economic and political questions, and as a consultant to all three levels of government in Canada. His discourse could be unorthodox and disconcerting, but his conclusions and recommendations never failed to surprise with their selfevident logic. It was also increasingly apparent to me that the Paquet brand of inescapable logic was only self-evident after he debunked the so-called embedded assumptions that so often keep other colleagues and scholars from locating le nerf de la guerre, the heart of the matter. When I joined in the mid-1960s, Canada’s external affairs and foreign trade services were renowned at home and abroad for a capacity to think and strategize long term, to collaborate with like-minded allies, to build compromise, and to UNBUNDLING PAQUET  71  serve as honest broker between parties where communications were in difficulty. Both the Departments of External Affairs, and Trade and Commerce were even known to take risks! Lessons learned at the knees of senior and more worldly foreign service colleagues in those early years taught innovative policy development habits and rigorous assessment of long-term national interests. From under Gilles’s penumbra, I was beginning to understand that my earlier programming had been eroded during those later career years of the 1980s and 1990s. It was a refreshing flashback to rediscover what seemed to me at the time “the way we used to do things.” At his Centre on Governance, we talked about governance! But of course there was something more to Gilles than just a return to those imagined golden years. The more I saw him at work, in tireless conversing, reflecting, lecturing, reading, and of course writing, the more I became intrigued with his method of problem analysis and public policy development—what I came to call la mèthode paquesienne. I wanted to understand how this mere university professor (with practically no foreign affairs experience after all) could be so consistently insightful on such a broad and varied spectrum of governance and public policy issues. There are many others, of course, who know and admire his work—and many critics as well. But disciple or heretic, all recognize that Gilles employs a uniquely effective approach to policy analysis and policy development. My question was simple. “How does he do that?” The answer, if there is one, is of course more complex. His closest associates, while as intrigued as me about what makes this man tick, were wisely unwilling to even attempt an exploration of the secrets of la méthode paquesienne. But for me, unbundling Gilles Paquet had become both a casual puzzle project and a desire to learn more from my enigmatic new colleague. As I became a dedicated Gilles watcher, one early impression was a sense that la méthode takes much of its inspiration from his years of practising a certain esprit de contradiction. Gilles, it seemed to me, was taking an almost perverse pleasure in asking “Who says?” or “What if?” in challenging those embedded assumptions. La méthode seemed to me to start with a conclusion—that conventional embedded assumptions are, by their very existence, the most likely reason for the failed policies under review. Gilles always needs to know up front what the protagonists claim the issue is all about. For him, whatever is taken for granted in most public policy challenges is probably just not so. He instinctively goes back to ground zero...