Frank Le, Canada’s consul and senior trade commissioner in Guadalajara, didn’t join the foreign service to spend all his time stuck behind a desk.
Professionally and privately, his preferred comfort zone is the great outdoors, whether engaging with the inhabitants of his adopted home, learning about their society and culture, or discovering the natural wonder of his new surroundings.
“I’m an inherently curious person,” says Le, a modest, well-spoken and affable diplomat who believes the best way he can learn about a country and serve his government is “to get out on the ground and meet people who know a lot more than I do.”
It was curiosity that prompted Le, while studying for a graduate degree in International Relations and Economics at the University of California in San Diego, to down tools for a period and backpack—and hitchhike (safer in those days, he stresses)—all the way to Mexico’s southern border.
The experience was pivotal in his decision to join the diplomatic corps and see more of the world. Le’s first posting in Shanghai, China was predominantly trade-focused, followed by a stint at the High Commission of Canada in New Delhi, India, where he wore a “number of different hats,” covering international security, crime and terrorism, as well as trade. When the Covid pandemic brought world travel to a halt, Le and other foreign service personnel were assigned less familiar duties, including the complex task of trying to arrange the repatriation of “enormous numbers” of Canadian citizens stranded in India, as well as smaller pockets marooned in Bhutan and Nepal.
His role overseeing 11 employees at the Guadalajara consulate, in an area covering Jalisco and five other states (Nayarit, Guanajuato, Colima, Aguascalientes and Sinaloa), has offered Le—now beginning his second year here—fresh challenges for commercial and social engagement, and the opportunity to promote Canada’s image as an innovative and socially progressive nation.
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