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Ambassador Bissett was born in the small village of
DELORAINE, located in the South-West corner of Manitoba close to the U.S. border and the
Province of Saskatchewan. During the Second World War his family moved to Winnipeg and he
received his secondary and university education in that city. It was there he became
interested in Eastern European cultures and history. |
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| After pursuing postgraduate
studies in history and political science he won a fellowship to study Public
Administration at Carleton University in Ottawa. Upon obtaining his Masters Degree he
joined the public service in1956. |
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| He spent 37 years as a Canadian
Public Servant in the Department of Citizenship and Immigration and Foreign Affairs. He
was appointed head of the Immigration Foreign Service in 1974 and became Assistant
Under-Secretary of State for Social Affairs in 1980. In the early '70s he served at the
Canadian High Commission in London England. |
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| He was appointed Canadian High Commissioner to Trinidad
and Tobago in 1982 and served there until 1985 when he was seconded to the Department of
Employment and Immigration as Executive Director to help steer new immigration and refugee
legislation through Parliament. |
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| In 1990 he was appointed Canadian Ambassador
to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. He therefore witnessed at first hand the Yugoslav
tragedy to which he attributes much of the blame to Western diplomatic blundering and
deliberate scheming. He was recalled from Yugoslavia in the summer of 1992. |
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| He retired from the Foreign
Service upon leaving Yugoslavia and accepted a job in Moscow as the head of an
International organization helping the Russian Govt. establish a new Immigration Ministry
and designing and implementing settlement programs for the thousands of Russians returning
to Russia from other parts of the former Soviet Union. He returned from Moscow in 1997 and
is enjoying retirement in Ottawa but continues to do contract work from time to time. |
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Ambassador Bissett is married and has 5 children and 8
grand children. He was shocked at NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia and has been an outspoken
critic of the war, appearing frequently on radio and television and on speaking
engagements across Canada. |
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