François Lafond joined the Department of External Affairs and International Trade in 1991 after serving for more than 11 years as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.
He has been posted to Caracas, to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C., and to Brasilia. In Ottawa, he has worked in a number of functional divisions, including five years in the area of trade and economic policy. He has been the head of the Economic and Trade Policy Program at the Embassy of Canada in Brasilia for 5 years before being appointed Consul General of Canada in Monterrey as of August 2009.