[CaptainCrunch]

Marc Garneau, who I thought would have been a very good Liberal leader, and should have been appointed as the Minister of Defence releases his autobiography.


https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/...8f9d4f4b4.html

OTTAWA - Former foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau says Canada has lost its standing in the world under the tenure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he criticizes as an ill-prepared leader who prioritizes politics and makes big pronouncements without any follow-through."I believe Justin Trudeau has overestimated Canada's impact abroad," Garneau writes in his autobiography, "A Most Extraordinary Ride: Space, Politics and the Pursuit of a Canadian Dream," which is scheduled to be released in October by Penguin Random House.
While much of the book is a trip down memory lane for Garneau's pre-politics career in the military and as an astronaut, the final third is devoted to his time as a member of Parliament.

After the Liberals came to power in 2015, Garneau served in Trudeau's cabinet for six years, more than five of those as the minister of transport. He spent the final nine months as the minister of foreign affairs, until Trudeau dropped him from cabinet completely after the 2021 election.
In his book, Garneau acknowledges being blindsided by that decision — one he says Trudeau never explained.
He makes it clear that he and Trudeau had little in common outside of their "Liberal values," and that the two were not close.

Another thing he makes clear: Garneau thinks Trudeau did not value the importance of a foreign affairs minister, and isn't very good at international relations.
"Unfortunately Canada's standing in the world has slipped, in part because our pronouncements are not always matched by a capacity to act or by actions that clearly demonstrate that we mean what we say," Garneau writes. "We are losing credibility."
He describes Trudeau's trips to China in 2016 and 2017, and to India in 2018, before his tenure as foreign minister, as "not successful."
The two China trips failed to kick-start free-trade talks with China, and Trudeau was criticized at the time for trying to bring non-trade issues to the table in talks with the Chinese government. That included pushing on human rights, which did not go over well in Beijing.
The India trip's failures were well-documented, including the embarrassment of inadvertently offering a reception invitation to a man convicted of trying to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister in Canada in 1986.
"We were not properly prepared," Garneau said of the three foreign visits.
"At a fundamental level, we did not understand who we were meeting. We thought we could seduce and were surprised it didn't turn out that way. Gone was the clear-eyed approach of a prime minister like Jean Chrétien, who always knew with whom he was dealing and who forged pragmatic alliances with world powers."

The ex-astronaut is not the first former Trudeau cabinet minister to pen a memoir that lambastes the prime minister. In 2023, former finance minister Bill Morneau released his own memoir, which criticized Trudeau for making mostly unilateral decisions and putting politics ahead of policy.
Both of them describe a concentration of power in the Prime Minister's Office that did not improve despite Trudeau's promises to decentralize when he came into office in 2015.
Garneau writes that when he was in charge of transport, Trudeau didn't seem to have much interest in the file at all. When he moved to foreign affairs, he hoped the prime minister would be more interested in seeking out his input on issues.
But, Garneau says, he did not.
He writes that Trudeau only called upon him once to offer advice, at a meeting with then-ambassador to China Dominic Barton, in a discussion about the ongoing plight of the two Michaels.
"The prime minister's aloofness led me to conclude that he did not consider my advice useful enough to want to hear from me directly, relying instead on his staff," Garneau recounts.
"I found this disappointing to say the least. The expectation was that communication between him and me would be via the (Prime Minister's Office), and so consequently I never knew what information, if any, reached him."
The Trudeau government, Garneau contends, is overall too reactive and ill-prepared.

Garneau was the fourth of five people who have headed up Canadian foreign policy over the 8 1/2 years Trudeau has been prime minister.
"Our allies could logically question whether Canada attached sufficient importance to this portfolio, and they did," Garneau writes.
During every one of his introductory calls with counterparts, he says he was told they hoped he'd last longer than his predecessors, something he describes as "a not so subtle message."
It didn't happen.

In terms of former Liberal cabinet member's Garneau is the fourth to come out against Trudeau recently.


Bill Morneau and Catherine McKenna have both come out recently. JWR's book was highly critical as well.