Canada’s global reputation has suffered under Justin Trudeau, says Marc Garneau

(Ottawa) Former foreign affairs minister Marc Garneau says Canada has lost its standing in the world under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whom he criticizes as an ill-prepared leader who prioritizes politics and makes big statements without follow-through.

“I think Justin Trudeau overestimated Canada’s impact abroad,” Garneau wrote in his autobiography, which is due to be published in October by Penguin Random House.

While much of the book is a trip down memory lane to Mr. Garneau’s pre-political career in the military and as an astronaut, the final third is devoted to his time as a member of Parliament.

Mr. Garneau, now 75, was first elected in 2008 as the Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Westmount–Ville-Marie, a riding that later became Notre-Dame-de-Grâce–Westmount after a 2015 electoral map redrawing.

He mounted an unsuccessful campaign for the party leadership in 2013, eventually withdrawing from the race and supporting Mr. Trudeau, who would go on to win a landslide victory.

After the Liberals came to power in 2015, Marc Garneau served in Trudeau’s cabinet for six years, including more than five as transport minister. He spent the last nine months as foreign affairs minister, until Prime Minister Trudeau removed him from cabinet entirely after the 2021 election.

In his book, Mr. Garneau acknowledges having been taken aback by this decision – which according to him was never explained to him by the Prime Minister.

He made it clear that he and Mr. Trudeau had little in common beyond their “liberal values” and that the two were not close.

The undervalued Minister of Foreign Affairs

Another thing he says clearly: Mr. Garneau thinks that Prime Minister Trudeau has not valued the importance of a foreign affairs minister and is not very good at international relations.

“Unfortunately, Canada’s standing in the world has declined, in part because our statements are not always matched by the ability to act or by actions that clearly demonstrate that we mean what we say,” he noted.

He describes Mr. Trudeau’s trips to China in 2016 and 2017, as well as to India in 2018, before his tenure as foreign minister, as “unsuccessful.”

Both trips to China failed to revive free trade negotiations with Beijing, and Trudeau was criticized at the time for trying to put non-trade issues on the table in negotiations with the Chinese government. That included pushing for human rights, which did not go down well in Beijing.

The failures of the India trip have been well documented, including the decision to inadvertently invite to a reception a man convicted of attempting to assassinate an Indian minister in Canada in 1986.

“We were not well prepared,” Garneau said of the three foreign visits.

“Basically, we didn’t understand who we were meeting. We thought we could seduce and we were surprised that it didn’t happen that way. Gone is the clear-eyed approach of a prime minister like Jean Chrétien, who always knew who he was up against and who forged pragmatic alliances with world powers.”

Delayed strategies

Marc Garneau also criticized Mr. Trudeau for delaying the publication of new national strategies for dealing with China and expanding Canada’s relations in the Indo-Pacific region.

The China strategy was delayed largely because Justin Trudeau and his “entourage” were reluctant to disclose anything about it while Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were still detained in China, he writes.

“I think it was a complete mistake.”

Similarly, he says he was unable to present a new Indo-Pacific strategy to cabinet, and it was not published until November 2022 – even though it had been ready for a year and he was no longer a minister.

Marc Garneau declined an interview request about the book.

Justin Trudeau’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its contents.

The former astronaut is not the first former minister under Justin Trudeau to pen a memoir lambasting the prime minister. In 2023, former Finance Minister Bill Morneau published his own memoir, in which he criticized Mr. Trudeau for making largely unilateral decisions and putting politics ahead of public policy.

Both describe a concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office that has not improved despite Mr. Trudeau’s promises of decentralization when he came to power in 2015.

Mr. Garneau writes that when he was in charge of transport, Mr. Trudeau did not seem at all interested in the file. When he moved to foreign affairs, he hoped the prime minister would want to seek his advice on certain issues.

But he didn’t, he said.

He writes that Mr. Trudeau only called on him once for advice, during a meeting with the then ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, on the current fate of the two Michaels.

“The Prime Minister’s distant attitude 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 said.

The Trudeau government, says Mr. Garneau, is generally too reactive and ill-prepared.

“It is not enough to pay attention only when a concern arises, which is what this government has become accustomed to doing,” he said.

Too much turnover

Garneau said the fact that Canada has used so many different foreign ministers has undermined the credibility of the role and left the impression that Trudeau and Canada do not value or prioritize the issue.

Marc Garneau was the fourth of five people to lead Canadian foreign policy during Mr. Trudeau’s eight and a half years as prime minister.

“Our allies could logically ask themselves whether Canada attached sufficient importance to this issue, and they did,” he wrote.

In each of his introductory calls with his counterparts, he says he was told they hoped he would outlast his predecessors, which he describes as “a not-so-subtle message.”

This does not happen.

Marc Garneau only stayed for nine months, the shortest term of the five.

Chrystia Freeland, the second to be appointed, held the post for nearly three years, and Mélanie Joly, the current foreign affairs minister, is closing in on 33 months in the role.

Stéphane Dion was the first, holding the title for 18 months, and François-Philippe Champagne, who was the third foreign minister, held the post for 14 months.