{"id":152943,"date":"2021-01-13T00:03:16","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T21:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-calm-hand-of-marc-garneau\/"},"modified":"2021-01-13T00:03:16","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T21:03:16","slug":"the-calm-hand-of-marc-garneau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-calm-hand-of-marc-garneau\/","title":{"rendered":"#The calm hand of Marc Garneau"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The calm hand of Marc Garneau<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Whether his new post is a prime opportunity or a headache in the waiting, Garneau’s surprise move to global affairs is a vote of confidence in his steadiness\n <\/div>\n
\n Global affairs is traditionally viewed as one of the most high-profile and consequential posts in the federal cabinet. But at the moment,\u00a0there is room to wonder whether it\u2019s also an albatross in waiting.<\/p>\n

On one hand, a sane and steady new American administration led by President-elect Joe Biden will be in charge before the milk currently in your fridge expires. On the other, the China file and the intractable predicament of Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, imprisoned for more than two years in retaliation for the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, is not a problem that is getting any easier to solve.<\/p>\n

But seen through either lens\u2014sterling opportunity or international headache in waiting\u2014Marc Garneau\u2019s elevation to global affairs minister on Tuesday is a vote of confidence in his abilities; he\u2019s either an understated veteran being rewarded with a high-profile post or a steady\u00a0hand asked to mind a volatile wheel.<\/p>\n

Garneau\u2019s move from transport minister came in a surprise cabinet shuffle precipitated by the decision of Navdeep Bains, formerly minister of innovation, science<\/a> and industry, to retire from politics to spend more time with his family.\u00a0On the day he was sworn in over Zoom as global affairs minister, Garneau drew links between the different facets of his new portfolio, vowing to work with the United States in an effort to free the so-called two Michaels, and to improve the traditionally close alliance frayed over the last several years by outgoing President Donald Trump\u2019s combative impetuousness. \u201cI believe very, very strongly that no bilateral relationship is more important than that of Canada with the United States and it will continue to be that way,\u201d Garneau said.<\/p>\n

Before launching his political career, he was a military man, engineer and astronaut. He graduated with an engineering degree from Canada\u2019s Royal Military College before attending the Imperial College of Science and Technology<\/a> in London on a scholarship, where he earned his PhD in electrical engineering in 1973.<\/p>\n

Garneau served in the Canadian navy until 1983 as a combat systems expert, before a chance sighting of a Canadian government ad recruiting astronauts to fly on the U.S. space shuttle radically altered his career path. He logged almost 700 hours in space on three missions, in 1984, 1996 and 2000, and he was the first non-American to serve as capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, the voice that bridges Mission Control and astronauts in flight. The entire job is about being precise, serene and possessing a technical sort of empathy for what colleagues in space need to know and have relayed back to Earth.\u00a0\u201cIf the frickin\u2019 spaceship\u2019s falling apart,\u201d Garneau once told Maclean\u2019s<\/em>. \u201cThey want to know you are calm, reassuring: \u2018You are going to get out of this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

After retiring as an astronaut, Garneau served as president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2006, before making his first unsuccessful political bid in a different Montreal riding, two years before he was elected in Westmount-Ville-Marie in 2008. He ran against Justin Trudeau for the Liberal leadership, but dropped out of the race a month before the April 2013 vote, when he determined Trudeau\u2019s victory was inevitable, saying he was a \u201cloyal soldier\u201d who would support the new leader. \u201cYou\u2019re going to see my face around for a long time,\u201d Garneau said at the time.<\/p>\n

After the Liberals won their majority two years later, the Prime Minister named Garneau transport minister, a post he held until Tuesday\u2019s shuffle.\u00a0It was in that role, nearly two years ago, that Garneau sat on the dais at the front of the National Press Theatre and scared the bejesus out of people by being good at a job for which he was uniquely well suited.<\/p>\n

Canada had belatedly joined a long list of countries grounding the Boeing 737 Max 8 after a second crash in five months killed 157 people, and Garneau was explaining\u00a0new evidence\u00a0about the airplane\u2019s last moments in the air that had led to this decision. Authorities had discovered that the angle-of-attack sensors in the planes were faulty, leading the aircraft to erroneously sense that its nose was too high\u2014an error that could stall its lift as it climbed after take-off\u2014so that the auto-pilot software forced the nose of the plane down in an attempt to correct things.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe pilot said, \u2018It\u2019s not too high,\u2019 so he countered that,\u201d the transport minister explained. \u201cAnd then a number of seconds later, the\u2026software kicked in again and tried to force it down again, and (the pilot) said, \u2018No, no, we\u2019ve gotta climb.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Saying that he was setting aside his politician role for a moment to don his \u201cengineer\u2019s hat\u201d and astronaut identity again, Garneau illustrated this with one hand held out in front of him, angling down and then up, as he explained the battle between faulty sensors and a certainly terrified pilot. The gesture was like a child sailing one hand out the car window on a road trip<\/a>, juxtaposed against facts that were viscerally horrifying, but as in his onetime role as the voice of Mission Control, he laid them out with calm precision.<\/p>\n

Now, whether his new global affairs role is a plum post at the dawn of a new and more stable era in Canada-U.S. relations or hornet\u2019s nest of intractable problems\u2014or, most likely, a complex mix of the two\u2014Garneau\u2019s elevation to the portfolio is a vote of confidence in his steadiness.<\/p>\n

For a man who used to be professionally calm, and who once described his own early political style as \u201cwooden,\u201d that\u2019s not a bad fit.
\n<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#The calm hand of Marc Garneau” Whether his new post is a prime opportunity or a headache in the waiting, Garneau’s surprise move to global affairs is a vote of confidence in his steadiness Global affairs is traditionally viewed as one of the most high-profile and consequential posts in the federal cabinet. But at the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152944,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/CP16989096-750x422.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[89226,67806,89237,89238],"class_list":["post-152943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cabinet-shuffle","tag-editors-picks","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-marc-garneau"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}