{"id":206408,"date":"2021-03-19T18:52:41","date_gmt":"2021-03-19T15:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/brent-robson-the-point-man-on-the-scramble-to-repatriate-canadians\/"},"modified":"2021-03-19T18:52:41","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T15:52:41","slug":"brent-robson-the-point-man-on-the-scramble-to-repatriate-canadians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/brent-robson-the-point-man-on-the-scramble-to-repatriate-canadians\/","title":{"rendered":"#Brent Robson: The point man on the scramble to repatriate Canadians"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Brent Robson: The point man on the scramble to repatriate Canadians<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n When civilian travel<\/a> ground to a halt last year, Brent Robson led efforts to bring Canadians home from the far reaches of the planet\n <\/div>\n
\n Brent Robson\u2019s computer screen last spring was a constantly messy patchwork of maps. Maps showing international airport statuses. Maps showing cruise ships, floating red dots on the oceans. Maps showing dozens of countries, overlaid with temporary populations of Canadians stranded and trying to get home.<\/p>\n

As emergency response director for Global Affairs Canada, Robson typically does low-key work, running an Ottawa response centre that helps people abroad with lost passports or other problems. Crises arise one foreign country at a time, with Canadians getting caught up in, say, a localized natural disaster or a terrorist attack. But last March, he became commander of a sprawling effort unfolding simultaneously across more than 100 countries, his attention endlessly redirected from one logistical complication to the next. The pandemic all but shut down an entire planet\u2019s civilian travel system. Robson had to help get more than 57,500 people home.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d spent most of his federal career doing consular affairs work in Africa, Asia and in the United States\u2014fortunate, because the pandemic rescue mission effectively converted the entire Global Affairs department into a harried consular affairs operation. His tiny team grew to 1,000 people, many in a round-the-clock call centre fielding hundreds of anxious inquiries a day. Others coordinated with on-the-ground diplomatic teams and airlines that dispatched hundreds of charter flights to bring home tourists, international students and workers stuck abroad.<\/p>\n

It went far beyond the work Robson\u2019s team did in January and February 2020 in repatriating a few hundred Canadians affected by the outbreaks in Wuhan and on a couple of cruise ships. They had to expand the effort to pretty much everywhere on Earth that Canadians were\u2014which was pretty much everywhere. And it started on March 16 with one \u201cbig bang\u201d: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warning all Canadians to hurry home, before they\u2019d be unable to. \u201cI\u2019d say within a week we had the flight model up and working, we were engaging our missions to come up with creative solutions to a whole series<\/a> of lockdown challenges,\u201d Robson recalls, \u201cand we were full into repatriation mode.\u201d<\/p>\n

To handle his team\u2019s mushrooming size\u2014and to cope with the then-new dictates of physical distancing\u2014his team took over much of the Lester B. Pearson Building, Global Affairs\u2019 headquarters in Ottawa. He describes it as \u201corganized chaos\u201d: so much happ<\/a>ening all at once, but everyone knowing their role. Fran\u00e7ois-Philippe Champagne, then the minister, even joined in as a virtual travel agent, negotiating Canadian airplane landing times in some locked-down countries.<\/p>\n

On July 17, the final flight returned 165 people from Trinidad and Tobago. The leadership challenge of Robson\u2019s career had wound down, after four exhausting months. \u201cI\u2019m just waiting for some of these restrictions to lift,\u201d he says now. \u201cMaybe get back on the ski hill, get my adrenalin rush that way. Something a little more controlled.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

This profile appeared in the April 2021 issue of\u00a0<\/em>Maclean\u2019s, where we\u00a0gave our magazine over to a 22,000-word special report, \u201cYear One: The untold story of the pandemic in Canada.\u201d Sign up to read that whole story, and\u00a0learn why we did it.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

“#Brent Robson: The point man on the scramble to repatriate Canadians” When civilian travel ground to a halt last year, Brent Robson led efforts to bring Canadians home from the far reaches of the planet Brent Robson\u2019s computer screen last spring was a constantly messy patchwork of maps. Maps showing international airport statuses. Maps showing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/COVID-CANADA-PROFILE_ROBSON-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1545,1356,67806,98564,98565],"class_list":["post-206408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-editors-picks","tag-global-affairs-canada","tag-repatriation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206408","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=206408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}