Former Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau said Canada had lost its standing in the world under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, criticizing him as an ill-prepared leader who puts politics first and talks big without putting it into action.
“I think Justin Trudeau overestimated Canada’s influence abroad,” Garneau wrote in his autobiography. The Greatest Journeys: Space, Politics, and the Pursuit of the Canadian DreamIt will be published by Penguin Random House in October.
While much of the book is a recollection of Garneau’s pre-political career as a military and astronaut, the final third is about his time as a member of parliament.
Garneau, 75, was first elected in 2008 as the Liberal MP for Montreal’s Westmount-Ville-Marie district, which became Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Westmount after boundary changes in 2015.
He ran unsuccessfully for leadership in 2013 and eventually withdrew from the election to support Trudeau, who won in a landslide victory.
Garneau served in Trudeau’s cabinet for six years after the Liberals took power in 2015, including more than five of those as transport minister, and the final nine months as foreign affairs minister, but Trudeau removed Garneau from cabinet altogether after the 2021 election.
Garneau acknowledges in his book that he was surprised by the decision, but Garneau says Trudeau never explained the decision.
He made it clear that he and Trudeau had little in common apart from “liberal values” and that the two were not close.
“Canada’s standing in the world has declined.”
Another thing he made clear was that Garneau doesn’t think Trudeau values the importance of a foreign affairs minister and isn’t very good at international relations.
“Unfortunately, Canada’s standing in the world is declining, in part because our words are not always matched by our ability to act, or by actions that clearly demonstrate that we mean what we say,” Garneau wrote. “We are losing credibility.”
He described Trudeau’s visits to China in 2016 and 2017, before he became foreign minister, and his visit to India in 2018 as “unsuccessful.”
The two visits to China did not help revitalize free trade talks with China, and Trudeau was criticized at the time for trying to bring non-trade issues onto the agenda in negotiations with Beijing, including addressing human rights issues, which were not well received in Beijing.
His India visits have been well-publicised, including the embarrassing incident in 1986 when he inadvertently sent a reception invitation to a man convicted of plotting to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister in Canada.
![Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and Jaspal Atwal attend an Indian film industry event in Mumbai in February during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's official visit to India.](https://i.cbc.ca/1.4617430.1716407628!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/jaspal-atwal-sophie-gregoire-trudeau.jpg)
![Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and Jaspal Atwal attend an Indian film industry event in Mumbai in February during Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's official visit to India.](https://i.cbc.ca/1.4617430.1716407628!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_780/jaspal-atwal-sophie-gregoire-trudeau.jpg)
Garneau said he “was not able to properly prepare” for his three overseas trips.
“Fundamentally, we did not understand who we were meeting with. We thought we could seduce them, but we were surprised that it did not work. Gone is the level-headed approach of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who always understood who he was negotiating with and built pragmatic alliances with world powers.”
Garneau has also criticized Trudeau for delaying the release of a new national strategy to deal with China and expand Canada’s relationships in the Indo-Pacific region.
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The China strategy was delayed because Trudeau and his “cronies” were reluctant to release information about the China strategy while Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor were still detained in China, he wrote.
“I think it was simply a mistake.”
Similarly, he said he failed to present a new Indo-Pacific strategy to Cabinet, which was only actually released in November 2022, a year after it was ready and a year after Garneau was removed from responsibility for the strategy.
“He didn’t think my advice was very helpful.”
Garneau declined a request to be interviewed for the book.
Trudeau’s office did not respond to a request for comment on its contents.
The former astronaut is not the first former Trudeau cabinet minister to pen a memoir slamming Trudeau: In 2023, former finance minister Bill Morneau published his own memoir, criticizing Trudeau for making largely unilateral decisions and prioritizing politics over policy.
Both say the concentration of power in the Prime Minister’s Office has not improved despite Trudeau’s promises of decentralization when he took office in 2015.
Garneau wrote that Trudeau seemed to show little interest in the issue when he was in charge of transportation, and when he moved to foreign affairs, he hoped the prime minister would be more interested in soliciting his opinion on issues.
But Garneau says he didn’t do that.
He wrote that Trudeau only called on him once for advice, during a meeting with then-Chinese ambassador Dominic Barton to discuss the ongoing plight of Michael’s brothers.
“The prime minister’s aloofness led me to conclude that he didn’t find my advice useful enough to want to hear it directly from me, and instead relied on his staff,” Garneau recalled.
“This was disappointing, to say the least. The communication between him and me was [Prime Minister’s Office]so I never knew what information, if any, reached him.”
Garneau argues that overall, the Trudeau government has reacted too quickly and been ill-prepared.
“It is not enough to pay attention only when concerns arise, and this administration has made a habit of doing so,” he wrote.
Garneau said the fact that Canada has had so many replacement foreign affairs ministers undermines the country’s credibility in the role and creates the impression that Trudeau and Canada don’t value the subject or make it a priority.
Garneau was the fourth of five people to lead Canada’s foreign policy over eight years.1/2 It has been several years since Trudeau became prime minister.
“Our allies would logically question whether Canada placed sufficient importance on this area, and they did,” Garneau wrote.
He says that on each of his first conference calls with colleagues, he was told that he expected them to last longer than his predecessor, what he describes as a “not-so-subtle message.”
That didn’t happen.
Garneau lasted just nine months, the shortest of the five administrations.
The second appointee, Chrystia Freeland, has served in the position for almost three years, while current foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly is approaching 33 months in the job.
The first Minister of Foreign Affairs was Stéphane Dion, who served for 18 months, and the third Minister of Foreign Affairs, François-Philippe Champagne, who served for 14 months.