John McCallum had two big jobs in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. First, as immigration minister from 2015 to early 2017, he managed the influx of Syrian refugees to this country; then, for the last two years, McCallum was Canada’s man in China. On a day that both of those issues collided spectacularly in the news, McCallum lost his job as Canada’s ambassador to China — asked by Trudeau to step down after some extremely ill-advised remarks on Friday to a StarMetro reporter in Vancouver. Even as attention was riveted on Kingston, Ont., and the questioning of a Syrian refugee in a terrorism take-down on Friday, McCallum was musing aloud in Vancouver about how it would be “great for Canada” if the U.S. dropped an extradition request that has entangled Canada in a massive, high-stakes dispute with China. It was McCallum’s second verbal misstep in a week, and Trudeau phoned him late on Friday night to say that this latest outburst was one too many. The firing throws a bucket of cold water over speculation all last week that McCallum was saying what the Trudeau government could not say publicly in what has been an escalating, high-stakes feud with China, kicked off by the December arrest and detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou as part of the U.S. extradition request. Since then, two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, have been detained and another, David Schellenberg, has been sentenced to death. This is, in short, not a situation that can tolerate freelancing, even by a man with a long history with this Prime Minister. (McCallum was dean of arts at McGill University when Trudeau and his principal advisor, Gerald Butts, were students there.) McCallum, on two separate occasions in the past week, appeared to be saying that politics — not the rule of law — would get this whole mess sorted. That’s “completely offside” with what the Trudeau government has been saying, a PM ...
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