Chantal Hébert: The Boeing 737 Max reversal shows team Trudeau is flying blind
(The Star Food)

No one will accuse Transport Minister Marc Garneau of having rushed to judgment on whether to ground Boeing 737 Max 8 planes from Canadian air space until more is known about the causes of last Sunday’s Ethiopian Airlines crash.By the time Garneau appeared on Wednesday to announce he was reversing his earlier stance that the aircraft was safe to fly, just about every international ally of Canada — with the exception of the United States — had already grounded the plane. Garneau said he changed his mind on the basis of new information drawn from comparing the satellite-tracked paths of the two Max 8s that crashed. Perhaps, but sometimes fresh data can double as a fig leaf.For it is also a fact that by the time Canada joined most of the rest of the planet in grounding the aircraft, the federal position had become untenable.The plan to keep the planes airborne really started to falter as of the moment the European Union banned them from its airspace. That happened about 24 hours before Garneau held his news conference. Based on information that Canada almost certainly had in hand at the time, countries with comparable air safety standards came to a very different conclusion. As of that point, hopes that Transport Canada’s assurances would be enough to shore up the faith of rattled Canadian air travellers vanished.Any plan to use Garneau’s scheduled press briefing to reinforce the message that there was nothing to fear from flying on 737 Max 8 aircraft was not going to cut it.With every passing hour the question became not if but when Canada would pivot to a different position. Indeed, the U.S followed suit a few hours later.By reversing his stance Garneau only narrowly avoided flying his government into a zone of political turbulence it is less than well equipped to navigate in the current crisis-mode state that has resulted from the SNC-Lavalin affair.He also spared himself what would likely have been a very acrimonious news conferenc ...