On Friday night, Justin Trudeau asked for and accepted John McCallum’s resignation as the ambassador to China, not offering specifics as to why, but offering praise of his years of service. The narrative emerged a little later over the weekend that his comments were “unhelpful” in releasing those Canadians detained in the country, and some said that it sent “inconsistent” messages to China (though I’m not sure that’s entirely true – we may be following the rule of law, but if the Americans withdraw their extradition request, that would resolve the situation, and we can’t pretend that extradition requests in Canada aren’t inherently political). Of course, this is also that whole dynamic of what can be said in private versus public, but there you go. Choosing a replacement will also be tricky business, and there are those who say it needs to be a senior bureaucrat who speaks Mandarin, but we’ll see if Trudeau seems to think another political appointee is his preferred route.

Andrew Scheer was quick to rush out and say that it was too late, that he should have been fired at the first instance, which is a bit rich considering that Stephen Harper’s usual practice was to conspicuously ignore these kinds of eruptions, shrug them off, and only months later would he quietly shuffle that person out of whatever job they were in, so that he didn’t look like he made a mistake in appointing them to the job in the first place.

Susan Delacourt hears from her PMO sources that nobody was happy with McCallum’s ouster, and that while they could walk back on comments once, they couldn’t do it a second time. Paul Wells goes through all of the other questions that McCallum’s ouster raises, not only with the state of the Meng incident, but also on the broader foreign policy objectives of this government, and what is left standing from the vision they outlined two years ago.

https://twitter.com/InklessPW/status/1089321523926786048

Good reads:

• Much of the aid money for industries affected by the US steel and aluminium tariffs has gone unspent.
• On scientist says that “amateur-hour” work done on the Trans Mountain pipeline has damaged a salmon habitat.
• VADM Mark Norman’s supporters claim that the leak to the media of the letter removing Norman from his position not being investigated is a double standard.
• At the end of his caucus retreat, Andrew Scheer gave a speech that reheated their various false talking points about taxes, carbon prices and “affordability.”
• Another Conservative MP, Guy Lauzon, won’t run again this fall.
• Charlie Angus wants the government to pause Google’s Sidewalk Labs project at Toronto’s waterfront until there is more transparency with the process.
• Svend Robinson is also agitating against the LNG pipeline in the interior of BC that Jagmeet Singh has publicly supported.
• Maxime Bernier has named an army veteran as the candidate in the by-election in Outremont.
• Bernier was also in Alberta to rile up “separatist” nonsense in that province and spread more lies about how the equalization system works.
• Raj Grewal has decided he won’t resign after all, but will stay on as an Independent MP, citing personal growth.
• My weekend column wondered why we keep calling Conservatives good fiscal managers when they can’t seem to get the basics of economics right.

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