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The elements of Marc Garneau – A special report from Paul Wells

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30 minute read

Paul Wells has written for the Toronto Star, the National Post, and the Montreal Gazette. Perhaps most Canadians know him best for the 19 years he spend writing long form journalism with Maclean’s magazine and for his regular appearances on CBC’s The National.
Paul Wells continues to write regularly.  Click here to subscribe to The Paul Wells Newsletter.

 He was trained to admit every error. Then he went into politics. A feature interview with the retiring MP for Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount

Introduction

When you resign your seat in the House of Commons, you get to keep your phone for 90 days. The deadlines for cleaning out your offices on Parliament Hill and in your riding are tighter but still civilized. Soon Marc Garneau will leave his constituency office on the third floor of a nondescript office building in Westmount, the affluent anglophone enclave west of downtown Montreal, for the last time. But there’s no rush, so he met me there on Monday.

Trying to get politicians to speak frankly while they’re still in office is not always rewarding, It gets easier quickly once they leave. So I thought a visit with Garneau was worth the drive to Montreal, even though he’s been cagey in his remarks to journalists since he announced his retirement on March 8. I’ll cut to the chase: His interview with me wasn’t the work of a rebel either. Garneau remains a gentleman and a Liberal. He offered only praise for Justin Trudeau. But on several issues — communications philosophy; the handling of the Freedom Convoy occupation of Ottawa; and the proper attitude toward one’s own fallibility — he drew occasional sharp distinctions between his attitude and the Trudeau government’s.

I took the scenic route to get to that stuff. Garneau was the first Canadian to fly in space. He was a national celebrity before Trudeau finished high school. And while that’s a historic distinction, Garneau shares with many more parliamentarians a long career outside politics that preceded, and informed, his career in elected office. Not all of that is the stuff of every conversation, but this one was valedictory in tone. I thought it best to start at the beginning.


This is an unusually long post on the Paul Wells newsletter. I figured I owed everyone a good feature read. I’m leaving the paywall off. You can help spread word about the writing I do by sharing this with a friend or with your networks.

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1. Water

 

I began by asking him about the year and a half he spent as a combat systems engineer on the HMCS Algonquin. When he arrived on board, it was the newest destroyer in the Canadian Navy.

“It was what I had dreamt of from the beginning of my life,” he said. “My first love was the Navy.” His father’s family was francophone Quebecers, soldiers from way back. His father fought in the infantry in WWII and was posted in Germany for two years as the Cold War settled in. “I crossed the ocean with my parents in 1956 coming back from Germany,” he said. “We came back on a ship that was on its last voyage, the Samaria, and I just fell in love with the ocean. A few years later, we went back to England on the Empress of Britain. Those confirmed for me that I wanted to be in the Navy.”

The Algonquin, a big boat with 280 crew, spent three months doing exercises as part of STANAVFORLANT, NATO’s multinational Standing Naval Force Atlantic, which would pretend the Soviet Union was up to various kinds of risky business and figure out ways to respond. Off Puerto Rico he led tests of the new Sea Sparrow missile system. Around Newfoundland’s outports, the Algonquin took the province’s lieutenant governor on an annual tour.

Young Garneau wasn’t particularly interested in moving up the ranks. “I’m an engineer. I didn’t want to be the ship captain. I wanted to be the engineer that kept the equipment going. That may not sound very exciting. But for me that was exciting, because it’s quite a job to keep all that equipment operational in case you had to go into conflict.”


2. Air

Advancement for its own sake held no appeal. But when he saw a nondescript ad from the National Research Council calling for applicants for Canada’s first astronaut corps, that sounded better than a promotion. “Wow. The idea of possibly going into space just blew me away. At the same time, I thought my chances [of being chosen] were pretty close to zero.”

In May of 1983 there were 4,200 applicants. Six months later, six remained. It became clear pretty soon the program wasn’t just looking for technical expertise but for — well, for heroes. Or at least for people who wouldn’t screw up the illusion.

“They wanted us to write essays about why we thought that we were particularly well suited. Did we realize that we would become public figures? And were we ready for that? And did we think it was important for Canada? Medical [exams] like you’d never had before. Every single thing checked, because you had to be 100% fit. Then they brought us in for the last week and and they subjected us to a whole bunch of things.

“We had to give presentations in front of the selection board. Any attempted humour was met with a stone-cold face. I remember coming out of it thinking, ‘I’ve totally bombed this.’ But they’d all been trained not to react to anything.

“Do you remember somebody called Keith Morrison?” I sure do. TV reporter and anchor, CTV to the CBC to NBC. He actually interviewed me once, when that was an odd thing to do, and I remember he was good at it. “Well, Keith was hired for the week. And he put us through our paces, sort of doing the interview thing. So that was another thing they wanted to know, if you’d be able to do that. They had us in social settings, like a cocktail kind of thing. [They wanted to see] whether you were relatively comfortable in the company of total strangers, that kind of thing. So it’s a pretty thorough week. And by the end of that, they said, ‘Look, stand by your telephone between five and seven on the third of December and you’ll get a call.’ We’re 20 at that point. ‘It’ll either be to say, sorry you didn’t make it, or, you made it.’ And I was fortunate to be one of the six chosen. They called about six o’clock. They didn’t beat around the bush. ‘Look, you made it. Congratulations. Keep it private and we’ll trot you out on the following Monday.’ Which they did.”

When you know what happened next in Garneau’s career, all this prodding and profiling and media scrutiny takes on a different meaning. He started to meet prime ministers.

Pierre Trudeau: “Man of powerful intellect. Everyone knows that. There are warmer people than Pierre Trudeau. But very cordial.”

Brian Mulroney: “Mulroney had just been elected. He wanted to meet Ronald Reagan right away… I was summoned, along with two of my crew members, Bob Crippen and Kathryn Sullivan. Which, by the way, is a total no-no. You do not take the next crew that’s going to fly in three weeks out of their bubble of training and getting ready. Except if it’s POTUS. Reagan thought it was good idea, so we were summoned. I spent time in the Oval Office with with Reagan, whom I liked right away, and Mulroney, whom I also liked right away…. I was even at the Shamrock Summit a couple of months later in Quebec City. I wasn’t quite so happy with what PMO told me to do, which is to come up through the floor on a thing that was raising me up with smoke and lighting on me, dressed in my flight suit, and having to say, ‘Take me to your leader,’ which the crowd liked. And I thought, ‘I’m making a fool of myself here.’”

On the first trip, Garneau was a payload specialist, which meant he had responsibility for a suite of Canadian scientific experiments and little else. But he had two audiences he wanted to please. NASA was the first. “I had to make a good impression so that, based on a sample of one, they’d say, ‘Okay, he did pretty well. Let’s keep inviting Canadians to fly.’ And quite a few Canadians have flown.”

Canadians were the second audience. “I wanted Canadians to be proud of me.”

Both audiences gave him the thumbs up. Today there’s a high school in Toronto named after him. In 1992 Garneau and Chris Hadfield reported for training to become mission specialists, with much broader responsibility for mission success. It took another year of training before Garneau was eligible for his second flight, in 1996. His third and final mission was at the end of 2000. There were Russians waiting at the International Space Station when the shuttle Endeavour delivered Garneau and the others. Relations with Russia were as warm as they’ve ever been. “It was more than cordial. Frankly our lives depended on one another.”

It was a longer acquaintance with higher stakes than most of us ever experience. “One of the things I loved the most about NASA was that if you fuck up” — he paused before using the salty word — “you confess. That is the culture there.”

Probably this does not need to be spelled out, but here goes anyway. This culture of honesty was not a simple preference. Shuttle crews rode a lake of liquid fuel and twin towers of solid fuel at speeds their own ancestors could not have imagined. If a bug slipped into the system it could kill them and set spaceflight back decades, as indeed it did, twice. Owning up to error was the primary method of keeping colleagues, and the dream of spaceflight, alive.

“I did hundreds of simulations. I was the first non-American CAPCOM ever. CAPCOM’s the guy who talks to the crew in orbit for Mission Control. And we did hundreds of simulations. I covered 17 missions, just as CAPCOM. And after every simulation, where the crew, perhaps, had not picked up the problem and had not reacted properly to it, we’d do a post mortem.

“And that culture of honesty and openness, which you absolutely need in the space business — you can’t have people making excuses or trying to hide things — that’s what I love the most. And I wish it existed in all facets of life, including the one I ended up in.”


3. Earth

 

Garneau first ran for Parliament in 2006, just west of Montreal Island, and lost, in the first of three elections when losing was most of what Liberals did. He was interested in Outremont in a 2007 by-election. So was Justin Trudeau. Stéphane Dion was the leader, though, and he thought a political scientist was just the ticket. Dion’s designated nominee, Jocelyn Coulon, did not fare well.

In 2008 Garneau inherited the Liberal nomination, essentially a Wonka golden ticket, in Westmount, as solid a Liberal fortress as any in Canada. Only a catastrophe could lose Westmount for the Liberal. In 2011 it almost happened — Garneau beat the New Democrat by only 642 votes in the party’s worst national defeat in since Confederation. Soon Peter C. Newman had a book out proclaiming the Liberals were history.

“There’s something intimate about being only 33 [MPs in the Liberal caucus], Garneau recalled. “We got to know each other in a kind of a relationship that you don’t get when you’re 150 or 160. So I really enjoyed the collegiality of having that small, small group. Although of course I was hoping it wouldn’t last too long.”

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In 2013, Garneau, who hadn’t been interested in commanding a ship, decided to try his chances with a political party. He ran for the Liberal leadership. He had competition.

“I personally believe that I had good policy that I put in the shop window. What I didn’t have — what I still don’t have — is charisma. I’m not interested in charisma, by the way. I’ve lived my life very well without charisma. And I’m not saying the electorate chooses on a superficial basis. But there was something about Justin Trudeau that was incredibly appealing to people.”

Garneau bowed to the inevitable and dropped out of the race. Eighteen months later he was co-chair of the Liberal Party’s “International Affairs Council of Advisors,” with a threefold mission: Figure out the party’s foreign policy; teach foreign policy to a leader with extremely limited experience in the field; and be seen showing interest in foreign policy. The group met regularly. “Trudeau only came occasionally to meet everybody and to sort of stir stir things up and have a really good discussion,” Garneau said.


4. Fire

As co-chair (with Andrew Leslie) of Trudeau’s Council of Advisors, Garneau figured he had a good chance to become foreign minister. He got Transport.

“You know, I’ve lived 17 years of my life abroad. And I love foreign policy. I wasn’t expecting Transport. And it turned out to be a job I loved. Although at first I thought, ‘Why’d he put me in transport?’

“When I got the call that, you know, ‘The Prime Minister wants to meet you,’ I thought — This is after the vetting process, ‘Are there any skeletons in your closet?’ — I thought, ‘What’s he going to put me in?’ I thought, Defence because of my background. I was in the regular forces. Or I thought, then, maybe Industry, because I was the president of the Canadian Space Agency and I worked for the Minister of Industry, Science and Technology at the time. And maybe even Foreign Affairs, because he’d had me in this job for the past two years. I wasn’t expecting Transport.” Garneau chuckled at the incongruity of it. “But now, after a little while, I saw the logic of it. I was in the Navy, ships, so I know the marine environment. I know the air environment. And so there is a certain logic to it. And it’s a job that I came to love.” He held the post for five and a half years. Only David Collenette and Lionel Chevrier lasted longer.

The new governing caucus had five times as many MPs as the Liberal caucus it replaced. “It was a heady experience,” Garneau said. “And there was a certain amount of chaos, which is understandable because it takes a couple of years to learn the basics of your job.”

It must have been a management challenge for the Prime Minister’s Office, I ventured. To have a finance minister, health minister, justice minister, defence minister who’d never been Members of Parliament before, let alone cabinet ministers. How did the PMO handle that? “It was a little bit like when you see kindergarten children all tied up with ropes, going down the street.”

Did the control ever chafe? “I had some times where I felt one way and and I felt that the centre did not necessarily agree with it. Yeah. That comes from the dynamic. If you’ve got your mandate letter, and you interpret that mandate letter the way you feel it must be implemented — you know, the vast majority of the time, no problem. But there was the odd occasion. You’ll forgive me if I don’t go into details on it. But I was very conscious of the fact [that] you have a chief of staff, your chief of staff is a key person for you. But that chief of staff reports to you, but also must report to the chief of staff of the Prime Minister. I made an indirect reference to it in my parting speech, that I sometimes made their life difficult because I might have wanted to go one way whilst the center didn’t necessarily want to go that way.”

We had been talking for more than an hour. I asked Garneau about the Freedom Convoy of January and February 2022, which has been on my mind. Specifically, I asked Garneau about his Liberal caucus colleague Joël Lightbound, who held an astonishing news conference in the second week of the Ottawa siege to say the Liberals’ COVID policy “stigmatizes and divides people.”

“I definitely took very much note of it,” he said of Lightbound’s surgical sortie. “Some of what he said is true. There were people on the Hill that were not extremists. They were just there because they felt that their rights were being not respected.” He faced his share of verbal abuse as he made his way to and from the Hill, but even still —

He paused. “I’ll be very candid. I don’t think we handled it as well as we could have.”

In what sense? “I think there was a sense that, ‘We’re not going to talk to you people. You’re just a bunch of troublemakers.’ I had always been brought up to not avoid dealing with difficult issues. This was an incredibly difficult issue.” Another pause. “So that’s just my personal comment.”

The other thing I wanted to ask him about was the tremendous controversy he and two other back-bench Liberals have stirred up over the interaction between Quebec’s newly beefed-up language law and Bill C-13, which proposes amendments to the federal Official Languages Act. This has put Garneau and his colleagues squarely on the side of Montreal’s anglophone population against a majority of Quebec’s elected politicians. And it’s brought Garneau in for some unaccustomed criticism. Barely two weeks before he resigned, he was complaining about the rough ride from Quebec commentators on Twitter.

Twitter avatar for @MarcGarneau

Marc Garneau @MarcGarneau
Quand Michel David du Devoir, une personne que je respecte, me traite de colonisé ou d’angryphone, je trouve ça irrespectueux et triste. Peut-on être respectueux l’un envers l’autre même si on ne pense pas de la même façon?

12:40 PM ∙ Feb 18, 2023


271Likes39Retweets

Garneau’s comments on this were long, and would constitute inside baseball for most readers outside Quebec, but he didn’t like seeing Quebec’s language laws incorporated by reference into a federal bill. “I have very rarely disagreed with my party, but I disagreed with them on that.” It got worse for Garneau when he read 88 amendments introduced by the Bloc Québécois, five of which said that in case of a conflict between federal and provincial legislation, Quebec’s should predominate. Those amendments were eventually rejected, but by then Garneau was already on the record with his concerns. “I’m always ready to face criticism, but it got personal. And I think that’s sad.”

The controversy has been a much bigger deal inside Quebec than outside, but Garneau insisted it’s not why he’s leaving politics.

The reason I’m leaving is because I made that promise to my wife, and to my family. I actually told him after the 2019 election that that was my last election. I had been reappointed to Transport. And I thought, ‘Okay, this is a lovely way to finish.’

“Then in January of 2021, to my great surprise, the Prime Minister [shuffled Garneau.] I think it was motivated by the fact that Navdeep Bains pulled out. The Prime Minister, I personally think that he said, ‘Okay, I want François-Philippe to take over from that. And there’s a bit of musical chairs and I ended up in foreign affairs.

“But seven months later, an election was announced. And I felt, in all good conscience, that after seven months in that portfolio — to now say, ‘Sorry, I’m leaving,’ when I had been the fourth appointed in under six years, it just wouldn’t have been right.

“Now, if the prime minister had told me, ‘Mark, after this election, you won’t be in the cabinet,’ I wouldn’t have run. But he didn’t tell me that.

“I ran hoping to go back into that job. Because Lord knows there were things that I wanted to do. With respect to Afghanistan, China, the Indo-Pacific strategy, I’d been working all that stuff. But the bottom line was that he said, ‘You’re not in cabinet anymore.’

“And so, at this point, I felt it would be really not acceptable for me to say, ‘Okay, thank you for electing me three weeks ago, I’m leaving.’ So I felt I needed to put in some time. To my great personal satisfaction, I was given two things that I really enjoyed. One was to be chair of the Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee, which I think has an important role with respect to reconciliation. And the other one was kind of unexpected… medical assistance in dying, where I was co-chair with a senator on this special mixed committee.”

That committee presented its final report in February. Garneau resigned three weeks later. He was already in the history books before he ever ran for office. Would he run now, in the atmosphere of today’s politics, if he were just starting out? Is there still room in politics for an engineer who just wants to make things work better? These are eternal questions, and I had already asked Garneau enough questions for one day.

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Alberta

‘Far too serious for such uninformed, careless journalism’: Complaint filed against Globe and Mail article challenging Alberta’s gender surgery law

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Macdonald-Laurier Institute

Macdonald Laurier Institute challenges Globe article on gender medicine

The complaint, now endorsed by 41 physicians, was filed in response to an article about Alberta’s law restricting gender surgery and hormones for minors.

On June 9, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute submitted a formal complaint to The Globe and Mail regarding its May 29 Morning Update by Danielle Groen, which reported on the Canadian Medical Association’s legal challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26.

Written by MLI Senior Fellow Mia Hughes and signed by 34 Canadian medical professionals at the time of submission to the Globe, the complaint stated that the Morning Update was misleading, ideologically slanted, and in violation the Globe’s own editorial standards of accuracy, fairness, and balance. It objected to the article’s repetition of discredited claims—that puberty blockers are reversible, that they “buy time to think,” and that denying access could lead to suicide—all assertions that have been thoroughly debunked in recent years.

Given the article’s reliance on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the complaint detailed the collapse of WPATH’s credibility, citing unsealed discovery documents from an Alabama court case and the Cass Review’s conclusion that WPATH’s guidelines—and those based on them—lack developmental rigour. It also noted the newsletter’s failure to mention the growing international shift away from paediatric medical transition in countries such as the UK, Sweden, and Finland. MLI called for the article to be corrected and urged the Globe to uphold its commitment to balanced, evidence-based journalism on this critical issue.

On June 18, Globe and Mail Standards Editor Sandra Martin responded, defending the article as a brief summary that provided a variety of links to offer further context. However, the three Globe and Mail news stories linked to in the article likewise lacked the necessary balance and context. Martin also pointed to a Canadian Paediatric Society (CPS) statement linked to in the newsletter. She argued it provided “sufficient context and qualification”—despite the fact that the CPS itself relies on WPATH’s discredited guidelines. Notwithstanding, Martin claimed the article met editorial standards and that brevity justified the lack of balance.

MLI responded that brevity does not excuse misinformation, particularly on a matter as serious as paediatric medical care, and reiterated the need for the Globe to address the scientific inaccuracies directly. MLI again called for the article to be corrected and for the unsupported suicide claim to be removed. As of this writing, the Globe has not responded.

Letter of complaint

June 9, 2025

To: The Globe and Mail
Attn: Sandra Martin, standards editor
CC: Caroline Alphonso, health editor; Mark Iype, deputy national editor and Alberta bureau chief

To the editors;

Your May 29 Morning Update: The Politics of Care by Danielle Groen, covering the Canadian Medical Association’s legal challenge to Alberta’s Bill 26, was misleading and ideologically slanted. It is journalistically irresponsible to report on contested medical claims as undisputed fact.

This issue is far too serious for such uninformed, careless journalism lacking vital perspectives and scientific context. At stake is the health and future of vulnerable children, and your reporting risks misleading parents into consenting to irreversible interventions based on misinformation.

According to The Globe and Mail’s own Journalistic Principles outlined in its Editorial Code of Conduct, the credibility of your reporting rests on “solid research, clear, intelligent writing, and maintaining a reputation for honesty, accuracy, fairness, balance and transparency.” Moreover, your principles go on to state that The Globe will “seek to provide reasonable accounts of competing views in any controversy.” The May 29 update violated these principles. There is, as I will show, a widely available body of scientific information that directly contests the claims and perspectives presented in your article. Yet this information is completely absent from your reporting.

The collapse of WPATH’s credibility

The article’s claim that Alberta’s law “falls well outside established medical practice” and could pose the “greatest threat” to transgender youth is both false and inflammatory. There is no global medical consensus on how to treat gender-distressed young people. In fact, in North America, guidelines are based on the Standards of Care developed by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH)—an organization now indisputably shown to place ideology above evidence.

For example, in a U.S. legal case over Alabama’s youth transition ban, WPATH was forced to disclose over two million internal emails. These revealed the organization commissioned independent evidence reviews for its latest Standards of Care (SOC8)—then suppressed those reviews when they found overwhelmingly low-quality evidence. Yet WPATH proceeded to publish the SOC8 as if it were evidence-based. This is not science. It is fraudulent and unethical conduct.

These emails also showed Admiral Rachel Levine—then-assistant secretary for Health in the Biden administration—pressured WPATH to remove all lower age recommendations from the guidelines—not on scientific grounds, but to avoid undermining ongoing legal cases at the state level. This is politics, not sound medical practice.

The U.K.’s Cass Review, a major multi-year investigation, included a systematic review of the guidelines in gender medicine. A systematic review is considered the gold standard because it assesses and synthesizes all the available research in a field, thereby reducing bias and providing a large comprehensive set of data upon which to reach findings. The systematic review of gender medicine guidelines concluded that WPATH’s standards of care “lack developmental rigour” and should not be used as a basis for clinical practice. The Cass Review also exposed citation laundering where medical associations endlessly recycled weak evidence across interlocking guidelines to fabricate a false consensus. This led Cass to suggest that “the circularity of this approach may explain why there has been an apparent consensus on key areas of practice despite the evidence being poor.”

Countries like SwedenFinland, and the U.K. have now abandoned WPATH and limited or halted medicalized youth transitions in favour of a therapy-first approach. In Norway, UKOM, an independent government health agency, has made similar recommendations. This shows the direction of global practice is moving away from WPATH’s medicalized approach—not toward it. As part of any serious effort to “provide reasonable accounts of competing views,” your reporting should acknowledge these developments.

Any journalist who cites WPATH as a credible authority on paediatric gender medicine—especially in the absence of contextualizing or competing views—signals a lack of due diligence and a fundamental misunderstanding of the field. It demonstrates that either no independent research was undertaken, or it was ignored despite your editorial standards.

Puberty blockers don’t ‘buy time’ and are not reversible

Your article repeats a widely debunked claim: that puberty blockers are a harmless pause to allow young people time to explore their identity. In fact, studies have consistently shown that between 98 per cent and 100 per cent of children placed on puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormones. Before puberty blockers, most children desisted and reconciled with their birth sex during or after puberty. Now, virtually none do.

This strongly suggests that blocking puberty in fact prevents the natural resolution of gender distress. Therefore, the most accurate and up-to-date understanding is that puberty blockers function not as a pause, but as the first step in a treatment continuum involving irreversible cross-sex hormones. Indeed, a 2022 paper found that while puberty suppression had been “justified by claims that it was reversible … these claims are increasingly implausible.” Again, adherence to the Globe’s own editorial guidelines would require, at minimum, the acknowledgement of the above findings alongside the claims your May 29 article makes.

Moreover, it is categorically false to describe puberty blockers as “completely reversible.” Besides locking youth into a pathway of further medicalization, puberty blockers pose serious physical risks: loss of bone densityimpaired sexual developmentstunted fertility, and psychosocial harm from being developmentally out of sync with peers. There are no long-term safety studies. These drugs are being prescribed to children despite glaring gaps in our understanding of their long-term effects.

Given the Globe’s stated editorial commitment to principles such as “accuracy,” the crucial information from the studies linked above should be provided in any article discussing puberty blockers. At a bare minimum, in adherence to the Globe’s commitment to “balance,” this information should be included alongside the contentious and disputed claims the article makes that these treatments are reversible.

No proof of suicide prevention

The most irresponsible and dangerous claim in your article is that denying access to puberty blockers could lead to “depression, self-harm and suicide.” There is no robust evidence supporting this transition-or-suicide narrative, and in fact, the findings of the highest-quality study conducted to date found no evidence that puberty suppression reduces suicide risk.

Suicide is complex and attributing it to a single cause is not only false—it violates all established suicide reporting guidelines. Sensationalized claims like this risk creating contagion effects and fuelling panic. In the public interest, reporting on the topic of suicide must be held to the most rigorous standards, and provide the most high-quality and accurate information.

Euphemism hides medical harm

Your use of euphemistic language obscures the extreme nature of the medical interventions being performed in gender clinics. Calling double mastectomies for teenage girls “paediatric breast surgeries for gender-affirming reasons” sanitizes the medically unnecessary removal of a child’s healthy organs. Referring to phalloplasty and vaginoplasty as “gender-affirming surgeries on lower body parts” conceals the fact that these are extreme operations involving permanent disfigurement, high complication rates, and often requiring multiple revisions.

Honest journalism should not hide these facts behind comforting language. Your reporting denies youth, their parents, and the general public the necessary information to understand the nature of these interventions. Members of the general public rely greatly on the news media to equip them with such information, and your own editorial standards claim you will fulfill this core responsibility.

Your responsibility to the public

As a flagship Canadian news outlet, your responsibility is not to amplify activist messaging, but to report the truth with integrity. On a subject as medically and ethically fraught as paediatric gender medicine, accuracy is not optional. The public depends on you to scrutinize claims, not echo ideology. Parents may make irreversible decisions on behalf of their children based on the narratives you promote. When reporting is false or ideologically distorted, the cost is measured in real-world harm to some of our society’s most vulnerable young people.

I encourage the Globe and Mail to publish an updated version on this article in order to correct the public record with the relevant information discussed above, and to modify your reporting practices on this matter going forward—by meeting your own journalistic standards—so that the public receives balanced, correct, and reliable information on this vital topic.

Trustworthy journalism is a cornerstone of public health—and on the issue of paediatric gender medicine, the stakes could not be higher.

Sincerely,

Mia Hughes
Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute
Author of The WPATH Files

The following 41 physicians have signed to endorse this letter:
Dr. Mike Ackermann, MD
Dr. Duncan Veasey, Psy MD
Dr. Rick Gibson, MD
Dr. Benjamin Turner, MD, FRCSC
Dr. J.N. Mahy, MD, FRCSC, FACS
Dr. Khai T. Phan, MD, CCFP
Dr. Martha Fulford, MD
Dr. J. Edward Les, MD, FRCPC
Dr. Darrell Palmer, MD, FRCPC
Dr. Jane Cassie, MD, FRCPC
Dr. David Lowen, MD, FCFP
Dr. Shawn Whatley, MD, FCFP (EM)
Dr. David Zitner, MD
Dr. Leonora Regenstreif, MD, CCFP(AM), FCFP
Dr. Gregory Chan, MD
Dr. Alanna Fitzpatrick, MD, FRCSC
Dr. Chris Millburn, MD, CCFP
Dr. Julie Curwin, MD, FRCPC
Dr. Roy Eappen, MD, MDCM, FRCP (c)
Dr. York N. Hsiang, MD, FRCSC
Dr. Dion Davidson, MD, FRCSC, FACS
Dr. Kevin Sclater, MD, CCFP (PC)
Dr. Theresa Szezepaniak, MB, ChB, DRCOG
Dr. Sofia Bayfield, MD, CCFP
Dr. Elizabeth Henry, MD, CCFP
Dr. Stephen Malthouse, MD
Dr. Darrell Hamm, MD, CCFP
Dr. Dale Classen, MD, FRCSC
Dr. Adam T. Gorner, MD, CCFP
Dr. Wesley B. Steed, MD
Dr. Timothy Ehmann, MD, FRCPC
Dr. Ryan Torrie, MD
Dr. Zachary Heinricks, MD, CCFP
Dr. Jessica Shintani, MD, CCFP
Dr. Mark D’Souza, MD, CCFP(EM), FCFP*
Dr. Joanne Sinai, MD, FRCPC*
Dr. Jane Batt, MD*
Dr. Brent McGrath, MD, FRCPC*
Dr. Leslie MacMillan MD FRCPC (emeritus)*
Dr. Ian Mitchell, MD, FRCPC*
Dr. John Cunnington, MD

*Indicates physician who signed following the letter’s June 9 submission to the Globe and Mail, but in advance of this letter being published on the MLI website.

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Automotive

Federal government should swiftly axe foolish EV mandate

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From the Fraser Institute

By Kenneth P. Green

Two recent events exemplify the fundamental irrationality that is Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) policy.

First, the Carney government re-committed to Justin Trudeau’s EV transition mandate that by 2035 all (that’s 100 per cent) of new car sales in Canada consist of “zero emission vehicles” including battery EVs, plug-in hybrid EVs and fuel-cell powered vehicles (which are virtually non-existent in today’s market). This policy has been a foolish idea since inception. The mass of car-buyers in Canada showed little desire to buy them in 2022, when the government announced the plan, and they still don’t want them.

Second, President Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill has slashed taxpayer subsidies for buying new and used EVs, ended federal support for EV charging stations, and limited the ability of states to use fuel standards to force EVs onto the sales lot. Of course, Canada should not craft policy to simply match U.S. policy, but in light of policy changes south of the border Canadian policymakers would be wise to give their own EV policies a rethink.

And in this case, a rethink—that is, scrapping Ottawa’s mandate—would only benefit most Canadians. Indeed, most Canadians disapprove of the mandate; most do not want to buy EVs; most can’t afford to buy EVs (which are more expensive than traditional internal combustion vehicles and more expensive to insure and repair); and if they do manage to swing the cost of an EV, most will likely find it difficult to find public charging stations.

Also, consider this. Globally, the mining sector likely lacks the ability to keep up with the supply of metals needed to produce EVs and satisfy government mandates like we have in Canada, potentially further driving up production costs and ultimately sticker prices.

Finally, if you’re worried about losing the climate and environmental benefits of an EV transition, you should, well, not worry that much. The benefits of vehicle electrification for climate/environmental risk reduction have been oversold. In some circumstances EVs can help reduce GHG emissions—in others, they can make them worse. It depends on the fuel used to generate electricity used to charge them. And EVs have environmental negatives of their own—their fancy tires cause a lot of fine particulate pollution, one of the more harmful types of air pollution that can affect our health. And when they burst into flames (which they do with disturbing regularity) they spew toxic metals and plastics into the air with abandon.

So, to sum up in point form. Prime Minister Carney’s government has re-upped its commitment to the Trudeau-era 2035 EV mandate even while Canadians have shown for years that most don’t want to buy them. EVs don’t provide meaningful environmental benefits. They represent the worst of public policy (picking winning or losing technologies in mass markets). They are unjust (tax-robbing people who can’t afford them to subsidize those who can). And taxpayer-funded “investments” in EVs and EV-battery technology will likely be wasted in light of the diminishing U.S. market for Canadian EV tech.

If ever there was a policy so justifiably axed on its failed merits, it’s Ottawa’s EV mandate. Hopefully, the pragmatists we’ve heard much about since Carney’s election victory will acknowledge EV reality.

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
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