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, Robert 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 PMO source said, about the need to keep the rule of law at the forefront.

“You can walk those comments back once,” the PMO source said on Saturday. “Not twice.”

Trudeau’s reluctance to jettison the ambassador was evident earlier in the week, when reporters asked him on Thursday about the outcry over McCallum’s remarks and demands — especially from Conservatives — that he fire him.

The Prime Minister, obviously annoyed, made clear that McCallum’s job had been saved for practical, not sentimental reasons: “Making a change would not help release those Canadians a day sooner,” he said.

The question now is whether McCallum’s missteps have prolonged the misery of those Canadians. This will be the top question in the coming days, as Trudeau wrestles with the question of who will replace the ambassador to China at a moment when every step seems perilous.

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One thing is clear — the next appointee will not be offering political opinions to journalists. It will be a surprise, in fact, if the next ambassador is allowed to speak to the media at all.

It is almost ironic that McCallum would lose his job for being too political. When he first came to elected politics in 2000, fresh from the Royal Bank of Canada where he served as economist, many thought McCallum was too academic for the rough and tumble of political life.

But he seemed to relish the job, and was repeatedly a good sport when Stephen Harper, then in opposition, did his annual impersonations of McCallum at the press gallery dinner. Once the Liberals were relegated to the opposition benches, McCallum was one of the happier warriors, appearing to enjoy the chance to pillory the Harper government at any opportunity.

So McCallum became one of the few, trusted “old hands” when Trudeau swore in his first cabinet, with all its emphasis on youth, women and diversity. Similarly, his appointment as ambassador was meant to send a signal to China that the Trudeau government was putting someone serious, political and trusted into the job of ambassador.

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“Nobody is feeling good about this,” the PMO source said of the decision to axe McCallum. That is undoubtedly true — many times over — for the Canadians whose future hangs in the balance in China.

The questions over McCallum’s future have been settled this weekend. But the futures of Kovrig, Spavor and Schellenberg — as well as Meng in Vancouver — are as unsettled as they were last week, and perhaps more so.

This file has been changed from a previous version to correct the name Robert Schellenberg.

Susan Delacourt is the Star’s Ottawa bureau chief and a columnist covering national politics. Reach her via email: sdelacourt@thestar.ca or follow her on Twitter: @susandelacourt

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