Then-Liberal MPs Stéphane Dion and John McCallum scrum with media in Ottawa in 2017 after both are named to ambassador postings. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

It’s time to end amateur hour in Canada’s Global Affairs Department.

The disastrous foray of Canada’s ambassador to China John McCallum into the crisis over the arrest of Chinese telecoms executive Meng Wanzhou is as clear a demonstration as any that it’s time to bring back some professionalism to our diplomatic service.

McCallum’s extraordinary intervention into the controversy has, in one ill-considered media interview, undermined, if not destroyed, Canada’s carefully enunciated strategy on the case, that the extradition was being handled by our courts independently and without political interference.

The only people pleased with McCallum’s undisciplined outburst were the Chinese, clearly thrilled that their bullying tactics, including the kidnapping of two Canadians in China and their incarceration in conditions that smell of torture, were finally bearing fruit.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been fending off demands to fire McCallum, apparently leaning on the former Liberal minister to admit that he “misspoke” and didn’t really mean what he said.

This was all so predictable and so preventable. It goes back to January 2017 when Trudeau decided it was time to clear out some dead wood from his cabinet, namely McCallum and Stephane Dion, the one-time foreign minister and Liberal leader. It was a problem for the PM, how to get rid of two party stalwarts without humiliating them.

Trudeau wanted McCallum out and Mary Ng, a staffer in his PMO in. So Ng, a reported close friend of Trudeau’s chief of staff Katie Telford, ended up getting the Liberal nomination in McCallum’s Toronto area riding and elected in his old seat. She’s now Minister of Small Business.

What to do with McCallum? The old dumping ground for political has-beens and party bagmen, the Senate, was no longer available. Crown corporations used to be a possibility but privatization means there are fewer boards around on which to put these people. There was always an embassy so Dion was shipped off to Germany and the European Union and McCallum was sent to Beijing.

McCallum told the press that the idea of going to China came up a week before the shuffle and said his credentials for the job were the fact that his wife was Chinese, he had visited China a lot and he represented a riding with lots of Chinese Canadians.

The fact that McCallum had zero diplomatic experience and no real clue how to handle complex files with our second-largest trading partner was not even a consideration. And if anybody had looked at McCallum’s 15-year career in politics, he was not exactly a safe pair of hands.

And when a political appointee like McCallum screws up, how does Trudeau replace him without taking the blame himself? So McCallum remains, with no credibility remaining.

Canada used to boast a professional foreign service of the highest order, men and women who spent their careers studying foreign languages, toiling for years abroad on assignment learning on how other governments and cultures work, carefully learning the art of diplomacy. And most importantly, learning when to speak publicly and when to shut up.

But those days are over. When the Liberal caucus met last week in Sherbrooke, Que., and heard from Canada’s six top ambassadors abroad, who represent our interests in Beijing, Berlin, Washington, Paris, London and the United Nations, not one was a professional diplomat. Everyone had got the job for political or other expedient reasons. They include two former ministers, a former president of the Quebec Liberal Party, a former co-chair of the 2015 federal Liberal campaign in Ontario, a former insurance company executive and a former clerk of the privy council.

There have always been a scattering of ex-politicians and the like named as ambassadors, not always a bad thing, but when professional diplomats are consistently passed over for hacks and favourites of the prime minister, Canada is the loser.

Global Affairs continues to suffer from general disinterest and neglect from the Trudeau government, a habit inherited from the Harper days. Recruitment of foreign service officers through specialized exams is all but history. Instead, young would-be diplomats go from one temporary assignment to another, hoping against hope that they’ll eventually become full-time employees. A pretty sorry state of affairs.

Passing the hot potato is a specialty in Ottawa. Public servants are seldom fired. Rather, they get shunted from one department to another. So it goes at the top of the federal chain.

Just this week, Marie Lemay, deputy minister of Public Services and Procurement and the top bureaucrat in charge of the Phoenix pay debacle for the past three years, was finally relieved of her job and appointed Master of the Mint.

Too bad the job at the Mint wasn’t open two years ago when the prime minister had to figure out what to do with McCallum. He would have done a lot less damage there than in Beijing.

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