Tom Spears: Marc Garneau's ambition for Canada

Throughout a career that took him from the navy to NASA to the federal cabinet, Marc Garneau never lost his focus on discipline, honesty, and competence.

By: Tom Spears

There was the night in 1992 when the Toronto Blue Jays had won the World Series, and Marc Garneau was considering all those flags flying at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The flag of the USA. (Don't touch that).
The Texas flag (state motto: Don't mess with Texas.)
The NASA flag. Well, then…

He and fellow Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield dodged guards and searchlights to replace the NASA flag with the Canadian maple leaf in dead of night. “The euphoria of the moment carried us through,” he said years later.

It was a flash of the former astronaut's style, and also his ambition for Canada in space: The ambition that led him years later, as head of the Canadian Space Agency, to electrify a Montreal audience with the simple words: "Allons-y! Let's go to Mars.”

Marc Garneau died Wednesday, at the age of 76. His passing was announced by his wife, Pam, who said that he’d been surrounded by family at the end, and had received excellent care during an unspecified short illness. (Other reports have cited cancer as the ailment.) The news was met with an immediate outpouring of grief from Canadians from across the political spectrum, as befitted a man of his profile and stature.

He had earned that profile gradually over the decades. Back in 1983 Garneau was a young naval officer with a fine pedigree — graduate of Royal Military College, PhD in electrical engineering from Imperial College London — but unknown to most Canadians. Then he joined our country’s first group of astronauts, becoming an instant celebrity.

Even more sudden was his first assignment. He was named to a space shuttle crew that would fly the following year — lightning-fast career advancement, considering he had not yet undergone the usual training as a mission specialist in NASA’s astronaut school.

That vaulted him ahead of many more senior astronauts, and he felt it keenly. He told the Ottawa Citizen years later that he felt his colleagues’ eyes “boring holes in my back” as he walked by them. Crewmate Dave Leestma later recalled how the rookie gained the respect of those around him through quiet competence.

Indeed, Garneau always looked calm, but his mother, Jean, said as he prepared for a second flight in 1996: “There’s a lot of controlled excitement there, and happiness … He figures he’s very, very lucky.”

He flew a third mission as well, in 2000. That flight, assembling the International Space Station, had an adventure that nobody wanted. A huge solar array was folded up and packed during launch, and was to unfold for assembly in space. But this one refused to unfold, until it suddenly popped open too hard, damaging itself. Garneau was the person in the shuttle guiding two crewmates on an improvised spacewalk to repair the 74-metre solar array, being responsible for the timeline, the tools, and the safety of the job.

"If you touch anything that's delicate up there — and it's all delicate — you can make it worse," Garneau later recalled, noting an old expression in the astronaut world: "There's no problem so bad that you can't make it worse.” But they got the array fixed.

While Canadians were fascinated by his career in space, few were aware of his more extensive work at Mission Control. He served 17 shuttle missions as the capsule communicator, or Capcom, the vital link who speaks directly with crews in orbit.

From the start of the space era, NASA's culture has required that no matter who at Mission Control was figuring out how to fix something, the crew must hear about it from someone who has flown in space. It’s a crucial and high-pressure job, requiring extensive training on each mission well before the flight, and Garneau was the first non-American to do it.

"You have to be concise, and tone is very important," Garneau said in a 2012 interview. "You have to be always mindful of their morale.”

"I consider myself very privileged," he said. "I was the first non-American Capcom. For NASA to say, 'We're going to give this job to a non-U.S. national,' was a big feather in my cap. I loved the job.”

(Evidently the higher-ups forgave the flag caper. His friend, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, was later a Capcom on more than 20 missions.)

Garneau credited the preparation for spaceflight, as well as the practice at fixing things, for helping him in his later career as an MP and cabinet minister. Mission training involves endless simulations where trainers create all kinds of problems. Then comes another tough part, when the crew sits down with Mission Control staff and talk about how they messed things up.

"Everybody was always brutally honest about how they screwed up ... about how we let the team down," Garneau says. "If we're not going to be very honest with each other, if we're going to find excuses ... Nobody tries to evade responsibility.”

He went on: "You need the same discipline (in both space and politics). Instead of ... doing actual repairs on the shuttle, you need to prepare some arguments so you can debate well, present your questions well."

He was Minister of Transport in the aftermath of the Lac Mégantic rail tragedy in which 47 people died, and was proud of bringing new regulations for the transportation of dangerous goods by rail and in ships. After six years at Transportation, he was shuffled to Foreign Affairs for a brief stint, before being dropped from cabinet after the 2021 election.

He also served as president of the Canadian Space Agency from 2001 to 2005, a time when he promoted Canada’s role in space and even pushed publicly for a Canadian-led unmanned mission to Mars. The CSA couldn’t get the funding, however.

Garneau ran for leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada in 2013, losing to Justin Trudeau. He announced his retirement from politics in March 2023.

Tom Spears is a former science reporter for the Ottawa Citizen.

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