rceme_rat
Grizzled Old Veteran
Member # 136
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posted 27 May 2021 12:50
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A little more on the new Minister, from today's NationalPost:
May 27, 2021
McCallum has had meteoric political rise
Former academic left top bank post to become an MP
Anne Marie Owens
National Post, with files from Southam News
On the day that John McCallum was first sworn into Cabinet, he was so flummoxed by all the pomp that he forgot to sign the papers to officially make him a minister.
The next day, he apparently forgot the car and driver that came with the new job and caused a stir as his limousine chased after him on Parliament Hill before the driver was able to flag him down.
On Mr. McCallum's first official day on the job as junior finance minister, he also attacked the banks for charging "grotesquely high" credit card interest rates, and was summarily chastised by Jean Chr�tien, the Prime Minister, for speaking out of turn.
"He has views, now he will have to express them within the Cabinet," Mr. Chr�tien said.
Mr. McCallum said the Prime Minister reminded him of that again yesterday when he called him in to discuss taking over the defence portfolio.
"The Prime Minister himself said to me in our conversation that I tend to use colourful language," Mr. McCallum said. "I said, 'You want my language to be less colourful?' and he said, 'No, no, just be careful.' "
Canada's new Defence Minister cheerfully admits that what he knows about the military is limited to what he learned as a young air cadet and what he heard from his father, a decorated war hero.
Mr. McCallum, a former senior bank executive, has always been described as a bit of a rebel, both as an economist and as a banker.
When he made the shift to run for political office in 2000, many said he must have been crazy to trade in a $400,000 salary at the Royal Bank and a powerful post among Canada's business elite for a $65,000 MP's salary and job.
It was widely believed that he had been lured to the job with promises of a plum Cabinet post, and that, with his background, he was a natural fit to be groomed for the job of Finance Minister.
When asked if he would be content to toil in the backbenches of politics, he said: "Few people enter politics and immediately enter Cabinet. Even Pierre Trudeau was a parliamentary secretary for a while."
Nobody who knew Mr. McCallum believed that he would wait in obscurity for long, but even those who know him best are likely to be surprised by a meteoric political rise that has pushed him from winning a seat to assuming one of the country's most powerful Cabinet positions in less than two years.
The 51-year-old was born in Montreal and spent part of his childhood in the affluent Westmount neighbourhood. His father was an actuary and his mother sold real estate.
After high school, he went to Cambridge University to study economics. He has three degrees (from Cambridge, the Universit� Paris and McGill University) and had an 18-year career as an academic. His teaching career took him all across Canada, to universities in Winnipeg, British Columbia (where he met his future wife, Nancy Lim, a student), and Montreal.
He left academia in 1994, when he was Dean of Arts at McGill University, and took a job with the Royal Bank, enamoured of higher pay and the prospect of a career change with considerably broader clout.
His political demeanour has combined a straight-shooting matter-of-factness with an academic's ease of putting issues into broader perspective. He has also been seen as part of a small intellectual wing of Mr. Chr�tien's otherwise workmanlike Cabinet. |
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posted 26 May 2021 
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