'I was lynched': Why astronaut Julie Payette flamed out as governor general

Once a friend of the former astronaut-turned-viceregal, John Fraser describes how Julie Payette crumbled into “perpetual petulance,” in this excerpt from his new book, The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office.

It should not have ended this way. It should have ended with a national celebration of an amazing, vibrant, and still young woman who managed to surmount all the challenges in a mostly male world; who managed to storm through a mostly male engineering school right up to the day she graduated summa cum laude ; who managed to get through mostly male selection and training at the Canadian Space Agency; and ultimately, who managed two trips to outer space with mostly American male crews at NASA. As if all that were not enough, she also managed to crown this extraordinary record by being appointed governor general, the highest and noblest position Canada has to offer its most outstanding citizens.

Except it didn’t end that way. Not at all.

Instead, it ended in national obloquy and left bitter feelings on all sides, which have yet to heal. On all sides. In effect, Julie Payette was forced out of high office before her term was over, having suffered all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as well as some undeniably self-inflicted wounds. After she severely irritated senior officials in the Privy Council Office who should have been her stout defenders, after she alienated more than a dozen institutions that looked to her office for moral and honorific support, after she reputedly bullied her own staff to a level of toxicity unprecedented in the history of the office, she more or less served herself up to a united and censorious media.

When it all came to a head, she woke up one day to find her appointment abruptly terminated by Royal Letters Patent and was immediately succeeded in her responsibilities by the Chief Justice of Canada Richard Wagner, in the rarely aroused and temporary office of national administrator to the government of Canada. To add to all this, she was booted out by the man who just a few years earlier had told her what an amazing woman she was and how proud Canadians would be to see her at the very pinnacle of the nation’s governance and honour system. That fantasy-spinner was Justin Trudeau, for whom due diligence was never his strongest suit.

Almost exactly one year after her unceremonious departure from Rideau Hall, on January 27, 2023, we literally bumped into each other in the main hallway of Massey College in the University of Toronto. It was following the college’s annual dinner honouring Adrienne Clarkson and the Clarkson Laureates in Public Service. In the good-natured melee in the hallway after the dinner, Payette and I were suddenly face to face. It was the first time we had met since her ouster. We had been good friends for quite a while before. She was, after all, a distinguished alumna of my college, having made her mark at Massey during the years that my predecessor, Professor Ann Saddlemyer, was master of the college, and she  maintained the relationship after I was elected master of the college. She came several times to stay, and the Junior Fellow scholars — and everyone else — were very happy to see her around the place. But the relationship had soured as she started digging her viceregal grave deeper and deeper at Rideau Hall and declined all help, even from those who admired her.

“Hi Julie. It’s nice to see you here.” A brief interlude of embarrassed silence ensued. We had stopped communicating as she careened off into her own limbo land of inexplicable rebellion against what was considered appropriate behaviour of a governor general, and she had clearly resented my point of view. “Are we talking to each other now?”

“Why would I talk to you? You were part of the lynch mob that hounded me out of office.”

“Julie, you can’t use the word ‘lynch’ around Massey College. It will just lead to trouble and …”

She didn’t linger. Abruptly turning her back on me, she returned to the nearby Upper Library. I wasn’t surprised or particularly hurt by the snub, because things had been bad between us for some time. But it deeply saddened me because I could see so clearly the wreckage that her life had become, despite her best intentions. It was also sobering to see how little she understood her own complicity in her troubles.

I am still gob-smacked that it took the Toronto Star about ten nano-seconds (that’s journalistic exaggeration for an easy search) to discover Payette had accidentally killed a (pedestrian) by running them over in her car, and also that she had spent time at a police station for allegedly going after her estranged husband with a dangerous weapon. That Star story ran three months before Payette was sworn into office. Due diligence takes on a special negative meaning in the PMO, as this sad but easily researched history demonstrates. I do not believe for a moment that if anyone in the PMO had known of these unfortunate incidents she would have ever been asked to take on the job of governor general.

Nevertheless, she did get the viceregal gig, which turned out to be a disaster on most fronts, and now the wreckage was before the entire nation’s eyes. And my own eyes because here she was at a place we both loved and I was deeply recalling all this when she returned a few minutes later, this time with eyes brimming with tears: “I came back to apologize. I shouldn’t have just said that to you, but you do know I was lynched.”

“I do know what happened to you, Julie, and no one should have to go through what you went through. But you mustn’t use the word ‘lynch’ around here. Not since my successor screwed up everything at the college by mishandling a racial incident …”

I was cut off mid-sentence, trying to explain how an ill-timed, ill-spoken barb was directed at a Black student at Massey College. The incident, wildly taken out of proportion, made front-page news and was then allowed to fester and poison the whole place for months to come. It’s still a blot on the college’s reputation.

“But I was lynched. How else do you explain what I was supposed to do when the prime minister comes and tells me I have to go? I wasn’t given a chance to have my own lawyer present. I tried phoning the chief justice for advice, and he didn’t return my calls. There was no one to come to my help and now I am a pariah. People at the CBC or the Globe and Mail aren’t interested in any viewpoint I might have. They were all part of the lynch mob, too. You didn’t help me. No journalists would help me. No one in the Privy Council would help me. I was completely alone.”

“I’m so sorry, Julie, for all this trouble, but I did actually try to reach out to you several times leading up to the showdown, but you never returned any emails or phone calls. I think you had already decided I was an enemy, which I never was. And I’m so sorry for the mess your life seems to still be in. You do know you have the right to present your own case to the public, don’t you? You could write about it. There would be some pushback, but it would still be a chance to show your side of those events.”

“How can I? I’m not a writer. I’m an astronaut. You could write it if you wanted to.”

“For God’s sake, Julie, I can’t write that particular story. Only you can. I mean you can always get a ghostwriter, just like Prince Harry …”

“I’m not Prince Harry.”

“I’m sorry. I was trying to be funny. That was a stupid thing to say. But look: I do have some ideas on what you can do to reclaim your better identity. I’ll send you an email tomorrow so we can set up a lunch and work out a strategy. Only if you’d like to. It’s fun to turn adversity into a challenge.”

I don’t think she was listening. All my words seemed to fly up into the fetid air. The hallway was quite crowded with people getting set to go home for the evening, but everyone was making a wide circle to avoid any contact with us. It was obvious that a troubled conversation was going on, but she soon disappeared into the throng.

I sent the email the next morning, but there was no response. Still haven’t heard, although I remain available. I would tell her to keep lying low, but get involved in some public organization where her presence would make a difference and just keep at it. Eventually, people would take note and as for the dear old media, well, the dear old media loves nothing more than rehabilitating someone it has already dragged down. That advice never got delivered, although in setting down this sad encounter, I did rediscover our last email exchange. It came out of the blue shortly after she was thrust out of office and the chief justice had taken over her responsibilities, the same chief justice who never returned her calls, probably because he had already been asked by the prime minister to take on the job temporarily:

2021-02-08: Hello John. Shouldn’t the monarchists and expert constitutionalists of this country be worried that the Crown’s office has been taken over by the ministry of the PCO (Privy Council Office), and that the administrator is currently from the judicial branch? What happens if we have elections this spring and it is tight? Who will decide?

Best

Jp

To which I replied:

2021-02-09: Dearest Madam, Of course it’s a concern and a serious one, but not as serious as what has happened to your venerable office! The country has survived an administrator from the Supreme Court before (I think you have even availed yourself of the office from time to time), but the office of governor general is going to be a long time recovering from all the recent damage.

I feel so badly for you. On the one hand, no one should have to go through what you did. On the other hand, I criticize myself for not being more honest and forthright when I knew you were heading straight for shoals and all the parameters of danger. I did not want to lose you as a friend and I also highly valued and esteemed your kindness and generosity to Massey when I was at the helm there. I’m not sure you realized it, but I actually stepped down from the presidency of my small institute of the Crown to make sure I wasn’t going to be in any conflict if you needed my help. The one time I really tried to get through to you and was almost in tears (shortly after the pandemic began), I think I just irritated you.

For me, the office was always more important than any of its holders and I still believe its ceremonial and emotional power is far greater than any vestiges of political power it has retained. I especially thought its symbolism was amazingly powerful during this period of historic reconciliation with the Indigenous nations, but here too I think I became an irritation and I sensed how uncomfortable you were at the Massey-Indigenous events a couple of years ago. In the end I was not of much use to you and that is a great sorrow for me. You have just gone through a terrible, terrible time, but it too will pass and you will have beautiful moments again. That’s the way life works. I shall always be grateful for your immense love of Massey College and the generosity you showed us, especially the time you came with your fellow astronauts — or “pathfinders” as Ursula Franklin called you.

Please take care of yourself.

Fondly,

John

I can be naïve. Much of her time in office, I kept wishing she would wake up and realize that the best impact she could make for the country during her mandate was with settler-Indigenous relations. The Canadian Crown has a unique role there. The historic opportunity for reconciliation past all the cruelty and tragic initiatives and misapprehensions of the past was occurring on her watch. No previous governor general was ever handed such a remarkable file so admirably suited for such a high office. What I failed to see was why “reconciliation” has gone down so badly in Quebec and for French Canadians, and this lost soul, Payette, was definitely a child of her native culture. Maybe it was because it was so obvious that I simply couldn’t see it.

The first stumbling block, and it’s a huge one, is that reconciliation begins with rethinking Quebec’s mystique as the founding nation. The point has been made earlier but bears repeating. Sorry. In the new dispensation, the French settlements in Canada were simply those of another European intruder, different in time but not in substance from the British intrusions. More devastatingly, Indigenous reconciliation totally undermines Quebec’s once primary claim of victimhood. Sorry again. Get in line behind historic Indigenous victimhood — and not just in line, but way back.

There wasn’t a hope in heaven or hell that this governor general would wade into these unpleasant realities. The few times I saw her with Indigenous leaders at their ceremonies, I wanted to shed tears at her evident frustration and irritation.

* * *

Nevertheless, even if it was her own damn fault, Julie Payette wasn’t wrong to fuss about either the fact that she was railroaded out of high office or the potential conflict between a chief justice of Canada’s Supreme Court acting as governor general, and a government caught out in conflict over the prorogation or dismissal of Parliament. We saw some of the potential damage to our constitutional equilibrium when Michaëlle Jean was faced with a prorogation request from Stephen Harper just under a decade earlier. The residual powers of a governor general mean that if an election is indecisive, handling how the country can proceed to fashion its governance falls directly on the lap of whoever resides at Rideau Hall. If there were any objections to that course of action, say brought by an opposition party, it would be up to the Supreme Court of Canada to adjudicate the constitutionality of it all, but if the chief justice is already the acting governor general then, how to put it delicately, we have something of a problem here.

There was no precedent for the way Payette was evicted from Rideau Hall. Well, that’s the wrong way to put it, because she managed to stay clear of Rideau Hall except for official functions throughout her foreshortened mandate. That was another problem she created out of what seemed pure petulance and a desire to exercise what she considered her freedom as viceregal. But the fact that she didn’t like the deal she was served doesn’t diminish the arbitrary and unfair way she was shown the door. Not only was she not allowed time to consult a lawyer, she wasn’t even allowed time to even consider if she, in fact, could call a lawyer or a constitutional adviser. But then she didn’t care in general for advice from constitutional experts, because she clearly thought she knew better about the parameters of power for a governor general.

All her determination, courage, and stamina that got her into space — graduate engineering school surrounded by alpha males, training at NASA surrounded by alpha males, a bruising marriage according to her own account to an alpha male — had hardened her and taught her to be tough, talk tough, and act tough. Personal security officers didn’t daunt her, government ministers didn’t daunt her, constitutional advisers (myself included) certainly didn’t daunt her. She was made for outer space. Stuck on Earth, she was like a caged lioness.

Sometimes it was even cruel to watch her so hemmed in. To call things as she saw them, that meant not pussyfooting around stupidity like vaccine denials, or, for that matter, like vacuous trust in religion of any sort. In some worlds that would all have been refreshing, especially when she was selling the rewards of space adventures or getting girls and young women to understand that the only thing holding them back from doing exactly what they dreamed of doing was to be like her and not accept boundaries. And yet, all these qualities conspired to ensure that she would be about the most unsuitable person imaginable for the high office of governor general.

By the time Justin Trudeau dropped by to tell her that her time was up, she was beyond being able to do or influence anything constitutionally or otherwise, because — to buy into the self-imagery she shared with me in conversation — she was already swinging from a tree.

Here’s a rule of thumb for all viceregal wannabes: governors general are influential to the degree that their slate is clean and that their reputations are unsullied by either controversy or toxicity. On both those counts, Julie Payette was well beyond repair by the time she was required to step down. She never really got it, never saw it coming, and is presumably still saying she was “lynched” without fully understanding why.

And here’s some advice for prime ministers who think they know how to make sexy appointments by raising up a “girl astronaut” to high office: look at the nature of the assignment you are asking someone to fulfill, and if it looks too good to be true, it is probably because it is too good to be true.

It didn’t start this way. She was sworn in during an emotional ceremony in the Senate chamber on October 2, 2017. I was sitting right beside my successor at Massey College, the Honourable Hugh Segal. Two years into his mandate, we had not hit it off very well, a common and unfortunate reality between successors and predecessors and we could barely speak civilly to each other. After all the oaths had been taken in both official languages, the newly sworn-in governor general declined to stay glued to the elaborate and hilariously pompous throne chair. Instead, she simply stood in front of the throne to address all those in the Senate chamber and across the nation. It was an arresting image that was both daunting and endearing: a woman who had winged her way through outer space to become a shining symbol to her fellow citizens of what a determined pioneer could achieve. My God, she was even a single mother, with her amazingly lookalike son, Laurier, nearby.

This was the high point of her time in office: all the rest was downhill, slowly at first with the dawning realization that she would never move into her official residence because it didn’t suit her fancy, and ultimately building up steam when she largely disappeared during the two years of COVID emergency in which she failed utterly to deploy her symbolic office to reassure Canadians: the sort of stuff expected in a position like that, the sort of stuff the Queen herself did so effectively, the sort of stuff that was left for the prime minister to do, almost daily, until we could hardly stand the sight of him.

When she did eventually emerge, post-COVID, we were subjected to what was basically a concentrated act of perpetual petulance. I first noticed it particularly just before COVID, the day she and all the lieutenant governors and territorial commissioners came to Massey College during the annual viceregal retreat. It was hosted by members of the Mississauga of the Credit First Nation, and the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the charismatic Perry Bellegarde, was scheduled to make a historic address to all attendees. A sacred fire was lit in the college quadrangle, where all the viceregal grandees were invited to join the Mississaugas in a ritual dance. Payette clearly found this ridiculous. The look on her face as she grimaced toward her private secretary at one turn of the dance said it all: this is unbelievably stupid and please get me out of here as fast as you can.

It was duly noted by many at the event, and in the amazing speech Chief Bellegarde subsequently made that night. I’m paraphrasing, but he effectively said: Your offices and mine tend to be regarded by unimaginative observers as unpowerful. But they are wrong, because we all have important platforms where we can make a real difference in the national debate on what we can do as a  people working together on reconciliation, and the preservation of the natural gifts the bountiful Creator has bequeathed all of us on Turtle Island.

As soon as this extraordinary encounter concluded, Payette was off — seemingly to places unknown, freed from the tedious necessities of high office.

* * *

Let’s go back to a far happier time. At the end of the eighties, Payette had been an outstanding junior fellow at Massey College, where she was living while pursuing her engineering degree at the University of Toronto. She was dynamic and popular and was remembered particularly for her enthusiasm in college events, even dressing up as Queen Elizabeth I at a costume ball. She loved the college deeply. Thanks to its small size and warmth of its buildings and community, she left part of her soul there, and would return to it time and again to recharge her batteries or to try and heal emotional wounds or just to get regrounded. By the time I came on the scene there, she was already an astronaut. She took her first jaunt into space in 1999, with the whole college watching the take-off and subsequent landing. She even took college souvenirs with her on that flight, which were subsequently returned, framed, and put up in the college’s common room along with a fabulous, shining portrait of her in her NASA space suit.

We were so proud of her then. Well, the college is still proud of her — although we had to learn to accept a wider understanding of her humanity, flaws and all.

The first time she returned to Massey after that flight will not be forgotten by anyone present. She arrived at Massey straight from one of the NASA headquarters, still wearing her astronaut’s jumpsuit, a strong royal blue that had a prominent zipper going from top to bottom on the front. Her plane had been late coming to Toronto, she said, and thus had been unable to change for dinner. Some of us doubted that she wanted to come as anything less than a fully-fledged astronaut. We didn’t blame her. We loved her brio and self-confidence.

She spoke to the whole community that night in Ondaatje Hall. She was just someone who had always wanted to be an astronaut, whatever the obstacles, being a woman from a working-class Quebec family. We all understood how significant those obstacles were. Her luxuriant head of dark blonde curly hair fell onto her shoulders with beguiling charm, and she became everyone’s ideal, especially to the female students, for whom she was an amazing model. Ditto for the male students, who wanted to have their picture taken with her. Well, with them she was both an inspiration and a fantasy figure.

Later that evening, on what Scandinavians politely call “a health break,” I went to the men’s washroom only to find the two stand-up urinals each occupied by junior fellows talking animatedly while they did their business. Neither knew I had stepped into the room. I went to one of the enclosed cubicles directly behind them.

“My God,” said one of the fellows to his neighbour as they were both mid-pee. “Did you get a load of that outfit she was in?” “Are you kidding?” said the other. “I fantasized about slowly pulling down that zipper and …”

From behind them in the enclosed cubicles, the stern voice of the master of the college cut them off and boomed out: “Steady on, Chaps. You’re talking about a guest of the college.”

Sometimes the art of being an effective head of a diverse community is purposely not seeing and hearing some things. Sometimes, certain issues have to be dealt with. Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you can make your point somewhere in between these two poles. I gave them both time to zip up, wash their hands quickly, and clear out before I emerged, chuckling.

* * *

The second big time she came back to Massey during my time there, she brought most of the crew of her second mission in the space shuttle Endeavour along. It, too, was a night to remember. The crew members, along with some of their spouses or partners, came to dinner in Ondaatje Hall and were distributed to different tables to sit with both the students and quite a number of eminent senior fellows. They were treated as the stars they really were, like the stars in whose universe they had actually travelled in.

Julie Payette was in her element. She was with her peers in the college she adored and had told them all about. There was a glow about her that night that everyone recognized. The person who recognized it the most was one of the most famous senior scholars of the college, Ursula Franklin: a companion of the Order of Canada, a Holocaust survivor, a holder of the United Nations’ Pearson Peace Prize, and the pioneer researcher in the field of archaeometry, which applies modern materials analysis to archaeology. She may well have been the most honoured academic in Canada, with more honorary degrees than anyone. In her lifetime, she had a school named after her and, after her death, a street in the heart of the University of Toronto campus. But on this night, she might easily have been a young engineering and physics student thrilled at being in the presence of a beautiful female astronaut, confirming all Franklin’s fervent beliefs and theories about women in science and public life.

“Feminism isn’t an employment agency for women,” Franklin once famously said. “It’s an alternative way of ordering the social space, in which women are the prototype rather than the men. It is based on collaboration rather than competition. As a youngster, I still remember my feeling of joy that one could look at the earth differently. That’s feminism: everything is differently oriented. Seeing the same world with different eyes.”

After the joyous dinner with the visiting astronauts, everyone gathered in the common room and then Franklin took centre stage with Payette, as the other (male) astronauts surrounded them in a semicircle. “You are all pathfinders,” she began pianissimo, and then taking Payette’s hand and raising it a little. “We all want to know a little bit about the paths you have been treading for us,” she began, and an amazing discussion ensued that lasted for well over an hour.

The audience was transfixed as these two voyageurs led us on: the traveller in space in the twenty-first century and the traveller through all that was evil on earth in the twentieth century, but here in this extraordinary moment, their journeys had intersected. My eyes fixed on Julie. She was absolutely radiant, her eyes taking in everything from the general excitement, from the wood crackling in the giant fireplace buttressing the warm glow of her favourite room in all of the college with its leather furniture, oriental carpets, its polished oak floors, from the transfixing and thrilling focus Ursula Franklin had a way of creating in the world of ideas, and from all the hope, ambition, and youthful brio of a hundred of the brightest young minds in the country. There, in the midst, was Julie Payette almost ready for takeoff.

It’s this memory more than any other that makes me so angry when I project the fate that was in store for her in the catastrophe that was to come. It’s also a memory I pray fervently she will be able to rediscover in some form before her days are done. It will come the moment she realizes that the great honour she was given to be the symbolic and inspiring leader of her country was never really about her; it was about the country’s needs and desires. That lack of understanding remains at the heart of this tragedy.

The Governors General: An Intimate History of Canada’s Highest Office, published by Sutherland House, Toronto, is out on April 7, 2026.

Main image: Governor General Julie Payette delivers the throne speech in the Senate on Sept. 23, 2020. Photo by Adrian Wyld/POOL/AFP via Getty Images