1.Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a small cabinet. The pre-election cabinet that Prime Minister Carney constructed actually was significantly smaller than normal, as he was quick to point out. At 29 members, it was far leaner than any cabinet in several decades. (Stephen Harper’s reached 40, and Justin Trudeau’s topped out at 39.) But that first Carney cabinet only lasted 9 days, tailor-made for the election.
This time, Mr. Carney has pulled a sleight of hand, re-instituting the concept of junior ministers, otherwise known as secretaries of state. This has created a sort of outer cabinet of 10, versus the 29-member inner cabinet. Any way you cut it this adds up to 39. In reality these junior ministers are glorified parliamentary secretaries, but they help the prime minister achieve all of the representational requirements peculiar to Canadian cabinet-making, outlined in detail in an earlier blog on the first Carney cabinet. [i]
2. The cabinet is a very real mix of some old and many more new individuals. Fully 24 of Carney’s 38-member extended cabinet have never been in cabinet before. The predominance of new cabinet ministers apparently has been obscured by the parliamentary convention of listing the cabinet in order of personal seniority, not alphabetically or by importance of the post. This practice led to the snapshot image of several Trudeau veterans appearing first at the swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall, simply because they have been MPs the longest. Pierre Poilievre and many journalists apparently are either unaware of this convention or have deliberately chosen to ignore it. Instead they have promoted the story that the cabinet is comprised almost entirely of recycled Trudeau stalwarts. This is simply incorrect. Of the 28 members of the inner cabinet, fully 17 have never been in cabinet before and one more, Rechie Valdez, was an obscure junior minister under Trudeau for little more than a year. Of the 10 secretaries in the outer cabinet, all but two have just been elected.
3.The business Liberals are in charge. Former Trudeau ministerKarina Gould was the only standard bearer for the social Liberals in the leadership race, and she finished with an abysmal 3.2% of the total vote. Although she was re-elected in her riding in the April 28 election, she is conspicuously absent from the new Carney cabinet, as are almost all of the caucus members who could be considered to be on the left wing of the party. Given the overriding importance of the economy in the face of the existential threat posed by Donald Trump, it is hardly surprising that this cabinet has a right-wing tilt and is heavily weighted in favour of business Liberals. At the same time, it is important to note that successful Liberal governments in the past have always attempted to maintain a healthy balance between the two wings of the party. While the Trudeau government may have leaned too far to the left, it is worth noting that the Chretien government — famous among other things for eliminating the deficit left by the Mulroney Conservatives and returning the books to a healthy surplus — nevertheless had a cabinet that was home to several well-known social liberals like Sheila Copps, Brian Tobin, Charles Caccia and Sergio Marchi. Without such representation in cabinet, social Liberals will be watching closely to ensure the government does not stray too far to the right.
4. The Danielle Smith appeasement tactic likely will not work. In the 2 ½ years since becoming premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith has conducted a full out war on the Trudeau government’s lead ministers on the environment and natural resources, Stephen Guilbeault and Jonathan Wilkinson. She once described Guilbeault’s efforts to reduce emissions as a “deranged vendetta” against Alberta, and declared Wilkinson to be both “tone deaf” and an “enemy” of the oil industry for his comment that “we cannot get to net zero by 2050 if we begin in 2040.” Wilkinson has been dropped from cabinet, and Guilbeault (an important Quebec minister who cannot be removed entirely) has been shuffled off to Heritage and Canadian Identity. The new Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Julie Dabrusin, is a Toronto lawyer who does not have the relevant background of her predecessor, and the new Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Tim Hodgson, is a Toronto-based financial analyst who once served on the board of an Alberta oil sands company. While this may be a not too subtle effort to appease Smith, they will undoubtedly run up against her sooner rather than later, as she continues her erratic Alberta-first agenda and the prime minister attempts to meet Canada’s environmental commitments and pursue his aggressive upgrade of the Canadian economy.
5. Reconciliation is alive and well. In a ‘Jodi Wilson-Raybould eat your heart out’ moment, Mandy Gull-Masty became the first indigenous Minister of Indigenous Services. Wilson-Raybould, it will be recalled, was the perennial troublemaker in Justin Trudeau’s early cabinets who wanted to interfere in her colleagues’ indigenous portfolios even while serving (many have said ineffectively) as Canada’s Justice Minister. Yet she turned down the chance to become the first indigenous minister of Indigenous Services and instead went on to create havoc with the SNC Lavalin “scandal” before resigning from cabinet, and politics, in a huff.
Gull-Masty, the highly regarded former Grand Chief of the Cree in Quebec, is not alone. She is joined in cabinet by two other indigenous Liberal MPs: Rebecca Chartrand as Minister of Northern and Arctic Affairs, and Buckley Belanger as Secretary of State for Rural Development. And, although she herself is not indigenous, Liberal MP Rebecca Alty, the former mayor of Yellowknife, has extensive experience representing indigenous interests in the NWT. As Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Chief Bobby Cameron wrote of Gull-Masty and Alty, “The appointment of these two accomplished women to lead key Indigenous portfolios signals a positive step forward for Prime Minister Carney’s government to advancing reconciliation and addressing the priorities of First Nations.We look forward to establishing strong working relationships with both ministers as we collectively work to address the needs of our community.”[ii]
6.The PMs` supporters have been rewarded. Despite all of the representational considerations that must go into cabinet making, most prime ministers will make sure that loyal supporters and friends receive some posts as well. Mark Carney may be inexperienced, but he has not failed to follow through on that common practice. It is true that Philippe Champagne, Melanie Joly and Dominic LeBlanc were crucial players in the Trump tariff issue under Trudeau. It would have been foolhardy to replace these veterans, but it is also true that they were in the forefront of support for Mark Carney in his leadership bid. Meanwhile Chrystia Freeland, who challenged him for the leadership, is lucky to find herself in cabinet at all, shuffled off to Transport despite her equally relevant role in earlier Trump negotiations. Of course there are also the surprise return engagements of Anita Anand and Sean Fraser, two former Trudeau ministers who announced they would not be running again but then were personally wooed by Carney to change their minds, and did. Now both find themselves in important roles in cabinet.
Meanwhile, as an outsider Carney may have lacked friends in caucus before, but among the new MPs elected in April he has several who are friends, colleagues or acquaintances from his former careers. One obvious example is rookie MP Tim Hodgson, a former banker who once headed up the Canadian branch of Goldman Sachs. When Carney was Governor of the Bank of Canada he recruited Hodgson as a special adviser for an eighteen month stint which ended just before Carney left to take over the job of Governor of the Bank of England. Having returned to a highly successful career in the private sector, Hodgson by his own admission had given no thought to entering politics until shortly before the election was called, when Carney approached him. He now finds himself Minister of Energy and Natural Resources. [iii]
Perhaps most interesting of these connections is his appointment of former CBC reporter Evan Solomon to the position of Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Information. Solomon, elected for the first time in April, left the CBC under a cloud ten years earlier over an alleged conflict of interest, involving an art dealership in which he was simultaneously engaged. The corporation’s problematic charge of conflict of interest, it should be noted, was directed exclusively at Solomon, as the corporation perceived the business to have interfered with his impartial role as a journalist. Among the clients of his company was then Bank of England governor Mark Carney.[iv]
7. You appoint rookie MPs to cabinet at your peril. Carney has 24. When Brian Mulroney was first elected in 1984 with the largest majority in Canadian history, he had so many new MPs he had no idea what to do with them all. Worse, Conservatives had been out of power for so long, except for the Clark minute, that there were very few veterans anywhere. He had no choice but to name some of the newbies to cabinet. As numerous accounts have detailed, many of them proved to be blatantly incompetent and others got into various difficulties, from conflict of interest to outright corruption, in no time at all.[v] When Justin Trudeau was elected with his majority in 2015, he too had many rookie MPs after a decade of Stephen Harper. In Trudeau’s case, the mistake was to place too much emphasis on representation, (“because it’s 2015”) but the result was similar in terms of incompetence. Luckily he had several more chances to fix things up.
The lesson here is simple. Newly elected MPs – no matter how competent or experienced in the real world — need time to learn the political and parliamentary ropes and where the little green buses run. Ideally they should first sit on a committee, then become a parliamentary secretary, and finally become a minister when they are ready. In the case of the Carney cabinet, there are 16 actual ministers who have just been elected, several with seriously important roles, not a good omen. The good news is that all but two of the secretaries of state are rookies, which is where they should be, and this can serve as a training ground for future ministers.
8. Some people never learn, or, Chrystia Freeland Politics 101. People always shoot the messenger. Nowhere is this more true than in politics. Another political truism of successful political parties – like the Liberals – is that you never wash your dirty linen in public. The Tories always had trouble with that one, and it cost them many times over. In this context, Chrystia Freeland’s hugely public meltdown in December of last year cost her big time. Like UK cabinet minister Michael Heseltine, who brought down none other than Margaret Thatcher, no one thanked Freeland for her efforts to dislodge Justin Trudeau. Instead, the once popular former Finance Minister finished the party leadership race with almost no caucus support and a less than 8% of the vote. Apparently this disaster did not impress itself on Nate Erskine-Smith, the Toronto-area MP who spent all of 2 months in Carney’s election cabinet but found himself on the outside looking in after the latest iteration was announced. Taking to social media the soon-to-be pariah MP denounced the process and described himself as both disrespected and hurt. Clearly he should have taken a page from the approach used by former ministers like David Lametti, Marco Mendocino or even Jonathan Wilkinson, all of whom chose to express their appreciation for having been allowed to serve in cabinet and then listed their accomplishments during their time in office before politely retreating to lick their wounds in private.
9. Ministers need more independence, but carrots and sticks are essential too. Much has been written about the decline of cabinet government and the rise of overly centralizing prime ministerial offices. There is much truth to this accusation, although some governments were far more controlling than others. Stephen Harper’s micromanagement of his ministers –who were truly mere figureheads — arguably takes the prize. That said, it is instructive to look at the style of the Chretien government, which accomplished much and had many well-known cabinet ministers in their own right. As Brian Tobin, one of Chretien’s strongest ministers, once commented, “he gave us our heads and didn’t interfere, unless of course we screwed up.” Put another way, ministers need to be given their heads to accomplish their mission statements, but they also need to be given sticks as well as carrots.
10. Departmental titles really do tell you about the priorities of a government. Ministerial departments are not found in the constitution. Each new government can create new departments or eliminate some altogether, and they can call departments by whatever names they choose. This most often reflects changes in the real world, new issues, and so on, but also the priorities of the party in power. A department of the Environment was only created in 1971. Since then it has been renamed Environment and Sustainable Development, and now, under Carney, Environment and Climate Change. Kim Campbell changed the name of Solicitor General to Public Security after terrorist bombings in 1993. Under Trudeau it became Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. And ministers of state for sport and physical fitness, disabilities and middle class prosperity have all come and gone. And last but not least, in obvious efforts to limit the number of cabinet posts, some governments choose to combine two apparently unrelated topics in one department or area. Hence Chrystia Freeland is now Minister of Transport and Internal Trade.
Perhaps the most frequent and revealing name changes have occurred in the area of immigration. Initially known as the Department of Immigration and Colonization, in 1950 it was renamed the Department of Citizenship and Immigration and remained so until 1966. The department was then reorganized as the Department of Manpower and Immigration (1966-1977) and later became the Department of Employment and Immigration (1977-1996). Finally, it was re-established as Citizenship and Immigration Canada in 1994. In 2015, it was renamed Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Under Mr. Carney it has stayed the same.
No doubt analysts will be reading the tea leaves on the Carney cabinet in terms of additions and omissions for some time to come. At the end of the day, however, it is results that matter, as the prime minister himself has said repeatedly. Ministers who can deliver on their mission statements will do well, and those who cannot will disappear.
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[i] https://brookejeffrey.ca/reading-the-tea-leaves-on-the-carney-cabinet/
[ii] https://ictnews.org/news/three-indigenous-members-of-canadas-parliament-named-to-prime-ministers-cabinet
[iii] https://calgaryherald.com/news/ex-banker-timothy-hodgson-answers-mark-carneys-call-to-fix-resources-sector
[iv] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/evan-solomon-fired-by-cbc-news-in-wake-of-alleged-secret-art-deals-1.3106983
[v] https://brookejeffrey.ca/brian-mulroney-canadas-consequential-18th-prime-minister/
