Few prime ministers have arrived needing a great cabinet quite like Mark Carney.
What became evident Tuesday was that, despite a towering résumé and fresh mandate, he leaned heavily on his unpopular predecessor’s leftovers—less by choice than necessity. With the clock ticking from the moment he became Liberal leader, Carney assembled a cabinet built more for containment than inspiration. It's not yet the army for transformation—just the best field medic unit he could deploy on short notice.
Carney brought back many of the usual suspects mainly as a practical necessity, because he had a matter of days once he was elected Liberal leader to recruit significant numbers to change the channel as he called an election.
The product is a bulbous, two-tiered, gender-equal, 38-person cabinet—an inner circle of 28 full ministers, then a foggier assemblage of 10 ministers of state—to contend with not only the madness of the Donald Trump administration but the exceptional homegrown challenges of affordability, housing, immigration, health care, security and whatever suits your grumpy fancy.
Great prime ministers rarely govern alone—they govern beside a ballast.
Stephen Harper had Jim Flaherty to steer through the 2008 financial storm. Pierre Trudeau relied on Marc Lalonde to reassert federal strength after the October crisis in Quebec. Lester Pearson summoned the “three wise men” from Québec—Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier—to lend his minority heft and credibility. Mackenzie King unleashed C.D. Howe to run the cabinet like a business empire, and Wilfrid Laurier elevated Joseph-Israël Tarte to assert himself beyond the Ottawa bubble.
Carney’s version of that stabilizing force appears to be Dominic LeBlanc, handed a political Rubik’s Cube of responsibilities: U.S. trade, intergovernmental relations and stitching together what’s being called a “One Canada Economy.” A steady hand, yes—but not yet the bold stroke that redefines an era.
Contemporary cabinets bring with them expectations of economic rebound, of regional repair and even dividends arising from diversity. Carney’s selections owe more to improvisation of his quicky election as leader and prime minister, with eyes on Trump and more of a glance at the long list of local issues that in other administrations would be the focus. It’s more of a wartime cabinet with one mission: to seek something approaching peace to quell the threat from the ruler on the other side of what he unamusingly calls the “line drawn with a ruler.”
Some of the appointments Tuesday are deft: Chrystia Freeland, a leadership rival who got the ball truly rolling on the departure of Justin Trudeau, takes on a seemingly impossible role to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers by July 1. (Granted, Carney hasn’t said which year.)
Tim Hodgson, a former Goldman Sachs colleague of the prime minister, takes on energy and resources and ought to apply a more generous approach to pulling our prosperity from the ground. Carney’s environment and climate change minister is thankfully not Steven Guilbeault but Julie Dabrusin, who has been a parliamentary secretary in both the environment and energy portfolios that presumably conferred a less activist perspective. François-Philippe Champagne, his finance and revenue minister, can expect to feel Carney over his shoulder and not shudder (Justin Trudeau didn’t fare well with that portfolio’s occupant).
There was a significant British Columbian changing of the guard: Gregor Robertson, the former Vancouver mayor, takes on the gigantic task of the government’s massive “build, baby, build” initiative as housing and infrastructure minister and the senior role in B.C. Jonathan Wilkinson, the North Vancouver—Capilano MP who was the most experienced option available to Carney as a former energy minister, was surprisingly dropped from cabinet altogether. (Full disclosure: I ran against Robertson for mayor in 2014.)
An intriguing appointment is Kelowna MP (and former fighter pilot) Stephen Fuhr as a minister of state for defence procurement, a subsidiary role to the defence minister that will have some large decisions ahead to appease American demands.
The obsession with Trump was, after all, what made sufficient numbers of voters forget the three Liberals terms for five weeks so as to grant Carney the job. But it isn’t a permanently repressed memory; before long, it will create a two-track test of one issue in the White House and all sorts of issues in our own houses if Carney doesn’t lead differently and more substantively.
The true political challenge before long for the prime minister—more vexing than the negotiation over our capacity to avoid economic ruin by the United States—is to shed sufficient skin of Justin Trudeau’s calloused cabinet and governing style so he brandishes his version of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition by next election.
It is unfair to liken it to walking and chewing gum at the same time—more like conducting an orchestra with one hand and wrestling an alligator with the other.
Kirk LaPointe is a Lodestar Media columnist with an extensive background in journalism. He is vice-president in the office of the chair at Fulmer & Company.
