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Trudeau’s New Cabinet Promises More of the Same — Mostly

A nod to Quebec, new enviro minister, a move up for Freeland. But mostly it doesn’t much matter.

Michael Harris 20 Nov 2019TheTyee.ca

Michael Harris, a Tyee contributing editor, is a highly awarded journalist and documentary maker. Author of Party of One, the bestselling exposé of the Harper government, his investigations have sparked four commissions of inquiry.

You will forgive me if the swearing in of Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet in that flashy pink and white room in Rideau Hall hasn’t set my pulse racing.

Politicians won’t admit it, but here’s the skinny. In our system of government, cabinet ministers mostly play the role of Walmart greeters at their government department stores. Their brains are their briefers; their perks are their pride and joy; and their main task is to avoid faceplants in public.

Cabinet ministers don’t usually make your life better, they don’t really make the decisions (the bureaucracy makes most of them), and their constant reappointment to new portfolios is mostly designed to distance them from the baggage of their previous roles.

For example, when government can’t solve the problems of a fishery, the usual answer is a new fisheries minister. It’s called the back-to-square-one gambit. It works almost as well as calling a royal commission.

For those reasons, crafting cabinets is a little like a parlour trick. The idea is to give everyone the impression that something magical has happened, and that the group that will govern the country for the foreseeable future is fair, balanced, representative and oh-so-talented.

The prime minister exhibited the usual political legerdemain in coming up with his new 36-member team. It is a politically correct blend of familiar and new faces and gender balance, with a tacit nod to the results of the last election.

It is also a standard collection of winners, losers, stay-putters and those shuffled sideways.

And it is the result of Trudeau losing his majority government and the popular vote to that charismatic fellow, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer. It is in that sense a “listening” cabinet.

Quebec was bound to do well in landing jammy posts around the big table. Though the Liberals lost five seats in the province, they won just enough to keep them in power. With the Bloc Québécois nipping at their heels, they must show Quebecers they are the party with the province’s best interests at heart.

So it was not surprising to see Francois-Philippe Champagne make the political quantum leap from international trade to foreign affairs.

Nor was it a shock to see Montreal MP Pablo Rodriguez replace Ontario’s Bardish Chagger as House Leader.

One of the new kids on the cabinet block, also from Quebec, is Steven Guilbeault. He is the political rookie Trudeau appointed to be the new heritage minister.

The other is Quebec MP Marc Miller, who will be sitting around the cabinet table as Indigenous services minister.

Quebecers will see a lot of those faces on the news, particularly if the prime minister keeps up his dubious attendance record in the House of Commons. You can bet the farm that Trudeau won’t miss an opportunity to show Quebec how important it is to his government — no doubt creating spikes in the political blood pressure of the Wexit set in the process.

It remains to be seen if appointing two Manitobans will make the West feel any more included. MP Dan Vandal becomes minister of northern affairs, and Jim Carr, battling cancer, is now special representative for the Prairies. Conservative MPs may not greet him with open arms.

After four years of Catherine McKenna’s largely empty rhetoric on the environment file, Trudeau had little choice but to shuffle her out. Voters sent a loud and clear message that the Liberals could no longer suck and blow on climate change, that public relations wasn’t a substitute for action, and that McKenna didn’t cut it. Think of it as Greta’s revenge.

But the oddity is not so much that McKenna got dumped from this critical post and shunted into the infrastructure and communities portfolio, but who replaced her.

The obvious choice was Guilbeault, Quebec’s most famous environmentalist. The Green party moved heaven and earth to recruit him as a candidate in the recent election, possibly seeing him as Elizabeth May’s successor. Back in 2001, Guilbeault was one of two Greenpeace members who scaled the CN Tower in Toronto and unfurled a sign that read “Canada and Bush Climate Killers.” He was a natural pick for environment minister.

But instead Trudeau chose Jonathan Wilkinson, former fisheries minister, as his new environment minister. The MP from North Vancouver has an NDP pedigree, having worked as an advisor to former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow. But it was probably his later work in the green technology industry that originally caught Trudeau’s eye.

Wilkinson was a CEO of a gas purification company in Vancouver before moving to a water treatment company in that same city. When he made the switch to politics he was a mediocre fisheries minister, but a reliable company man. With no support in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Trudeau is probably hoping that Westerners will remember that Wilkinson grew up in Saskatoon.

The main reason Trudeau tapped Wilkinson for environment? He supports a project that could be the first major controversy of the new government — the Trans Mountain pipeline purchase and expansion.

Guilbeault, on the other hand, is dead against pipelines. That will make him a frustrated man in this new cabinet, and maybe Trudeau’s next Jody Wilson-Raybould — depending on how serious he is about his principles.

The PM may also be hoping that Westerners will remember that his one true star from the last government, foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland, was raised in Alberta. It was Freeland who earned the government good headlines on the new trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico, though her work on the China file did not bear fruit — or pork and soybean sales or freed detainees.

Freeland’s was the biggest move. Trudeau shifted her into intergovernmental affairs, and also elevated her to the post of deputy prime minister. She has big shoes to fill in replacing Ralph Goodale, the Liberal veteran who served under both Pierre and Justin Trudeau and lost his Saskatchewan seat in last month’s election. Although no one has been designated deputy prime minister since 2006, Goodale was second-in-command behind Trudeau.

As much as politicians try to convince voters that there is something brand new about their latest cabinets, key portfolios can tell a different story.

Bill Morneau is still finance minister, and that means Trudeau remains in sync with his performance and style on the most important issue to this government — the economy.

Ditto for justice, where the man who replaced Wilson-Raybould, Quebec MP David Lametti, retains that portfolio.

It remains to be seen if Lametti is willing to meddle in the SNC-Lavalin case, a move that could be the nitroglycerin that blows the doors off Trudeau’s minority. It should be remembered that all opposition parties called for a public inquiry into the scandal that cost Trudeau two cabinet ministers, his principal secretary and his Clerk of the Privy Council.

But the oath that the justice minister took included a brand new pledge to uphold the “prosecutorial” process, which suggests that not even Trudeau thinks he can get away with further meddling in this case.

Bottom line?

With all of the new faces, get ready for more of the same.  [Tyee]

Read more: Politics, Federal Politics

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