Six Priorities As Carney Builds His Cabinet

On What The New Cabinet Should Show

With the election behind us, the next big moment in the political calendar, beyond whatever the fuck is going to happen with Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative leadership, will be the swearing in of a new cabinet. The early rumours are that a shuffle is imminent in the next couple of weeks, with names like Gregor Robertson and Nathalie Provost amongst others tipped for promotion into a bigger, but still slimmed down from the Trudeau peak, cabinet.

Post-election cabinet guessing is impossible - it’s hard enough guessing a mid-Parliament shuffle, where you at least have somewhat of a grasp of who’s performed well and badly, but here it’s impossible, and fundamentally not worth my time to write or yours to read. Others can and will do a better job with better sources than me at figuring out which star candidates will make Cabinet and which will be Parl Secs first.

But, what can be useful and worthwhile is figuring out how we should use the new Cabinet to govern, and that is actually right up my alley. So, six priorities for the new Cabinet, also known as 6 things I’d do to set this government off on a good path.

Consolidate The Development Agencies

This is a very niche pet project of mine to start with,but we do not need Ministers for Economic Development for every region, but consolidating Economic Development into one job and taking the Competition and Diversification mandate from Industry and Innovation would create another relatively big economic portfolio. Call it the Ministry of Economic Development, but have the Minister be the point person for all of the private sector investment we’re looking to garner and deploy, while leaving Industry and Innovation to invest in research, development, investigate use cases for AI, and work with existing industry, as opposed to having our Industry Minister calling around the globe begging a fourth Telco or grocery chain to open here.

The other advantage of this is we need as many portfolios for strong economic managers as possible. One of the Trudeau government’s big failures was sidelining economic growth as a priority, and by rejigging things to create a fourth big economic portfolio - with Finance and Treasury Board, in addition to Industry/Innovation and this new one - you’d be able to have four big economic minds at four economic portfolios around the cabinet table. Finding as many ways to get smart economic minds at the table - and therefore able to keep the conversation focused where it needs to be - is crucial.

Fresh Face At Minister Of Justice

I want someone who didn’t serve a second in Cabinet under JT at Justice. This government has to - HAS TO - walk back a significant part of the Trudeau era reforms on bail, and I don’t want those reforms being bogged down by “you were in the cabinet that passed them, why are you now getting rid of them” every day. I don’t really care who is it, but I need it to be a fresh face.

I also need it to be someone who actually believes in cracking the whip a little bit, because I swear to God if we do the Marc Miller “Have a bleeding heart who refuses to sell necessary draconian policies because they don’t like it” bit again I’m going to lose my fucking mind. Reverse yourselves on bail and sentencing and then fucking sell it.

Give The Lieutenants Actual Responsibilities

We often talk about who will be the Quebec Lieutenant or the Ontario Lieutenant or wherever, and it’s broadly understood to be important in a party management and hierarchy sense. Fuck that, let’s give it actual teeth.

We have huge amounts of work we need to get done with provinces, and there is no reason not to be giving the people we have deemed the point person for that province an actual job of regularly working across portfolios to achieve deals and outcomes. If she’s staying in Cabinet, give Chrystia Freeland a broad remit to handle negotiations with Ford on upzoning and DCs, health care cuts, international students, and tariff relief. Give Steve MacKinnon the same remit with Legault, instead of trying to make deals in a piecemeal way at a sluggish pace.

Also, this isn’t a full point on its own, but give Steve a big job. He’s one of the most capable MPs in the caucus and he was criminally underused by Trudeau.

Give The Next Immigration Minister A Mandate To Enforce Exits

Given the way the temporary immigration system has been used in the last half decade, we are going to have a lot more departures in the coming years than arrivals, which is a key feature of the government’s plan to bring rent down. But, one of the issues that comes up from people who are happy the Liberals finally cut immigration levels is concern about whether these people will actually exit.

Even if it’s merely announcing existing powers, make a show of saying the words “we will ensure that visa overstays are removed from this country” every so often will make it clear that we take this issue more seriously than the Trudeau government ever did. It’s a perfectly reasonable policy point as well, but one that codes as right wing, and a great opportunity for Carney to show he’s focused on achieving outcomes for all Canadians.

Avoid Too Many Rookie Ministers

The balance between showing you’re the change candidate and tossing the baby out with the bathwater is crucial. Obviously there has to be some class of 2025 MPs added to cabinet, especially with the considerable turnover at this election, but ditching good MPs for no apparent or clear reason just for the sake of new is a bad idea.

This government doesn’t have the time to learn on the run, and while a lot of the Cabinet potentials have been considerable in other ways, knowing how to run a government department is a much different job than being a CEO. (Carlos Leitão is the one exception, given he’s literally run one before in the Quebec Ministry of Finance.)

The impulse will be to load up on new names, be it Robertson, Provost, Leitão (all of whom seem likely to walk straight in), and others like Evan Solomon, Tim Hodgson, Claude Guay, Jill McKnight, or whoever else. That instinct needs to be tempered. Pick your best 4-6 from the class of 2025, and let the rest of them sit and learn as Parl Secs. Tossing them into the fire too early is a surefire way to end some promising careers before they get a chance to start.

Empower Ministers To Actually Run Their Departments

I know this is the cliche, but the virtue of Cabinet governance is supposed to be that there are multiple points of view, and multiple people who can pick up on, essentially, community dissent. The problem with PMOs that isolate themselves from said dissent is they start to believe their shit don’t stink, and I am here to say that it does. It always fucking does.

We need empowered Ministers, and empowered staffers behind those Ministers, so that we have an actual org structure to stop the centralization and head up their assery of the Trudeau PMO. One of the reasons this site became as popular as it was was because it became a meeting point for progressive thinking in the electorate, but also on the Hill, where staffers routinely reached out to say they wished anybody in the higher ups of the government would engage with criticisms like the ones I was providing.

If Carney wants to avoid the Trudeau fate, he needs to be much more willing to empower his Ministers and their staffs to actually govern this country, and to be responsive to criticism. This has to be a new, more collaborative government with the whole of the Parliamentary Party and the broader Liberal Party being taken seriously. If it becomes a new cult of personality and a cult in the PMO we might as well all just fuck off.

I’m going to be plenty critical of Carney in these pages when he deserves it, because there is an opportunity to undo a lot of the Trudeau damage and govern better. I want to be proud to vote Liberal in 2029 or whenever the next election is, and that means being a better government than we’ve been. We need a government that will fix Trudeau’s errors, govern well, and serve its people with a humility and a generosity to its critics that Trudeau lacked. And this cabinet can be - needs to be, honestly - a sign he will do that, or Carney will not be the PM this country needs him to be.