Carney Cabinet Sends A Message
Mark Carney doesn’t feel threatened by competence and he isn’t governed by favours. His cabinet picks speak to bench strength over all other considerations and his statement that there would be no games in calling Poilievre’s Alberta by-election, bringing the brash Conservative leader back into the House to argue with him again as quickly as possible, are a statement about how he intends to govern. Results over image, country over self.
Prior to Trudeau’s resignation, I was a Carney sceptic. I didn’t know him and was apprehensive of bringing a banker in at a time when Canadians are struggling with making ends meet. I felt having an outsider put in place by a party elite would go about as well as it did with Michael Ignatieff nearly two decades earlier, that he would be a puppet to a party establishment looking to change faces rather than styles.
His simple appearance on The Daily Show in January flipped the script for me, showing me not a controlled banker, but a capable statesman with a clear grasp of the issues and a no-nonsense style that would simply run over problems.
Far from simply recycling Justin Trudeau’s team and being run by the same staff, he put in excommunicated Trudeau minister Marco Mendicino as his first chief of staff, made some changes to the cabinet to maintain continuity through a transition and election, but also add some fresh ideas, and pulled the plug only 14 days after winning the leadership.
Carney does not suffer fools easily. I expect high cabinet and staff turnover. He demands competence. Ministers and senior staffers who don’t measure up won’t be around long, and the separation won’t be sentimental. In the long term, enemies will be created, mitigated perhaps by them being jilted less competent folks, and his leadership won’t last forever. But I don’t think he cares. He’s here to do a job, and he’s going to do it.
To wit, his post-election cabinet looked at who he had in caucus, not who he had only in cabinet, to pick people to do the job. Many Prime Ministers and leaders of all parties and at all levels of government are leery of putting people who might some day have leadership aspirations of their own in too prominent a role, lest they undermine them in an effort to eventually replace them.
The current cabinet reintroduces senior and junior cabinet ministers, the latter being known as secretaries of state for (file), something Trudeau eliminated early on as part of his push to have a gender balance in a cabinet in which all cabinet members were nominally equal. Carney’s cabinet is almost balanced — not counting the Prime Minister, there are 14 male and 14 female ministers, but 6 male and 4 female secretaries of state. It is a recognition that not all cabinet roles truly do have the same weight. He has also eschewed the largely ceremonial title of deputy Prime Minister.
He’s also created a Minister for AI, which is an interesting statement, but also highlights the severe lack of direct high tech expertise in the caucus or in politics more generally.
The more subtle but interesting decisions in this cabinet, though, are the introduction of long-time MPs David McGuinty and Joel Lightbound to senior cabinet roles.
McGuinty who, full disclosure, I worked for as a Parliamentary staffer in 2011-2012, had long been seen as a potential serious contender for the leadership of the Liberal party. His brother Dalton was premier of Ontario from 2003 to 2013, and the McGuinty family is an institution in its own right in Ottawa political circles. His service has long been selfless, never seeking the spotlight and always demanding both competence and loyalty from himself and those around him. He spent most of the ten years the Liberals have been in power chairing the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, a hard-working committee that oversees Canada’s security and intelligence establishment far from the spotlight.
It was a role that demands the highest level of competence, but one in which there is essentially no public profile. It is a role suited for hiding a potential leadership rival. McGuinty moving to National Defence when Canada is facing an existential threat from the Americans is no accident, and shows that Carney doesn’t play the game, he just does the job.
Quebec City MP Joel Lightbound was widely seen within caucus when I was there as a rising star. Extremely competent, perfectly bilingual, and deeply principled. He was briefly a Parliamentary Secretary in the 43rd Parliament, left entirely to the backbenches through the 44th, and finally has a seat at the cabinet table under Carney.
There were many members of cabinet that were unceremoniously dropped, some of which came as a surprise. There are only so many seats around the cabinet table, and none were elected to be Ministers.
The bottom line is that Carney is not sentimental, and he isn’t interested in building a cabinet based on who was already there, or what they may or may not do in the future, but on whether they are the right people to be around the table here and now, for today’s challenges.