This week's shuffle has added a few new faces to the Cabinet table, and has been described by various commentators as a survive-until-the-election Cabinet with a number of bloody battles on the horizon, a shuffle in response to the Ontario election (much like the previous shuffle was in response to the election of Donald Trump in the US), and also the election-ready Cabinet that he will use to shore up perceived weaknesses.  It may be some or all of these things, given the political climate around the country, but it nevertheless leaves me with a number of questions, and frankly, concerns about some of the other messages that he's sending with it.

In particular, the shuffle has me wondering about some machinery-of-government questions that arise from the choices that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made in the additions and reorganizations that he's called for.  Why this matters is because of this government's managerial competence, or lack thereof on many of their files.  Some of these new ministers have peculiar relationships with the departments that they are tasked with overseeing, and that may cause problems down the road, particularly if some of these new ministries exist solely for crass politicking.

To start with, the one big change that makes the most sense for the coming year is putting Dominic LeBlanc into the post of intergovernmental affairs.  It's a ministry that had largely gone dormant for the past number of years Harper relegated it to a junior ministry usually given as a secondary portfolio to another minister after Michael Chong resigned in protest after he wasn't consulted about Harper's "Quebecois as a nation" motion, and Trudeau had initially kept the portfolio for himself.  In the early days of this government, Trudeau had a lot more allies in legislatures around the country, and those days are gone.  Giving LeBlanc Northern Affairs takes one more item off of Carolyn Bennett's plate, as she tries to reframe the relationship with Indigenous peoples entirely a job that is likely to go beyond this government's current election cycle but the biggest item that was given to LeBlanc is internal trade.  You know, that thorny issue that has plagued this country since 1867, and which the Supreme Court of Canada just handed back to the government, declining to enforce it by judicial fiat.  With the coming trade war with the United States, LeBlanc will have his work cut out for him in that role but it's a role that crosses departments.

Remember that there are no junior ministers in this government, and portfolios that rightfully should be ministers of state are full ministers because in a gender-equal Cabinet, nobody wants there to be the impression that the junior portfolios are dominated by women.  While it's not uncommon in Canada for departments to have more than one minister attached to them look at Global Affairs, which comprises of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and International Development (sometimes called "cooperation").  But what's more of an issue is how this current government keeps splitting up portfolios and giving disparate ones to ministers in a way that I find troubling from a governance perspective.

With LeBlanc, Intergovernmental Affairs is really a sub-department of the Privy Council Office, while interprovincial trade has been handled out of the ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, and the regulatory harmonization component of interprovincial trade has been spearheaded by Treasury Board.  Mélanie Joly, in what has been called a demotion been given both tourism (a division of ISED) and official languages and the Francophonie (ministry of Heritage).  Does she maintain an office in both departments?  Deputy or assistant deputy ministers in each?  Mary Ng was given small business usually paired with tourism but no longer which is also part of ISED, but she's been tasked with pairing that with export promotion, which sounds like it should be part of International Trade.  While there have been numerous reports and calls for better integration between industry (which is what ISED used to be called) and international trade departments, does this minister straddling two departments actually do that, or does it create governance challenges?  Kirsty Duncan as well science (a division of ISED) and sport (a division of Heritage).  As for why the science title is still relevant, I'm not sure there were definite challenges with granting agencies that she was tasked with cleaning up when she was named, but that has largely been done, and I have serious concerns that the title is simply one for optics to show that Trudeau is a prime minister that respects science where the last guy didn't.

And that leaves us with two more new ministers that I'm far more troubled by.  Filomena Tassi has been given the portfolio of seniors, which aside from being a subdivision of Families, Children and Social Development, is a file that looks very much to be a pander to a voter base that the Liberals have been accused of ignoring (not unfairly given the way older members of their own party membership have been treated).  Unless Trudeau has a major project for her to undertake and we won't know until the mandate letters are released later this summer I can't help but look on this with suspicion.  But it's Bill Blair being given the role of Minister of Looking Tough on Stuff err, I mean "Border Security and Organized Crime Reduction" that appears to be the most problematic of them all.

Despite being assigned the role of border security, Blair apparently isn't being given oversight over the Canada Border Services Agency (which would have lightened Ralph Goodale's workload if he had), nor over asylum seekers.  His organized crime file has aspects of public safety, but he's apparently also keeping his straddling roles from justice and health when it comes to keeping the marijuana file, so he's ostensibly a minister without any actual department(s) to be responsible for, which is troubling from a governance perspective.  Add to that, his appointment sends a number of really bad messages that irregular border crossers are a crisis (they're not by any stretch of the definition), that pairing that issue with organized crime conflates the two and fuels the kind of xenophobic rhetoric that the right in Canada has increasingly been peddling, not to mention the implicit message that asylum seekers are a criminal as opposed to a humanitarian issue a message that this government probably doesn't want to send, because it vindicates the Conservative talking points.  His purpose appears to be looking tough on a Cabinet minister's salary.  There have been a number of crass appointments that I've seen over the years, but this is a pretty special level of crass that's disappointing to see this government engaging in, when they did a lot of work to clean up the regional economic development messes left by previous governments.  We shouldn't be surprised, but it's still disappointing to see.

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney, Loonie Politics