Justin Trudeau Archives - Page 32 of 41

Is Justin Trudeau Canada’s first New Democratic prime minister?

Former Jean Chretien advisor, and fellow Loonie Politics columnist, Warren Kinsella, seems to think so.

According to him, Justin Trudeau is not only our “first NDP prime minister.” He is also “our first social democrat prime minister.”

Kinsella doesn’t believe that Trudeau has always been a Dipper. But his “transformation” into one was made complete last week after Trudeau played musical chairs with his cabinet and appointed the “radical” climate activist Steven Guilbeault as his new environment minister.

Kinsella, like other business-oriented Liberals, are “apoplectic” over Guilbeault’s promotion and the demotion of cabinet centrists like Marc Garneau and Jim Carr. They think that Trudeau is guilty of “vandalizing the economy” and fear that, left unchecked, he and his team will “slay our energy sector.”

After spewing so much hysteria and hyperbole, Kinsella and the rest of his Blue Liberal pals really need to get a grip. The fears that they have are completely overblown and the comparisons that they’ve made, overstated.

To begin with, lets state the obvious: the Canadian government has not been taken over by radicals. The same group of men and women that sat in cabinet with Trudeau a few months ago are still, by and large, the same team they are today, and none of them are extremists, Guilbeault included. In fact, I think there is a strong case to be made that Guilbeault is far more clear-eyed than most when it comes to tackling climate change. Whether obstructionists in the Liberal Party agree with him or not is another story.

As for Justin Trudeau, let me categorically state that he is not Canada’s first New Democratic prime minister. How could he be when he’s not a social democrat? He never has been. Liberal blood flows through his veins, just as it flowed through the veins of both his father and his mother’s father, James Sinclair, an MP under the Liberal Mackenzie King, and a cabinet minister under another Liberal, Louis St. Laurent.

Of course, blood and familial ties are more anecdotal than anything.

Policy, and one’s vision for society, are what really determines one’s political and ideological identities.

And in this regard again, Trudeau is as Liberal as they come.

On his better days, he is an activist, deficit-spending, diversity-promoting Liberal, but a status-quo Liberal no less.

If anything, the closest Canada has ever come to a New Democrat prime minister is Justin’s dad. Pierre was at least a supporter of the New Democrats, prior to his entry into electoral politics as a Liberal Party candidate. But even he, with his anti-American foreign views and nationalist, economic policies, was still just a left-leaning Liberal. While transformational on constitutional change and language policy, Pierre failed to move the dial substantially on labour, income inequality and countless other socio-economic issues.

Justin, in comparison, is viewed by many on the right as a bold progressive. But he’s really just a more centrist version of the neoliberal Jean Chretien/Paul Martin Liberals that came before him. That’s why in this year’s federal election, establishment Democrats in the United States like Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama backed him, while social democrats Bernie Sanders and Rashida Tlaib, endorsed Jagmeet Singh and the NDP.

For anyone that still questions Trudeau’s placement on the ideological spectrum, ask yourself the following questions:

a) Would a social democrat criticize the idea of increasing taxes on the very wealthiest in society, as Trudeau did at a campaign stop in La Prairie, Quebec?

b) Similarly, would a social democrat renege on their promise to expand the country’s social safety net and implement a national pharmacare system?

c) Would they have prioritized profits over peace by continuing the sale of arms to human rights abusing regimes in Saudi Arabia and Israel?

d) Would they continue to sign and ratify free trade agreements that cement investor rights while only paying lip service to their environmental and labor commitments?

The answer is of course not. These are the flawed, detrimental policies of Conservatives and establishment Liberals. Not equality-seeking, transformational-minded social democrats.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

I don’t mean to say that Liberals – especially this current crop in Ottawa – are all bad.

The Trudeau government’s acceptance of tens of thousands Syrian refugees was admirable (though not quite as deserving as all the praise it received when compared to the refugee intake of states like Germany), as is the Prime Minister’s promotion of multiculturalism, the LGBTQ+ community, and women’s reproductive rights. Furthermore, Trudeau’s apparent resolve to address the climate crisis and implement a national childcare program, is similarly commendable.

But that alone does not earn him the title or the praise (unintended as it may be from folks like Kinsella) of being named Canada’s first social democratic Prime Minister.

Only once Canadians have an administration that makes the necessary, structural changes to Canada’s economic, social and tax systems to strengthen society and eliminate inequality, will we be able to finally say that social democracy has arrived in Ottawa.

In the meantime, Kinsella and all the other blue, business-friendly Liberals should really stop with their fallacious fearmongering.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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We come not to bury Justin Trudeau, nor to praise him.

But we do wish to defend him. Sort of.

Okay, okay: put down your torches and pitchforks. There’s no need to chase me out of the Sun’s newsroom (yet). But hear me out.

As every reader of this newspaper knows, Remembrance Day is a very important day. It is the day we pay tribute to the sacrifice of men and women who went to war when Canada called.

It is a day that recalls the hundreds of thousands of Canadians killed in wartime – 67,000 in World War One, 45,000 in World War Two, and the 1,000 killed in Korea, Bosnia and Afghanistan. With many, many more grievously wounded on the battlefield.

This Remembrance Day, I attended a small ceremony on Main Street in Picton, Ontario. I had the ringer on my cell phone off, but mid-ceremony, it started buzzing like crazy. Later on, I looked at it.

Partisans on social media – Twitter and Facebook, mostly – were going wild. They were in a spit-flecked fury about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor-General Mary Simon.

Here’s what had them upset: Trudeau and Simon arrived late. Trudeau got to Ottawa’s National War memorial just before 11:00 a.m. And Simon actually arrived – and was therefore announced – during the period when there was supposed to be silence.

Given that both live just a few minutes up Sussex Drive – and given that both have armed motorcades to ferry them around – it was easy to understand why people were upset.

The mainstream media noticed, too. The stately Globe and Mail reported that the Prime Minister, the Governor General and the Silver Cross Mother “arrived behind schedule” – if that isn’t a Globe-y way to say “late,” I don’t know what is – and others noticed, too.

Hill reporter Kristy Kirkup tweeted this: “The Remembrance Day ceremony in Ottawa was about 10 minutes behind schedule this morning, according to a timeline provided by the Legion. Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor-General Mary Simon arrived behind schedule. We don’t have word as to why.”

The Internet didn’t wait for why. It went bananas.

Said one, echoing many: “Disrespectful! But, what else would you expect from Trudeau.” Another: “Clearly has no respect for Canadians. This PM is an abomination of a leader. An overgrown child riding on his daddy’s coattails. Makes me sick.” And yet another: “That’s disgraceful. There’s no excuse whatsoever!!”

Except, there was.

First off, protocol dictates that the Governor General can’t arrive until the Prime Minister does. That’s how it’s been in Ottawa for a Century, give or take, under Liberal and Conservative governments.

But most importantly: there was security issue, folks. And, given that we have had significant security issues at the War Memorial in the past – most notably, and most tragically, the murder of Corporal Nathan Cirillo almost exactly seven years ago – the police had no choice.

A suspicious package had been found. It looked like a bomb. So, the Explosive Disposal Unit was called in. That unit is made up of RCMP and Ottawa Police Service officers, as well as trained police service dogs, and they do not take their job lightly. They checked out the package. It wasn’t a bomb.

Said the RCMP later: “As a precautionary measure, our officers investigated it and the package was cleared a few minutes after.”

The Remembrance Day ceremony continued, albeit a bit late. But not by a lot.

Anonymous Twitter types – you know, the ones who have been dispensing epidemiological advice without a licence throughout the pandemic – were unconvinced. To them, it was a conspiracy, or a deliberate show of disrespect, or both.

But it wasn’t any of those things. It was a reminder, on our most solemn of days, that we shouldn’t always rush to judgment. Because, sometimes, nobody did anything wrong.

Even if that somebody is Justin Trudeau.

[Kinsella was Special Assistant to Jean Chretien.]

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is talking tough on carbon emissions.

As world leaders gas on in Glasgow, Trudeau is taking an aggressive stance on emissions caps, ending energy industry subsidies and carbon pricing.

Albertans, ever quick to feel victimized and/or affronted, are taking it very personally.

True, oil and gas has been the biggest of economic drivers in the province for decades. But the industry is also the biggest single source of carbon emissions in the country.

While Trudeau struts his country’s renewed environmental commitment on the world stage, Alberta’s premier is sniping from the weeds in Edmonton.

Jason Kenney decided to skip the international marketing opportunity of taking a trip to COP26 to tout all the provincial energy industry has done to reduce emission.

Beleaguered at home, the premier instead is playing to the provincial crowd, dismissing Glasgow as a meaningless “gabfest”.

This week he announced 16 emission-busting industry projects which will get $125 million in funding from the provincial heavy emitters tax fund (and $50 million from the feds, but Kenney’s barely mentioning that.)

The projects may reduce seven million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, crowed Kenney. To put that in some perspective oilsands operations alone account for 70 million tonnes of GHGs annually.

Some of the projects certainly have that cool factor. Canadian Pacific Railway, for instance, is going to retrofit three locomotives to run on hydrogen. Why exactly one of Canada’s richest companies needs government subsidies to try this technology out is just an untidy detail.

Kenney argues that “the path forward” is to incentivize innovation and create jobs rather than punish people with carbon caps and taxes.

Alberta is not just talking, it’s acting, he says.

But the action is pretty slow and the results are sometimes problematic. Alberta is hanging much of its “innovation” cred on technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration, which still assumes oil, gas and petrochemicals are going to continue for many years to come as an economic engine. So called ‘blue hydrogen’ is a byproduct of natural gas.

But Kenney’s not wrong about the need to act. Trudeau has been happy to talk long-range emission reduction targets, but the proof is in results.

Ultimately the question is what kind of action will actually have a meaningful impact.

Many captains of industry admit in boardrooms and at conference podiums that a properly set carbon price is ultimately the stick that will drive capitalism forward. As high emission fuels become too expensive, low-to-no carbon innovation becomes a bottom-line necessity.

The problem is how hard and how fast can a government wield the stick.

Environmentalists argue that no government is hitting the big carbon producers nearly hard enough to save the planet.

Despite Kenney’s opposition to pricing carbon, the money for the province’s latest spate of tech projects actually comes from Alberta’s own homegrown carbon tax on heavy emitters.

But the pilots and startups funded by those carbon tax dollars still have a long way to go to pay off and make a dent.

Kenney tossed out at his giveaway press conference that Alberta’s updated climate policy is coming in the next few weeks. But he also declared, “We will vigorously defend the economic interest of Alberta which includes the right to develop our resources and to do so in a responsible way while also seeking to reduce carbon emissions.”

That’s one seriously mixed message.

The prime minister and the premier are both thrashing on the carbon file. This past week has taxed speech writers and speechifiers to the max.

What the planet needs is less of that speechifying and more effective change. It’s not in either Canada’s or Alberta’s interests to be left behind in a cloud of ineffective rhetoric, half measures and failed targets.

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When Justin Trudeau became Canada’s 23rd prime minister in 2015, he received a significant amount of international praise and media coverage.

The New York Times Magazine paid homage to his late father and declared it was “Trudeau’s Canada, Again.” CNN suggested “Justin Trudeau, ‘the anti-Trump,’ shows Canada’s progressive, diverse face.” At the United Nations, then-Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev said, “I love him. I admire him. He is a wonderful young leader of this planet.” An article about Trudeau in Rolling Stone included this header, “Is he the free world’s best hope?”

These assessments all turned out to be complete nonsense.

Trudeau has been a weak and ineffective leader. He’s lost when it comes to the fine art of public relations and strategic communications. He has a vapid approach to everything from politics to daily life. He understands almost nothing about economics and financial management. He’s turned off more than two-thirds of all Canadian voters in the past two elections, and one truly wonders how much faith and confidence the remaining one-third has in him.

Still, a gushing profile in Vogue’s December 2015 edition, where Trudeau was depicted as the “New Young Face of Canadian Politics” who “celebrates openness and transparency” actually contained a few small kernels of truth. In particular, contributing editor John Power’s analysis in the last two paragraphs was a harbinger of things to come,

During his campaign, Trudeau pledged to invest in schools, health care, and infrastructure, even if that meant running deficits, and—in a profound reversal of Conservative policy—to make Canada a big player in environmental causes, especially climate change. This has already proved a tricky balancing act. Even as he expressed disappointment that President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline (which would have carried oil from the Alberta tar sands), Trudeau was setting up a conference with provincial and territorial leaders to create national emission-reduction standards.

Trudeau insists that the important thing in the modern world is to be optimistic about change, which is a fact of life, and not succumb to negativity. “There’s a sense that maybe we’ve reached the end of progress, that maybe it’s the new normal that the quality of life is going to go down for the next generation. Well, I refuse to accept that,” he says, fixing me with his deep gaze. “And I refuse to allow that to happen.”

This, in a nutshell, explains Trudeau’s leadership. The only thing this PM has left at his disposal is the environment. That’s been his pet project since day one, and he can’t (and won’t) stop talking about it. Since his public image has been badly shattered and properly ridiculed the past six years, his “sunny ways” and eternal optimism now more closely resemble never-ending flights of fantasy.

Trudeau’s statement about carbon pricing at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland emphatically proves this.

“We recognize right now that only about 20 per cent of global emissions are covered by a price on pollution,” he said in a speech. “We should be ambitious and say as of right here today that we want to triple that to 60 per cent of global emissions should be covered by a price on pollution in 2030. What a strong carbon price does, when it’s properly designed, is actually drive those price signals to the private sector, transform the economy and support citizens in encouraging them to make better choices.”

Trudeau didn’t stop there. “We know there are many different approaches that every country is going to have to take to reduce emissions, to decarbonize their economy, to get to net zero (emissions by 2050),” he later said at a news conference. “Carbon pricing is one of the most effective and cheapest ways to get there. It’s an extremely powerful tool that incentivizes businesses and consumers to make smarter choices.”

Trudeau’s assessment of the benefits of carbon pricing are complete fantasy.

Carbon pricing, as you may have guessed, is a less controversial way of suggesting the implementation of a carbon tax. Briefly, it’s not a free market-oriented strategy, but rather a regressive Pigouvian tax which affects overall market outcomes through social costs rather than pure private costs. Governments can then use carbon pricing as a means of regular interference with the ebbs and flows of the free market. It’s nothing more than a subtle shift of taxes from one source to the other.

When have you ever heard, read or experienced a new tax proposal or pricing method that can be, to use Trudeau’s description, “cheap and effective?” Never, because they don’t exist! Additional tax policies like a global price on carbon can only truly benefit one entity, the state. Individuals and businesses face the prospect of steady increases in everything from the gas pumps to income tax rates.

Most world leaders recognize the folly of Trudeau’s position on carbon pricing. U.S. President Joe Biden certainly hasn’t suggested it as part of his plan at COP26. The left-leaning Democrat has expressed an interest in tackling climate change, but he’s not foolish enough to back a new carbon tax scheme that would hurt Americans in their wallets. It would be political suicide for his party and movement, and cause permanent economic damage to his country.

That’s why the international community pays very little attention to Trudeau. In six short years, they’ve learned he has nothing to offer his own country and the world. He may want to be an environmental saviour at COP26, but they realize he’s nothing more than comic relief. Unfortunately, Canadians won’t be able to get him off the domestic and international stage for a while longer.

Michael Taube, a long-time newspaper columnist and political commentator, was a speechwriter for former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper.

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With a major cabinet shuffle announced, pundits have had a field day analyzing the tea leaves of its significance.

Despite all the so-called analysis, there remained a limited insight about the road map to achieve the government’s intentions.

Were the appointments a sign of Trudeau’s legacy efforts to boost the fortunes of women as future potential Liberal leaders? Will carefully crafted and balanced Cabinet teams advance the goal posts on climate change, indigenous affairs and infrastructure? Will the creation of standalone ministries dealing with housing and mental health give those portfolios the attention they richly deserve?

Despite continuity in key economic roles, business and labour interest groups alike are seeking clarity to address skilled labour shortages, global supply chain challenges, employment insurance system failings and to deliver an equitable recovery for women in the workforce.

Beyond rehashing personal anecdotes and scoring political points, have the pundits really been concentrating on the right metrics to make a sound policy assessment of the government’s future direction?

The 2021 election campaign sorely lacked a serious public policy focus, flitting instead from one to another transactional promise: the competing Covid related leadership agendas drove most of the campaign debate and ‘horse-race’ coverage.

Within the next month, several crucial public policy documents will be released. Those analysts willing to hold their fire about future policy direction until then will have a veritable banquet of information to feast upon.

Throne Speeches are notorious for their vague language and lack of quantifiable outcomes. They do however send an important signal to the public service about the government’s priorities and where to marshal their resources.

But it will be a longer wait for budgets and economic statements including estimates to spell out in detail the likely availability of financial resources and allocations to specific project priorities.

Even before those documents are produced, there is a an important transitional process step that can provide clarity about the Liberal government’s intentions and priorities. In line with ongoing parliamentary practice, individual mandate letters will be sent by the Prime Minister to each of his ministers around the time of the Throne Speech.

While ministerial mandate letters have been a common practice in Canada and abroad for many years, their public release was accelerated by Ontario Premier Wynne’s publication of these letters in 2014 as part of her Open Government initiative.

“Ontarians want their government to work for them – and with them. Making the mandate letters public makes it easier for people to see what we are working on, and how we can work together to build better lives for everyone across Ontario.”

In 2015, Mr. Trudeau set an important federal precedent by publicly releasing the expectations he had for each Minister: “to outline responsibilities and considerations that I expect you to undertake on behalf of Canadians”. He has continued to issue such guidance following each Cabinet shuffle as well as the swearing -in of a new government.

Ministerial mandate letters follow a common format and serve as a roadmap to manage both public service and sectoral expectations.

After confirming and thanking the Minister for taking on their official duties, there is a short pro-forma summary of the challenges facing the country. A general restatement of the government’s priorities and the tone and style it wishes to follow in governing includes references to the communications themes that frame the government’s agenda.

The meat of the letters rests in the specifics related to each Ministers’s accountabilities. For example, after the start of the COVID -19 crisis, the Prime Minister spelt out additional accountabilities for Finance Minister Freeland in 2019.

“You will use whatever fiscal firepower is needed in the short term to support people and businesses during the pandemic, and will keep supporting the economy with emergency measures until the economy improves. Doing so, you will avoid creating new permanent spending.” (my bolding)

Trudeau’s letter also flags certain sectors for attention:

“Tailor support for those sectors hit hardest, such as travel and tourism, hospitality and cultural industries like the performing arts… consider options for further, targeted measures for personal support workers as they continue to provide essential services in our communities.”

It also gives clear direction about new revenue sources:

“Identify additional ways to tax extreme wealth inequality, including by finalizing amendments to the Income Tax Act to limit the stock option deduction for high-income individuals at large, established firms… Continue work with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with the support of the Minister of Canadian Heritage, to ensure that multinational technology giants pay appropriate corporate tax on the revenue that they generate within Canada. If no consensus can be reached among OECD members, you will ensure that a made-in-Canada approach is applied no later than 2022. You will also work to ensure that international digital corporations whose products are consumed in Canada collect and remit the same level of sales tax as Canadian digital corporations.”

The letter also reinforces existing government policy approaches: “… Continue putting a price on pollution while putting that money back in the pockets of Canadians. As part of Canada’s climate plan, move forward with tax policies that support clean energy transition, advancing policy work on border carbon adjustments and ensuring carbon pollution pricing rebate payments move from being distributed on an annual basis to a quarterly basis, starting as early as 2022. … As part of Canada’s climate plan and to create jobs and make Canada a world leader in clean technology, cut tax rates by 50 per cent for companies that develop and manufacture zero-emission technology including a listing of eligible sectors.”

For those wishing to understand and benchmark the government’s progress in meeting its accountabilities, the ministerial mandate letters remain an excellent place to start.

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Oh, here’s a surprise. Justin Trudeau really is committed to climate alarmism and the logical policy response of shutting down our energy sector and with it our economy. He doesn’t know the latter will happen. And nor does his new Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault. Which is precisely why it very well might.

The appointment of Guilbeault is odd for several reasons. A particularly notable one being that someone famous for breaking the law to circumvent the policy process should be made a senior policymaker in precisely that same area. Perhaps it’s because it’s 2021.

It is perhaps less surprising that someone who was a walking PR disaster as Heritage Minister should receive what is, in TrudeauWorld, a promotion. But if causing needless controversy through arrogant ineptitude disqualified you from this cabinet it would have a rather different makeup. Harjit Sajjan, for instance, would have been yeeted straight to the back bench not entrusted with “International Development”.

It is also unsurprising that we would have a ministry of Environment and Climate Change. We have much stranger ministries, like “Housing and Diversity and Inclusion”. And it is certainly no surprise that the Prime Minister wants Canada to stop emitting greenhouse gases so he appointed an environment minister committed to shutting down Canada’s fossil fuel industry. What is surprising is the number of people who have long believed that you could be committed to ceasing to emit greenhouse gasses and preserving that industry.

It is odd to have to try to convince adults that just because they do not like a thing does not mean it cannot be happening. It doesn’t matter how convinced you are that getting rid of the Canadian petroleum industry would be a disaster economically, politically, socially, intellectually or some ghastly combination of them all. It only matters whether people in a position to make it happen think it should and are determined to try. Which they rather obviously are.

A lot of people are blasé because they’re convinced that really bad policy is self-correcting in a democracy. Even if the politicians and bureaucrats in power are persuaded, let us say, that there is such a thing as “stimulative” fiscal or monetary policy, and the more the better, they sooner or later discover that spending money you don’t have and then printing it to cover the gap isn’t good. Or at any rate the public does, and the worse the policy, the sooner the feedback arrives, in the form of pressure that makes even stubborn politicians act as if they’d changed their minds, or votes them out.

This argument is not fatuous. Indeed it’s fundamental to democracy, to the effort to get good government through regular voting. The two are not synonymous, though it’s easy to confuse them because when people cannot vote politicians in and, crucially, out you invariably get government that is awful or worse. And when they can, you usually get government that is better than awful.

In Canada, as elsewhere, we can also point to solid evidence that this abstract argument has merit. In the early 1970s governments went nuts on deficits and inflation. But by the late 1970s, faced with public anger and scorn, they were already claiming they would fix the problem. And they did fix inflation, by the mid-1980s, and debts and deficits a decade later.

Yes, they went off the rails again. Bad policy like ignorance is a renewable resource. But again we think the electorate will again force them to smarten up as inflation gets worse and insolvency looms. And the sooner the better, I say.

By the same token, it has long been widely believed, including by those in business, that sufficiently awful tax or regulatory policy is self-correcting. It drives out investment followed closely by investors, unemployment rises, tax revenues plummet and even dense politicians smarten up. And the 1980s were encouraging that way too.

Unfortunately it can be argued that times are changing in perilous ways. The general breakdown of standards we see in the tolerance of inept or even scofflaw ministers, possibly even prime ministers, makes all the machinery of government work less smoothly. And the catastrophe that would result from shutting down our only reliable source of energy, by people whose negligible total lifetime practical experience creating wealth has engendered sublime confidence that their arm-waving about new and better forms of energy is as good as actually creating it, could happen fast enough and go far enough that it will be really hard to recover from.
Of course there are alternatives. Including starting to push back now, hard and persistently though legally. Which requires one vital preliminary step.

We must acknowledge that what seems to be happening right under our noses is precisely what is happening right under our noses.

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My read on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet can best be summarized as half-and-half.

The first half of the equation – a sterling front bench of capable, qualified women, backed up by close confidantes and activists in key roles.

Chrystia Freeland at Finance remains Minister of Domestic and Fiscal.

Anita Anand and Melanie Joly land the biggest promotions, running Defence and Foreign Affairs.

Trudeau’s groomsman and get-the-job-done quiet performer Marc Miller at Crown-Indigenous Reconciliation makes sense; he’s calmly distinguished himself in that role’s sister portfolio.

The activist Stephen Guibeault at Environment and Climate Change signals Trudeau wants to, no ironic pun intended, step on the gas on that all-important file, with Guibeault backed up by Jonathan Wilkinson, sort of the pragmatist foil to the activist, at Natural Resources.

Through in the uber-competent Jean-Yves Duclos at Health and Dominic LeBlanc as guy in charge of getting the provinces and municipalities to build things – with Ahmad Hussein and Karina Gould taking housing and child care as back up – and that isn’t a bad front bench at all.

The other half, well, here things get a bit more curious with the junior ministers – some of whom were recently senior ministers, demoted almost out of the cabinet but not quite. One wonders why the PM chose to drop his astronaut foreign minister, but kept some others he was demoting to the margins of cabinet; why not a full cull if he was demoting them anyway?

Indeed, and at the risk of being indelicate, I had thought there might be a blatant eye towards succession planning. Team Trudeau has always favoured a sort of Gen X/elder Millennial vibe, so there are at least three survivors in this cabinet I expected might have been put out to pasture in favour of “fresh blood”, if for no other reason than to renew the cabinet with younger faces, an eye to the future of the party, and to keep the backbench happy. I suppose there was some of that; but the fact there was some of that makes it all the stranger when there wasn’t.

More broadly, the more junior ministers are curious. Many share their regional economic development office – not a bad idea per se, to make economic development more locally focused, but still a bit strange when the senior minister in the province might be the one inclined to make the big economic announcements in the first place – case most in point being having a Quebec lieutenant in charge of Heritage, but a Quebec minister responsible for economic development who’s main portfolio is Sport. Or a lonely Alberta minister tasked with economic development and specifically also for… tourism? The pattern breaks when Ontario gets a standalone economic development minister, and rural Canada gets a Minister for Rural Economic Development.

These aren’t criticisms so much as puzzling things out.

So, what does it all mean?

Some commentators have remarked that it shows Team Trudeau’s preference to dance with the ones that brung em; close friends and borderline clique.

I preferred Aaron Wherry’s notion that the cabinet is instead a team of teams: there’s the global affairs gang, the infrastructure crew, the climate change duo, the finance sisterhood, the health squad. It’s a cabinet of not only regional and gender balancing, but also of ministers teaming up to tackle intra-related aspects of cabinet. That is intriguing.

The next most intriguing thing? Figuring out who was left out of cabinet, and how they divvy up the remaining spoils in parliamentary secretary roles and caucus leadership – there’s still plenty of room at the almost-top, or perhaps, if you will, the middle class of government, and indeed there’s still plenty of MPs working hard to join it.

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