Carney's Cabinet | A Swing...and a Miss

Post 87 | Analyzing the disappointing start

This new government has a massive task ahead to demonstrate balance in multiple policy areas where I disagree and even more so in overcoming intense skepticism in their ability to simply execute on fundamentals. I hope they will surprise to the upside, but this week was not a good start.

I awaited Tuesday’s Cabinet announcement with modest hope to write a positive piece. But, dammit Mark, you’re not making this easy.

Two weeks ago in Can Carney Find Pragmatism? I outlined the importance of his Cabinet’s structure, leadership choices and mandates – to strike a solid tone and signal back-to-basics priorities.

I wanted to like it.

I don’t.

Let’s analyze five areas and give them each a Pragmatic Canadian (PC) score.

Gender Un-Parity

Start with the gender parity thing - by the numbers.

Prior to the election the Liberal website declared Carney’s intention for gender parity in his Cabinet. Yes - that was before they knew what ratio of women would be elected and while they fielded a slate of only 35% women (down from 43% in 2021).

“A Liberal Cabinet will have an equal number of women and men. Our country is enriched, and our government is more effective, when decision-makers at the leadership level accurately represent Canada’s diversity. We will also adopt a federal government-wide open and merit-based appointments process, which will ensure gender parity and that more Indigenous Peoples and minority groups are reflected in positions of leadership.”

How can you claim “merit-based” then force gender parity in Cabinet as first principle? And this after your own party self-selected against parity and 19.5 million Canadians collectively selected against parity? It defies reason and is blatantly discriminatory.

Here is the gender split of MPs post-election.

Table 1: Source | Pragmatic Canadian

Yet we were presented a Cabinet of 13 men (plus Carney) and 14 women, plus 10 Secretaries of State split as 6 men and 4 women and told this is democratically representative. However,

• If apportioned by gender of elected Liberal MPs we should have 17 men and 11 women

• If apportioned by gender of elected total MPs we would have 19 men and 9 women

Cutting directly against this, Carney forced a synthetic number of women into Cabinet – after his own party ran only 35% female candidates, resulting in only 39% of elected Liberals being women and 30% when measured against total elected MP ranks.

I’ve previously written on the scourge of forced equity, largely on Trudeau’s decade of DEI social reconstruction. It extends to any equity quotas by gender, ethnicity, skin colour or other innate attributes – rather than applying merit as first order. Little dissuades me of this damaging and misguided equity of outcome approach - as opposed to promoting policies driving equality of opportunity while relentlessly upholding meritocracy.

The reality of pre-declaring the post-election gender split of our country’s top leaders before votes were even cast is a continuation of Trudeauian equity manipulation. All that’s missing is a breathy “because it’s 2025” reasoning.

In this first big move Carney has enforced his preferred societal outcome, rather than respecting the outcome voted on by the electorate or even the slate of candidates his own party put forward.

PC Score = F

Small & Focused…Not

Carney promised a “small and focused” Cabinet. We didn’t get that.

In Put Cabinet on a Diet, I outlined an efficient 22-ministry structure for any serious new government (See Appendix at end of article).

Yet notwithstanding the ballyhooed separation of his Cabinet into two tiers, Carney still appointed a bloated 38 - he just sneakily packaged it.

In addition to the 28 core ministries we now add 10 Secretaries of State (not seen since Mulroney era) – effectively junior ministers who don’t own a full department, won’t attend every Cabinet meeting and have less authority and cache. But make no mistake we still nominally have 38 departments directly reporting to Carney - each requiring PMO, PCO and broader bureaucratic support. If the hope is to reduce our bureaucracy and streamline decision making, this remains unwieldy and starts off on the back foot.

Measured against other G7 countries Canada’s 38 ministries are excessive in absolute numbers and per capita representation (41 million pop). Are we really so different to need such a comparatively obese Cabinet?

• United States: 15 Executive Departments for 335 million

• United Kingdom: ~20 Ministries for 67 million

• Germany: ~16 Ministries for 83 million

• France: ~17 Ministries for 68 million

• Italy: ~16 core Ministries (plus 9 without portfolio) for 59 million

• Japan: ~14 core Ministries for 124 million

PC Score = C

Regional Distribution

Effective regional representation is tough to get right but the numbers suggest Carney did a decent job with a notable exception.

Cabinet’s provincial representation is close when aligned either to provincial representation of elected MPs or by provincial population, per Table 2.

The outlier is Alberta who are significantly under-represented in Cabinet when measured by population, which would otherwise grant them 5 Cabinet members (versus 1). But because only two Liberal MPs were elected in that province there’s not much Carney can do beyond appointing both to posts.

Table 2: Source | Pragmatic Canadian

PC Score = B+

Ministry Misses and Miscues

Ministries should deal with fundamental responsibilities of a federal government, but Canada has instead developed a bloated approach. Carney’s Cabinet continues the trend. My own list of 22 core ministries (see Appendix) covers the basics of governing a country while avoiding overlaps and eliminating identity-based and regional departments.

But that is far from what we got this week.

Here are some of my top structural concerns.

• Small Business | Canada’s 1.2 million Small Medium Enterprises (SME) represent nearly 1/3 of our Gross Domestic Product and are the lifeblood of our economy, innovation, employment and entrepreneurship. As they go, so goes our economy - and the past years have not been kind to them. Now this critical file has been demoted to a junior ministry under a Secretary of State. Worse however is that it’s ridiculously smushed into a “Small business and tourism” portfolio (what on earth is the logic of packaging it with tourism?), and it doesn’t even get its own Secretary of State but rather a part time role from someone named Rechie Valdez who will also run the Ministry of Women and Gender Equality as her primary job. This is a huge miss for Carney.

• Labour | Similar to small business, this was demoted to a junior ministry – another unsettling sign that Carney lacks understanding and appreciation for the role of small business and labour in Canada – not only as core economic contributors but as predicates for a strong society. Labour remains the backbone of our country whether corporate suit guys like Carney realize it or not. This is something Poilievre understands well and tapped into. Demoting labour is another punch in the nose to the millions of working class - a term Liberals regularly use but don’t understand.

• Why? | Among the list of ministries that make me either scratch or shake my head are Women and Gender Equality, Official Languages, Nature, and Combatting Crime. I could dig into each but suffice to say they have potential to be divisive, unnecessary and/or duplicative.

• Economic Development Agencies | Doling out $1.5 Billion annually and eating up nearly 2000 bureaucratic staff we have again institutionalized 7 regional agencies (Pacific, Prairies, Northern, Northern Ontario, Southern Ontario, Quebec, Atlantic). I have little hope these will be anything but pork barreling departments stuffing money into regional interests – regional money transfers by a different name. Also worth noting is that each of the agencies is overseen by a minister with an already full portfolio, threatening dilution from their primary duties and tugging at the regional impartiality they should bring to their primary Cabinet role.

• Indigenous | I’ve covered this fraught topic in prior articles. Carney’s short-lived temporary Cabinet offered hope we’d return to a single ministry on this file as it was prior to Trudeau. Instead we have reverted to two full ministries - Crown Indigenous Relations plus Indigenous Services. Reality is that what happens in these portfolios has massive implications on Canada’s finances, strengthens the powerful veto by a small minority over Canada’s infrastructure and energy growth, and has done little to improve the health, wellness and sustainability of Canadian indigenous peoples - all while we’ve seen major upticks in related social discord, divisiveness and no path from the morass.

• Rural Development | This new junior ministry is interesting in concept though its mandate and scope remains to be seen.

• Defence Procurement | This is a potentially valuable new junior ministry that may signal a focus on renewing our military but I’ll await mandate, budget and watch with interest where it leads.

• Emergency Management & Community Resilience | While guessing at the mandate of this new ministry, I see value in the emergency management component particularly if it includes a long overdue Covid post-mortem. However, why is this department not simply part of the Ministry of Public Safety? And as for the community resilience piece, I have no clue what it means and suspect its will be another flabby portfolio with few objective success metrics.

PC Score = C+

The Ministers

Carney proudly noted a Cabinet split of half veterans and half newbies and I won’t fault him for the approach as there is no perfect balance to strike. We’ll await how each performs including some of the unspectacular Trudeau retreads. Who knows - perhaps they’ll suddenly become competent. Meanwhile I note the following appointments from good to awful.

• Positive Choices | Some potential bright spots are Anita Anand at Foreign Affairs – with hopes her intelligence and talents are better directed than under Trudeau, notwithstanding her misstep already this week on Israel/Hamas. Another is Tim Hodgson at Energy and Natural Resources – a potentially solid upgrade from Jonathan Wilkinson, though will be hamstrung by Carney’s directives.

• Questionable Choice | A very questionable choice was ex-CBC journalist turned podcaster Evan Solomon to head the new Ministry for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. Given the critical influence of AI and digital technology, his education (English and Religious Studies) and work experience are an unlikely match for this technically fraught and complicated file. In addition, he also holds a dual portfolio for one of my much-disliked Economic Development Agencies, defocusing from what should be a full time role.

• Fraught Choice | Sean Fraser failed brutally as Minister of Immigration and then subsequently as Minister of Housing, neither which I need highlight here as we all watched the carnage unfold. Carney lured him back to run in Nova Scotia after Fraser swore off politics only a few months earlier citing the usual need for family time. He publicly announced that Carney promised a better work-life balance if successfully re-elected so came bounding back, apparently under those auspices. Sean now finds himself in Canada’s most influential dual role – as Justice Minister and Attorney General. The former is responsible for appointing all judges in Canada and the latter as Canada’s top federal lawyer. This, for a guy who spent only three years in his profession as an Associate lawyer! Did we not have another more qualified lawyer among 170 elected MPs? Oh, and Fraser is also responsible for the Atlantic Economic Development Agency. Are we sure work-life balance is what brought him back?

• Awful Choice | My blood pressure spiked when I saw Steven Guilbeault preening in the front row of the installment ceremony, as Minister for Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages. I completely oppose a department for official languages but that’s actually my smallest nit here. Steven Guilbeault was a sharp stick in Canada’s eye for 3+ years as Minister of Environment & Climate Change – one of the biggest impediments to our fossil fuels and mining development, lead architect of the Impact Assessment Act (IAA) throttling energy development, and a perpetual thorn in our ass with his environmental crusading. He now reprises his role at the former Department of Heritage. And while few are aware, this ministry is powerfully influential as it shapes the history we tell, our museums, our arts funding, our cultural policies - plus our online policies, digital communications, the CBC and much more. This department has been at the forefront of Canada’s cultural destruction the past ten years with Guilbeault leading it for two of those and now reinstalled - yet another Quebecker at the helm and one of the worst in the bunch. To read more about it see Eliminate or Rethink the Department of Canadian Heritage.

  Simply put, this choice from Carney was brutal – symbolically and practically. And Guilbeault was already true to form this week, yapping to the media about the lack of need for more pipelines in Canada – even though his new mandate is far away from that portfolio.

PC Score = C-

OVERALL PC Score = C

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We need our government to succeed with the right structure, policies and people in place - and this first big litmus test leaves me already concerned.

As for other matters in early going…

• This week gave us info we didn’t hear from Carney on the campaign trail, of the unlikelihood we’ll get a new budget this year - likely just a Fall Update. I see we’re starting the shell games already.

• Meanwhile a whopping $73.4 billion of spending approvals have been released by Carney through a limited use special warrant mechanism (think US-style Executive Order “national emergency” authority) that sidesteps parliamentary oversight. This while Parliament has been suspended for five months and after Trudeau already spent tens of billions without debate. Perhaps we accidentally elected a King and not a Prime Minister, just like the US seems to have done. Who needs pesky democratic oversight, right?

• Carney is quickly backtracking on oil & gas with Quebec-speak about any new pipeline needing national “consensus”. Likely he’ll drag feet for a while until “elbows up” fades and takes along with it the anti-US fervour that finally saw the potential of building out our oil & gas resources.

I’m already experiencing discomforting deja vu.

Stay tuned and stay Pragmatic.

Appendix

My list of 22 ministries represents Cabinet as I would organize it - clearly named and absent identity-based departments and regional carve outs.

• Finance: Budget, accounting. Coordinate with Revenue

• Revenue: CRA, tax collection and policy

• Defence & Border Security: Military, CBSA and Coast Guard

• Immigration & Citizenship: Per current IRCC, Coordinate with Border Security

• Energy: Oil, gas, minerals and alternative. Coordinate with infrastructure

• Infrastructure & Housing: Central dept for all infrastructure development

• Transportation: Manage ports, air, rail, roads. Coordinate with Infrastructure

• Agriculture & Fisheries: Combined

• Science & Technology: Coordinate with International Trade

• Communications: Media, telco mgmt. and regs, CBC. Coordinate with Culture

• Commerce: Enablement and regs for industry and small business. Coordinate with International Trade

• International Trade: Focus on trade diversification

• International Relations: aka Foreign Affairs

• Justice: Includes Attorney General

• Health: Canada Health Act, mental health, pharma

• Public Safety: Emergency preparedness, Corrections. Coordinate with Border Security

• Federal Social Services: Veterans, disabilities and seniors

• Indigenous Affairs: Re-combine with Crown-Indigenous Relations

• Environment: Water, forestry, Parks Canada

• Provincial Relations & Labour: Intergovernmental, OHSC, standards, union mgmt.

• Sport & Culture: Sports Canada, monuments, archives, museums, history

• Government Procurement: Procurement