To say first what can be said: Anita Anand and Jean-Yves Duclos will each bring a reputation for competence to portfolios – Treasury Board and Procurement – that could sorely use some.
Dominic LeBlanc is a safe pair of hands to throw Public Safety to. Marc Miller will bring passion and commitment as Minister of Immigration. The choice of rising star Sean Fraser for Housing indicates what a hot issue it has become.
As for the shuffle’s big losers, Marco Mendicino, Omar Alghabra and Ahmed Hussen probably got what was coming to them; Pablo Rodriguez, airlifted from Heritage to the relative safety of Transport, did not.
I do not know what David Lametti could have done to merit being turfed as Justice minister. (I have my beefs, same as you, but a firing offence? In this government?) The promotion of Bill Blair to Defence is no less of a headscratcher, if for opposite reasons.
But as for the rest, there really isn’t a great deal to say. What does the appointment of Mark Holland as Minister of Health mean to anyone but Mr. Holland? What changes in policy would Pascale St-Onge make at Heritage? How would Randy Boissonnault do things differently from his predecessor at Employment, or Kamal Khera at Diversity and Inclusion?
There is no point even trying to answer these questions, because for the most part it does not matter. It does not matter which minister occupies which portfolio. Outside of the top dozen or so, the portfolios themselves do not matter.
They are made-up jobs for make-work purposes. The point is not to fulfill some urgent public responsibility but to give their recipients something to do, for which the requisite qualification is neither their views nor their experience, but their membership in whatever region or demographic group the government is most anxious to court.
Cabinet posts in this country are not important jobs for skilled professionals, but trinkets and baubles, rewards for that most Canadian of political ambitions: supporting the winning side.
And everybody knows it. You can see it in how we cover a cabinet shuffle; our language gives us away. In other countries, a cabinet shuffle will be analyzed in terms of what shifts in direction it might signal, or how the prime minister is balancing the differing wings of the party, or what changes in approach particular ministers will bring to their posts.
But in Canada there is no reason to look at cabinet in this way. Party ideologies are hazy enough, but individual MPs are not expected to have any. Parties like the modern Liberal Party – or the modern Conservative Party – exist largely as extensions of the leader; their beliefs are whatever the leader believes.
Cabinets, and cabinet shuffles, are therefore viewed entirely through the lens of symbolism and messaging. Individual ministers, so far as they are discussed at all, are rated mostly for their ability to “sell” whatever policy or talking point is cooked up for them in the Prime Minister’s Office. Not for nothing are they referred to as “performers.”
One consequence of this is the enormous expansion in Cabinet in recent decades: at 39 full ministers, ours is easily the largest in the democratic world. Most comparable countries get by on barely half as many. But you do the math: the more ways you must be able to divide up the cabinet to accommodate the demands of different groups, the greater the overall number of ministers must be.
A cabinet of 39 is not a serious decision-making body. As cabinet gets larger, moreover, the ministers get smaller. In a cabinet of 12, every minister is a player. As you pass 20, they start to blur together. By the time you near 40, they look like ants.
To maintain a cabinet of such size and complexity, what is more, requires constant tinkering. Accordingly, ministers tend not to stay long in their posts: an average of about 30 months. As it generally takes several months at least to get up to speed in the job, that means even the most ambitious and independent-minded minister has about a year, two at most, to make their mark. Most leave without a trace.
Can this cabinet shuffle, the largest in recent memory, save this government – 10 points behind in the most recent Abacus poll, and more than 30 points behind on the economy (among those who rank the economy as one of their top issues)? References to deck chairs and the Titanic are probably premature: they haven’t hit the iceberg yet.
But to avoid that fate it’s not enough to reassign the deckhands. You have to actually change course. Or, possibly, change captains.
Andrew Coyne