Cabinet will show if election changed PM

Justin Trudeau’s most significant cabinet shuffles can be summed up in three names: Donald Trump, Doug Ford and Scott Brison.

Those are the three people who have prodded Trudeau into making the biggest changes in his ministerial lineup over the years: Trump and Ford with their election victories in 2016 and 2018, and Brison when he stepped down from his cabinet post in early 2019.

Two of the three worked out pretty well. The Brison shuffle, however, lit the fuse for future explosions — the departures within weeks of ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott, as well as the resignations of Trudeau’s principal adviser Gerald Butts and the top public servant, Michael Wernick.

That track record indicates an important way to gauge the potential for success of whatever cabinet lineup Trudeau unveils at Rideau Hall on Tuesday. This prime minister does his best work, shuffle-wise, when he is adjusting to big events outside his government’s control. Results are more mixed, let’s say, when he is trying to realign forces within it.

So it’s worth watching where Trudeau has fixed his sights with his new, post-election team of ministers — outward or inward.

Will it be a cabinet designed to tackle big things like climate change, Indigenous reconciliation and the shape of the post-pandemic future? Or will it be mainly a human-resources exercise of promotions, demotions and lateral moves?

Much of the speculation has been focused on the latter: who Trudeau intends to put into problem departments such as defence, and which of the current ministers and MPs are due for a step up or a step out.

Trudeau has given few signs, either during the election campaign or afterward, that he is making any big shifts in business as usual. Chrystia Freeland is already reinstalled as the deputy prime minister and finance minister. The Liberal campaign platform was little more than an elaboration on the previous budget and speech from the throne.

The prime minister’s meetings this week with opposition leaders had a rote feel to them too; terse, boilerplate news releases issued afterward to describe what he said to the other leaders and nothing about what the meetings produced. The statements, much like the election result itself, further fed the idea that Canadians are going to be getting a déjà vu Parliament — as possibly a déjà vu cabinet, too.

Elizabeth May was one of those leaders who met Trudeau this week by virtue of her status as the Green party’s leader in the Commons. Of all the opposition leaders in the House, she knows Trudeau the best — they sat beside each other in the back rows when the Liberals languished as the third party in the chamber.

With that in mind, I asked May this week whether she got the impression during her half-hour conversation with him that Trudeau had been changed by the election, or whether she expected him to govern differently in this third term.

“No,” she said succinctly, “I did not.”

May is among a number of opposition MPs invited along as part of the Canadian delegation when Trudeau heads to Glasgow next week for the big United Nations meeting on climate change. She is not sure how optimistic to be about what Trudeau intends to do there.

His news releases after the meetings this week listed climate change as one of the issues discussed, but he didn’t give May any hints of big things to come — including a possible change of ministers.

Jonathan Wilkinson, the current environment minister, has generally drawn good reviews for the tone he’s struck since assuming the job after the 2019 election. But May and others believe that Trudeau could send a powerful signal by putting Steven Guilbeault on the job. Guilbeault was a prominent environmental activist before he was lured into the Liberal fold and could well be a part of the greening of cabinet if Trudeau is doing an outward-looking shuffle.

In fact, any big moves on environment, health, foreign affairs and intergovernmental relations would demonstrate that Trudeau is trying to adjust his cabinet as he did after the Trump and Ford victories — to react to events not totally within his government’s control.

Other changes in the cabinet, at defence or to fill vacancies left by defeated ministers (status of women, fisheries and seniors) are more motivated by internal problems within the Trudeau government — as the Brison shuffle was in 2019.

Trudeau has used cabinet shuffles throughout his time in office to signal where he’s facing the biggest tests. On Tuesday, he’ll reveal whether the election has broadened or narrowed his horizons — or whether it hasn’t changed him much at all.