Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks following a swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, on May 13.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Ladies and gentlemen, we have been had.
Cast your mind back two months, to March 14. On that day, just five days after he had won the Liberal leadership, Mark Carney was sworn in as Prime Minister, at the same time appointing a new cabinet. The air was thick with talk of “new realities” and “existential crises.”
In keeping with the tone of seriousness the Prime Minister was anxious to cultivate, the new cabinet was sharply reduced in size, from the 39 ministers it had averaged in Justin Trudeau’s last government to just 24 – the smallest it had been in decades.
For a moment, it was possible to imagine that the reduction in the number of cabinet ministers would mean a corresponding increase in the importance of cabinet, and of each minister within it. Canada’s bloated cabinets, more than twice as large as the OECD average, had become a standing international joke, a fantastic wedding cake of invented and overlapping offices with few real responsibilities, the whole so comically unwieldy that it was forbidden even to photograph it in session.
The new-look, slimmed-down cabinet – there had even been talk it might come in at fewer than 20 – was plainly intended to signal those days were over, that Cabinet government, to borrow a phrase, was back. Gone were the multiplicity of boutique portfolios with meaningless titles like “Middle Class Prosperity” or “Citizens’ Services.” In their place were something closer to the core responsibilities of government: still more than in most other OECD countries, but at least somewhere on the same planet.
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It even dared to depart, in whatever slight degree, from the absolute Liberal dogma of perfect gender parity – there were 13 men to 11 women – hinting that the new Prime Minister might be more concerned with finding the right people for the job, whatever their gender, rather than filling quotas.
That was the cabinet the Prime Minister took with him into the election. That was the cabinet, we were to understand, with which he would govern the country.
Well, here we are in May, the election safely past, and the Prime Minister has announced another, altogether different cabinet. Just days into government, the cabinet has already grown to near 30 members. Back are the comic-book portfolios – Minister of Artificial Intelligence! – to be discarded and replaced before long with newer, shinier labels.
Back, too, is the overlap and duplication. We have a Minister of One Canadian Economy and a Minister of Internal Trade; a Minister of International Trade and a Minister of Canada-U.S. Trade; a Minister of Indigenous Services and a Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations; a Minister of Defence and a Minister of Veterans’ Affairs; a Minister of Public Safety and a Minister of Emergency Management; and so on.
The pork-barrel portfolios are also back. As the economist William Watson has pointed out, while it is encouraging to have a minister given the job of making One Economy out of Canada’s constituent parts, 158 years after Confederation, it is somewhat at odds with the seven other ministers assigned the task of balkanizing it: steering subsidies to one part of the country or another, via the various “regional development” agencies.
And the quotas are back. Unveiled by a smirking Justin Trudeau a decade ago as if they were the vanguard of progressive change (“because it‘s 2015”), these have been adopted in few other countries: see, for example, the cabinets of France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland (which has more women than men), Australia (ditto), New Zealand or Japan.
On top of which there is the strange case of the ten additional “secretaries of state.” When first announced these were thought to be akin to “ministers of state,” familiar from recent governments, junior ministers, who were either not counted as members of Cabinet (under Stephen Harper) or were (under Justin Trudeau, after critics pointed out that the list of full ministers was not gender balanced).
But “secretary of state” is an even more junior rank – essentially a glorified parliamentary secretary – without a department, a budget or much in the way of staff. They are not part of cabinet, not even part of the broader “ministry” that includes junior ministers. Nevertheless, someone thought it desirable to mention them in the same breath as cabinet ministers. To bulk up the numbers.
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Because the numbers are what modern Canadian cabinets are all about. You can see it in the political and media reactions afterward. In other countries, a shuffle will be analyzed in terms of what shifts in government direction it might signal, or how the prime minister is balancing the differing wings of his party, or what changes in approach particular ministers will bring to their posts. Pundits will ask: Do they have the right sort of background and experience, the judgment, character, competence and so forth needed to do the job?
In Canada, these questions are almost never asked. Party ideologies are hazy enough, but individual MPs are not expected to have any, as such; their beliefs are assumed to be whatever the leader’s are. As for the experience, talents and character of the appointees: Who cares? That‘s not why they were chosen, and everybody knows it.
Instead, the postshuffle analysis, on this as on previous occasions, has been restricted to counting heads: How many are from which province or subregion or even city (“why no ministers from Kitchener-Waterloo?”), and how many are from which gender, race or other identity category, with percentages calculated to the second decimal point. It is a tacit admission that the individuals, like the jobs themselves, do not matter.
Cabinet posts in this country are not important jobs for skilled professionals, but trinkets and baubles to be handed out to important regional and demographic interests as rewards for supporting the governing party – as they are for MPs who show conspicuous loyalty to the leader. The point is not to fulfill some urgent public responsibility but to give their recipients something to do or, more accurately, something to be. Their job is not to govern the country, but to provide “representation.”
Perhaps you imagined that was the job of Parliament. But as Parliament long ago ceased to represent the country in any meaningful sense, so the job has fallen to cabinet – to “reflect the country back to itself.” Which is fair enough, since ministers are given so little else to do.
So as you watch those newly named ministers in their best suits at the swearing-in ceremony, families beaming with pride, bear in mind that it is all downhill from here. They do not, certainly, run the departments on whose letterhead their names appear: That was long ago devolved to the deputy ministers, or these days to the ministers’ chiefs of staff, who, like the ministers and like the deputy ministers, are all appointed by the prime minister, or by his staff, and report to them.
Neither are ministers ordinarily involved in developing policy for their departments. Most aren’t in the job long enough: The average minister nowadays lasts less than two years before being shuffled out, fired or reorganized. The new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anita Anand, is in her sixth ministerial post in six years; she is also the 13th minister of Foreign Affairs (by whatever title the position has been known) since 2000.
At best their job is to execute the list of tasks assigned them in the now fashionable “mandate letters” from the prime minister. And if any ministers are in the illusion that they have been given a free hand, they are periodically reminded that it is the prime minister who calls the shots, big footed on important policy announcements without being consulted or even warned. As Chrystia Freeland discovered in the matter of those multibillion-dollar “political gimmicks” Mr. Trudeau saddled her with. As perhaps François-Philippe Champagne is discovering in the matter of whether he should deliver a budget this year.
Neither do they have much role in deciding policy collectively. Certainly not at those ludicrous cabinet meetings, with 30-odd heads around the table and ministers, quite literally, put on timers (“you have 20 seconds”) before they speak. Cabinet committees? Maybe a couple: the new-old Priorities and Planning, or Operations and Parliamentary Affairs, or Treasury Board. But for the most part policy is planned, developed and implemented by the prime minister’s staff, with an assist from senior staff in the Privy Council Office and the relevant departments.
Perhaps a minister would like to offer input into this process. Good luck. Ministers in the Trudeau cabinet – including such heavyweights as Bill Morneau (Finance), Marc Garneau (Foreign Affairs) and Jody Wilson-Raybould (Justice) – have since told of how they were unable even to get a meeting with the prime minister. Perhaps Mr. Carney will be different. Perhaps, that is, ministers will have the privilege of serving the prime minister, rather than his staff.
Mostly a minister’s job, beyond serving as human bribes, is to advocate for – sell, in other words – policies they may have had no hand in devising, or may even oppose. Not for nothing are they often described, or graded, as “performers.” A very few earn enough trust from the prime minister to be given more important assignments; some even become famous. The rest – the vast majority of the more than 1,000 ministers to have served in the federal cabinet over the years – come and go without a trace. Their usefulness to the prime minister ceased with their appointment.
Occasionally it will be said, after a minister has been dismissed, that he or she was not up to the job. This seems unfair. Being up to the job was not one of the job requirements.