Mark Carney’s cabinet change is a mirage

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From a distance, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new cabinet looks like change.

It’s structured differently; there are 28 full ministers and 10 secretaries of state, the latter of whom will have smaller departments, smaller salaries and will only occasionally sit at the cabinet table.

There are new faces; more than half of the people comprising this cabinet have never been ministers in the federal government.

And the roles have been shaken up; few have stayed in their previous files, with the exception of François-Philippe Champagne, Chrystia Freeland and Dominic LeBlanc, who remain Finance Minister, Transport and Internal Trade Minister, and Privy Council President and Minister of International Trade, respectively.

So yes, this looks like change: new structure, new faces, new jobs. Change – exactly what Canadians asked for, right?

But when you get a little closer and start looking at who remains in cabinet, and which roles they have been assigned, this starts to look an awful lot like a Trudeau cabinet – just with a different prime minister.

It’s clear now that the 23-minister cabinet that Mr. Carney unveiled in March shortly after he won the Liberal leadership and became Prime Minister was just for show. This new cabinet is effectively one of 39 people including Mr. Carney, which is around the same size of the cabinet under Justin Trudeau in February.

But more saliently: nearly all the people chairing the most prominent files are of the old Trudeau guard. It was literally on display during the swearing-in ceremony, where the front row of seats was being warmed by a team that has sat there for the better part of a decade: there was Mr. LeBlanc, then Mélanie Joly, Mr. Champagne, Anita Anand, Patty Hajdu, Steven Guilbeault, Sean Fraser, and finally, Chrystia Freeland. The new faces were mostly in the back, which is to be expected of those chairing junior portfolios.

Mr. Fraser was the minister of immigration between 2021 and 2023, during which time the Trudeau government increased immigration to unsustainable levels, and then became the minister of housing, where he delivered zero measurable results. (He also said that he would be leaving politics to spend more time with his family back when the Liberals were 25 points behind in the polls, only to change his mind when Mr. Carney closed the gap.) Mr. Fraser has now been appointed Attorney-General.

Most Canadians would recognize Ms. Hajdu as the minister during the pandemic who defended China’s early reports on COVID-19 data and scolded journalists for expressing skepticism, as well as for asking about border controls. She is now the Minister of Jobs and Families.

Mr. Guilbeault was an anti-pipeline activist before entering politics, and as Mr. Trudeau’s minister of environment he was an enthusiastic supporter of the carbon tax. His name is thus radioactive in Western Canada. Despite that, and despite Canada’s brewing unity crisis, Mr. Carney has named him Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.

Ms. Freeland blew up Canada’s books and oversaw our ever-worsening productivity crisis. Ms. Joly’s tenure at Foreign Affairs was ineffective at best, and embarrassing at worst. Yet they both have, again, been assigned senior portfolios.

There are only a few once-prominent cabinet ministers who have been left off the front bench by Mr. Carney, namely Karina Gould, Ahmed Hussen and Bill Blair. Most other former cabinet ministers opted not to run again, thus creating cabinet vacancies for Mr. Carney to fill with fresh faces. But those fresh faces are largely on the B Team; the A Team has almost all of the same players, with just a couple of new additions. And some of those new additions are, in a sense, old hats; Gregor Robertson spent 10 years as the Mayor of Vancouver, which became one of the most unaffordable housing markets in the world under his tenure. Mr. Carney has appointed him to oversee housing on the federal level.

It makes sense that a prime minister who wants to hit the ground running on a number of files would opt for top ministers who are familiar with government, familiar with the role of cabinet, and who have teams assembled and ready to get the job done. But those ministers also come with years’ worth of baggage, and their appointments will necessarily breed skepticism about whether this government will, in fact, deliver the radical change that Mr. Carney promised. (Indeed, having Ms. Joly and Ms. Anand swap jobs doesn’t represent a transformational shift in governance.)

Mr. Carney’s first major act as Prime Minister offers a mirage of change, but upon closer inspection, it isn’t all that different from what Canada had before. Some ministers don’t even need to switch offices on Parliament Hill.