Prime Minister Mark Carney has said he will have equal number of men and women in his new cabinet.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Prime Minister Mark Carney will put his personal stamp on the federal government Tuesday with the unveiling of his new cabinet team at Rideau Hall.
Governor-General Mary Simon’s office confirmed the timing in an announcement Friday.
The revamped cabinet follows a federal election campaign in which the Liberal Party fell just a few seats short of forming a majority government.
Mr. Carney placed himself at the centre of the party’s campaign, urging Canadians to select him as the person who would do the best job in representing Canada in difficult trade discussions with U.S. President Donald Trump.
He put that pledge to the test on Tuesday this week with a visit to the White House. The meeting showed an improved tone between Mr. Trump and Canada but did not produce any clear American pledges to drop the tariffs imposed this year on a range of Canadian goods.
Mr. Carney has promised to lead a government that is more focused on economic matters than his predecessor, Justin Trudeau.
On March. 14, after winning the Liberal leadership, Mr. Carney named a 23-member cabinet in addition to himself. That was smaller than Mr. Trudeau’s cabinet, which reached a 40-member peak last year.
Mr. Carney has said he will have an equal number of men and women in his postelection cabinet.
He has also said that reducing internal government spending will be a priority, which suggests that he will keep the size of cabinet relatively small, even if it does grow from its current size.
Some of the new faces added to the Liberal caucus are viewed as having been recruited to run by Mr. Carney and are therefore considered to be highly likely to enter the new cabinet.
They include former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson and Tim Hodgson, who was an adviser to Mr. Carney at the Bank of Canada, formerly led Goldman Sachs’s Canadian operations and was the Hydro One board chair until he took a leave of absence to run in Markham-Thornhill.
Adding new faces while keeping the overall size small will require demoting some current members. Mr. Carney already did that before the election with his first cabinet shuffle.
The House of Commons is scheduled to resume sitting the week of May 26 for a four-week period.
Mr. Carney has promised to have “free trade by Canada Day” by removing all federal barriers to interprovincial trade and is urging the provinces to take similar action.
His campaign also promised a broad-based income-tax cut and an urgent focus on nation-building projects that would help diversify the Canadian economy so that it is less dependent on the United States.
Jason Easton, who was a strategic adviser to Mr. Trudeau in the Prime Minister’s Office until earlier this year, said the new Carney cabinet and related senior staff will have to move quickly on major files.
“He is approaching this just like one would in the private sector. He wants to hit the ground running. People are going to have to work really hard and walk and chew gum at the same time, so I expect a very busy pace,” he said in an interview.