Ivison: Carney's cabinet has too many 'downtown Toronto, urban progressives'
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In this week's show, John Ivison is joined by regular guests Eugene Lang and Ian Brodie to take a deep dive into Mark Carney's post-election cabinet shuffle.
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Brodie, a former chief of staff to prime minister Stephen Harper, said one concern he has is the predominance of 'downtown Toronto, urban progressives' in the new cabinet.
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'It's an almost obsessively Toronto-focused cabinet,' he said, noting that excluding the one Liberal elected in Calgary (Corey Hogan) was a 'missed opportunity'.
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Brodie said that new natural resources minister Tim Hodgson is an improvement on his predecessor (Jonathan Wilkinson).
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'But the problem is not that the Natural Resources department has been standing in the way of natural resource development in this country; the problem has been the environmental regulations that come out of the Environment Ministry. The Environment Ministry is huge now and much larger than it was 10 years ago. It has many more levers over the Canadian economy and the people in the Environment Department seem to be quite prepared to use all of them. The fact is that we have basically, to be blunt, the kind of a standard issue, downtown Toronto, social justice activist, kind of do-gooder, NGO type person as minister (Julie Dabrusin).
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'There is a long history of 'we have to keep oil and gas in the ground and keep Alberta and Saskatchewan from growing if we're going to save the planet'. If that's the approach of the government, then we're in for a very difficult couple of years.'
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Lang, a former chief of staff to two Liberal defence ministers, said his first impression is that there are far too many Trudeau-era ministers in this cabinet.
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'I count 11 out of 28 – about 40 per cent of this cabinet are former Trudeau-era ministers. There is no reason for that. Mr. Carney owes none of these people anything. And he had an opportunity here to really show change in this cabinet, and he chose not to,' he said. 'It's more than about optics. It's about competence. The last Trudeau government's great failing was its relative lack of competence in governing. I don't know how you improve the competence in your governing when 40 per cent of your ministers are from a government that was less than competent.'
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Brodie said that, while the cabinet does look like a rearrangement of the chairs of people Carney inherited, there is 'deep experience' on the front bench with ministers like Dominic LeBlanc on the Canada-U.S. trade and security file.
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