Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Carney's new cabinet - comments from Brittlestar, Delacourt, Wark;,Urback, Ling, and Scrimshaw.

I gathered some of the comments on Prime Minister Carney's new cabinet.
Overall, the judgement seems to be "lets wait and see".

First, this is hilarious:
View on Threads
Susan Delacourt / Toronto Star
Mark Carney is trying to tell you something with his cabinet choices
Carney didn’t name Trudeau as the missing piece of this new federal cabinet, but his message — that this is the not-Trudeau cabinet — was crystal clear.
“Canadians elected us with a mandate for change. So there is a great deal of change in this cabinet, by necessity,” Carney said, boasting that he’d created a “perfect” mix by building a team that’s made up of half rookies, half experienced hands.
The other message that it sends is that this is a prime minister not afraid to cut people loose, even those Carney installed around him when he did his first shuffle after winning the leadership, such as Toronto’s Nate Erskine-Smith and Bill Blair, or Jonathan Wilkinson from British Columbia.
... One other big difference Carney seemed keen to establish is that his PMO won’t be holding hands of any ministers, new or old.
“This cabinet is smaller and more focused than those of previous governments,” Carney said. “It will operate with a commitment to true cabinet government, with everyone expected and empowered to show leadership, bring new ideas, to have a clear focus and to take decisive actions to accomplish their work in a return to more traditional cabinet.”...
Wesley Wark’s National Security and Intelligence Newsletter
Carney’s new Cabinet
Or, whose got the security partnership job?
...The question won’t get top billing in the general media commentary, but a key capacity the new Cabinet will have to demonstrate is its ability to help shape and deliver the PM’s promise to create a new security partnership, alongside a new economic relationship, with the United States. These will be huge and fraught challenges....
So the new security team will be Anand, Foreign Affairs; Anandasangaree, Public Safety; and McGuinty, Defence. Two veterans, one newbie. With Carney and Le Blanc over-seeing...
Some negative comments too:

Cue the usual suspects:
Robyn Urback / The Globe and Mail 
Mark Carney’s cabinet change is a mirage
...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 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....

Carney could have filled his cabinet with space aliens and conservatives would yell “same old! Same old!” #cdnpoli

— Laura Babcock 🇨🇦 (@laura-babcock.bsky.social) May 13, 2025 at 1:49 PM
But Justin Ling wasn't impressed either:
Justin Ling / Toronto Star
With his new cabinet, Mark Carney is going for the wrong kind of change ...Tuesday was a real opportunity to be bold: To reward skill and experience instead of fundraising prowess; to put less emphasis on politically-sensitive communities in order to keep effective operators in place; perhaps even to ditch gender parity — and appoint more women than men.
This cabinet may yet surprise us. But I’m already hearing from members of his caucus who feel that this team represents a bad omen for Carney’s tenure. Change was necessary, and there is some — but in refusing to think big, Carney has likely gone with change of the wrong kind...

Evan Scrimshaw / Scrimshaw Unscripted
NES, Cabinet, And Carney’s Betrayal Of The Left
On Carney’s Catastrophic Decision
...The implicit deal between Mark Carney and the Canadian left was simple. We understood that the moment called for a discipline and unity that was unprecedented in modern Canadian history, and that Carney, even though he wasn’t really the reincarnation of the PCs that some claim, would be a step right of Trudeau. The deal was that we would swallow that in exchange for not electing a Conservative government, and for not making trouble for the fact that we were necessary parts of the tent we’d get at least consideration moving forward.
The decision to keep Nate Erskine-Smith in Cabinet in March was a sign that the implicit deal was properly understood, that Carney would reach out to the left in important ways and that we could trust Carney. Now, with Nate’s dropping, we can’t trust Carney. This decision has broken an already fragile trust between the Liberals and their left flank, let alone the usual NDP voters who saved us this year, and plainly has me wondering what the point of all of this is....
In his own post, Nate Erskine-Smith writes
...I ran again because of the opportunity to make an even bigger difference around the cabinet table and to help fix the housing crisis. The way it played out doesn’t sit right and it’s impossible not to feel disrespected. But I’m mostly disappointed that my team and I won’t have the chance to build on all we accomplished with only a short runway.
Our ambitious housing plan is bigger than one person, of course....
Plenty of posts tonight along these lines too:

Including Erskine-Smith in the cabinet was a basic litmus test that Mark Carney failed today.

— Emmett Macfarlane 🇨🇦 (@emmettmacfarlane.com) May 13, 2025 at 1:54 PM
But even Scrimshaw also notes this: Finally, of course, PP weighs in:

2 comments:

Purple library guy said...

"Unemployed Ottawa-area man" got me laughing.

Cathie from Canada said...

Yeah, I thought that was great too!