One of the notable new faces in the cabinet prime minister Mark Carney unveiled on Tuesday, May 13, is that of Mandy Gull-Masty, the former Grand Chief of the Quebec Cree.
Gull-Masty has become the first Indigenous minister of Indigenous Services.
When Justin Trudeau offered the same job to Jody Wilson-Raybould she turned it down. As an Indigenous person she did not want to become an instrument of the colonial-era Indian Act.
Gull-Masty made a different choice and her experience in Quebec could lead to salutary results.
The Cree of northern Quebec have a degree of regionally-based self-government almost unknown elsewhere in Canada.
The Quebec Cree are not divided into isolated and virtually powerless bands, as are most Canadian Indigenous peoples, including the Cree and Ojibway just across the border in Ontario.
Rather, the Quebec Cree have a territorial government which covers a huge swath of land and water on the eastern side of the James and Hudson Bay basins. The Quebec model has meant more effective governance – with better outcomes – than those which most Indigenous communities experience.
Gull-Masty will bring her experience of Indigenous self-governance to her new role.
But the new minister (and MP) should be prepared for a tough fight with a recalcitrant bureaucracy and her fellow cabinet members if she tries to institute any key elements of the Quebec Cree model at the federal level.
Justin Trudeau had split what had once been Indigenous Affairs and Northern Development into three ministries. Perhaps surprisingly, given his rhetorical proclivity for efficiency, Mark Carney chose to maintain that division.
One of those departments, Gull-Masty’s, delivers services.
Another ministry, now headed by the former mayor of Yellowknife and rookie MP, Rebecca Alty, focuses on Crown-Indigenous relations.
A third has responsibility for the North. It will be led by another Indigenous woman, and rookie MP, Rebecca Chartrand, who defeated long-serving New Democratic MP Niki Ashton in Manitoba’s most northerly riding.
New ministry of AI and a young maverick at government transformation
Two former hosts of the longstanding CBC Radio politics show The House got themselves elected as Liberals in this spring’s vote: Anthony Germain in Newfoundland and Evan Solomon in Ontario.
Mark Carney tapped one of them, Solomon, for a brand-new cabinet role: Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation. There is, as yet, no such department, and one might have expected Carney to put this role into the policy-focused secretary of state category.
The fact that he chose otherwise indicates the prime minister intends to make AI a major focus of his government.
In this case, more than the devil is in the details.
Will the government create a new, fully-staffed department of AI and Digital Innovation? If so, at what cost – at a time when the PM has pledged to reduce the growth and overall cost of the public service?
Another aspect of the AI strategy concerns the operations of government itself.
In March, Carney created the new ministry of Government Transformation, with a mandate, in part, to fulfill the PM’s promise to streamline public services by using more AI.
Carney has now handed that challenge to Joël Lightbound, a young Quebec City MP.
In 2022, Lightbound became something of a Liberal black sheep when he publicly criticized his own government’s strategy to deal with the COVID pandemic. He was especially critical of the vaccine mandates which were the putative motive for the truckers’ more than two weeks’ illegal occupation of downtown Ottawa.
Carney gave Lightbound a big job, in part, it seems, because observers had noted in March that Quebec City had no representation in cabinet.
The PM could have chosen the far more experienced and accomplished Quebec City MP Jean-Yves Duclos, an eminent economist who had deftly handled a number of difficult challenges for the Justin Trudeau government.
Duclos was in charge of implementing the Canada Child Benefit during the Trudeau government’s early years. Later, he skillfully and competently dealt with COVID as health minister.
Or, if Carney needed another Quebec voice in the cabinet, he could have chosen Carlos Leitão, a former Quebec Liberal finance minister.
Instead, Carney entrusted a new big role to a young maverick with the thinnest of resumés.
Other rookies in the new government include Marjorie Michel, who now represents Trudeau’s former Montreal riding, Papineau.
The newly-elected MP now has the daunting task of running the federal health ministry, a tall order for any politician. Michel has worked in the Liberal backrooms for a number of years. Her late father had been, briefly, prime minister of Haiti, under former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Lena Metlege Diab, a former provincial cabinet minister in Nova Scotia, takes over the prickly and potentially explosive immigration portfolio.
Newly elected Edmonton MP Eleanor Olszewski, who has degrees in both pharmacy and law, takes over the emergency management and community resilience job from former Toronto police chief Bill Blair.
Front bench keeps familiar faces
The ministers who will be front and centre in the ongoing conflict with Donald Trump’s U.S. regime remain largely unchanged.
François Philippe Champagne stays at finance.
Dominic Leblanc retains intergovernmental relations, with, in addition, responsibility for trade with the U.S. (The task of managing trade with the rest of the world falls to Brampton MP Maninder Sidhu.)
Mélanie Joly will still be on the team, but as industry minister. Her former job, foreign affairs minister, goes to another experienced and seasoned politician from the Trudeau era, Anita Annand.
Ottawa MP David McGuinty had been deeply involved in dealings with the White House as minister of public safety. He will continue on the front lines of that effort as the new minister of defence.
Gary Anandasangaree, formerly Indigenous relations and justice minister, takes over at public safety.
Mark Carney has said that his new team represents a return “to true cabinet government with everyone expected and empowered to show leadership, to bring new ideas, to have a clear focus and to take decisive actions to accomplish their work.”
For decades the federal executive branch has become more and more centralized in the prime minister’s office.
PMs, including both Harper and Trudeau, surrounded themselves with a small team of loyalists, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), who kept cabinet ministers, not to mention backbench MPs, at arm’s length.
Most significant government initiatives – and 100 per cent of government communications – had to pass through the PMO. Cabinet ministers were, in essence, treated as lackeys, with no margin of manoeuvre.
Carney says he will change that, and empower his new team of ministers to take a genuine leadership and managerial role.
We’ll see how that works out for him. It is instructive to note that Justin Trudeau made much the same promise in 2015.
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