Following Canada’s April 28 federal election, the people close to newly-elected Prime Minister Mark Carney made a point of telegraphing that his new cabinet would be lean, mean and business-like – much smaller, they said, than Justin Trudeau’s bloated ministry.
Apart from Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne, few Canadians give a damn about the size of the federal cabinet.
But Carney and his people seem to be among those few. They made sure the news media got the message: the PM believes small is beautiful.
Carney’s bona fides on the cabinet-size question were solid.
The cabinet he named this past March, shortly after he was chosen Liberal leader, had a mere 23 ministers. By contrast, after the 2021 election Justin Trudeau named 38 folks to his cabinet.
Then came the May 13 swearing-in for Carney’s post-2025-election team. There were many more than 23 MPs at Rideau Hall to take the various legally-required oaths to enter cabinet.
Indeed, Carney’s new gang consisted of – wait for it – 38 members, the same as Trudeau’s last cabinet.
Liberals will be quick to point out that 10 of Carney’s group are not full cabinet ministers. They have the junior role of secretaries of state.
Secretaries of state are responsible not for government departments, but for matters of policy, such as “nature,” “sport,” and “seniors.”
These junior ministers are paid less than full ministers, and only attend cabinet meetings when their policy areas are on the agenda.
Carney’s post-election senior cabinet consists of only 28 ministers, five (or 22 per cent) more than the pre-election team he named this past March.
Mind you, had Carney’s people, and Carney himself, not put the issue of cabinet size on the table nobody would be noticing it now.
Carney even continued to insist that his new group was “smaller and more focused than previous cabinets” after the almost interminable swearing-in ceremony for his 38-member-strong team gave the lie to that claim.
For Carney and his inner circle their handling of the cabinet-size issue looks like a case of over-promising and under-delivering.
They’ll probably get away with it this time. The country and the government have bigger fish to fry. Right now, Canadians will be happy to judge the new Liberal cabinet on its performance, not its numbers.
Carney ditched ministers who had held jobs for only three months
As for the junior cabinet group – Carney did not invent that idea.
Junior ministers are commonplace in Britain. And here in Canada, in 1993, Liberal PM Jean Chrétien named a much larger group of secretaries of state to his cabinet than Carney’s ten.
At the time, journalists called those second tier ministers the taxi squad. Unlike full ministers, they did not have government-supplied cars and drivers.
What is more notable than size about Carney’s May 2025 cabinet is the number of new faces.
So anxious was Carney to put his own fresh stamp on the government’s executive branch that he booted out several ministers he himself had boosted into cabinet for the first time only three months ago, last March.
Among those are: Winnipeg MP Terry Duguid, whom Carney had promoted to the environment portfolio in March; Montreal MP Rachel Bendayan, who had replaced fellow Montrealer Marc Miller as immigration minister; and Ali Ehsassi, a Toronto MP to whom Carney entrusted the daunting task of government transformation (and public works and procurement).
All three ran for and won re-election on April 28. Now they’ve returned to the back benches. Montreal and Toronto have a number of other ministers. But Winnipeg now has none.
Nathan Erskine-Smith, a downtown Toronto MP known as a progressive and an advocate for electoral reform, ascended to Justin Trudeau’s cabinet as Housing Minister late in the day, in December 2024.
Carney kept him on in the slimmed-down March 2025 cabinet, but dropped him from the larger post-election team. It came as something of a shock to Erskine-Smith, who did not try to hide his disappointment.
On the social media site X he posted: “It’s impossible not to feel disrespected and the way it played out doesn’t sit right. 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.”
The housing portfolio has gone to former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson, one of only two British Columbia MPs Carney chose for the senior cabinet.
BC got three secretaries of state as well. The Liberals won 20 seats in BC on April 28.
Like Erskine-Smith, B.C. Liberal MP Jonathan Wilkinson would have a right to be more than a bit disappointed at his exclusion from Carney’s post-election cabinet.
Starting in 2018 Wilkinson held three different cabinet portfolios, the last being minister of energy and natural resources.
Those who worked for and with him describe Wilkinson as serious, hardworking and knowledgeable – not unlike Carney himself.
In March of this year Wilkinson was one of the Trudeau ministers whom Carney kept on. But in May it was a different story. Carney replaced Wilkinson with newly-elected Toronto area MP Tim Hodgson.
It just so happens that Hodgson worked closely with Carney at the U.S.-based investment bank Goldman Sachs and at the Bank of Canada.
Back in March, two contentious portfolios of great interest to the West – energy and natural resources and environment – were held by westerners.
Now, both are held by Toronto MPs. (Carney named Julie Dabrusin, a lawyer originally from Montreal, who represents Danforth in the heart of Toronto, to replace Winnipeg’s Duguid at the environment ministry.)
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