Tiny Things Amuse Tiny Minds

There’s an aura about cabinet shuffles. Certainly they mesmerize newsrooms. The game of who will go where, who’s up, who’s down, what does it mean if X moves from this portfolio to that portfolio, or Y gets hauled from some high-profile perch to dwell in the lower echelons of cabinet, is a harmless one. It’s an endlessly chewable biscuit, ideal low-calorie filler for columns and news panels. And as all will oblige, it is important for columnists to be fed and news panels to have matter to be dreary and obvious about.

In the case of the Trudeau shuffle, don’t take any of it too seriously. It’s mainly show. Having lost his majority, having shed his always specious charisma, the PM has a profound responsibility to show he has been chastened by the election, by the fractured, fractious mélange of a Parliament it has produced, and now in a wounded second term is going to seriously revise his approach to being prime minister.

Start by showing, Prime Minister, that it is a country you lead, not some boutique for trendy causes or a display case for the very freshest “progressive” attitudes.

A cabinet shuffle that does not signify some much deeper, non-cosmetic, shift in the tone and approach of your government will leave things much as they are. What’s needed is a real attitude shift in the whole approach to government, a reorientation of your ideas about government, particularly abandoning performative, emblematic politics for the real business of getting things done.

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See Also:

(1) Attorney-General David Lametti invokes power to block judge-ordered disclosures

(2) Ottawa should keep quiet about Hong Kong, China’s new ambassador to Canada says

(3) Eric Girard: Québec is a partner of Western Canada and wants it to prosper

(4) New Minister of Middle Class Prosperity declines to provide clear definition of middle class

(5) Selective indignation: Why the Trudeau government needs to reassess its relationships in Latin America