This isn't Carney's real cabinet shuffle, it's just a prelude
Three short-term caretakers take over Guilbeault's pieced-apart portfolio
To be quite frank, I don’t find cabinet shuffles all that interesting. Serving in cabinet comes with the caveat that you do exactly what the Prime Minister tells you, no matter how stupid or humiliating.
Rather than pick your own chief of staff to help accomplish your agenda, they are assigned to you by the PMO, to monitor and control you in your role. And in the end, you’ll be expected to take the fall for something the PMO is fully responsible for, and you’ll wonder whether you ever accomplished anything at all.
So there’s a degree of respect I have for ex-Minister Steven Guilbeault in resigning once his line was crossed, and forcing some chaos onto Prime Minister Carney and his team. In Guilbeault’s words, “over the past few months, several elements of the climate action plan I worked on as Minister of the Environment have been, or are about to be, dismantled”.
Guilbeault is a staunch environmentalist and climate activist, who has full clarity when it comes to the irreversible damage done by fossil fuel pollution. In tears, he told Tout le Monde on Radio-Canada last night regarding Carney’s deal with Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta that he would not have been able to look in the mirror, and that the sacrifices would have been too high.
I salute Steven Guilbeault, for listening to his own conscience when Liberal partisans are typically trained to suffocate it. And I admire how his resignation is creating enough problems to require not just this shuffle, but a future shuffle in just a few weeks time.
Today’s cabinet shuffle was a small one, better described as a mini-shuffle or a caretaker shuffle. That last one is likely the most apt verbiage, as it consisted entirely of piecing apart Guilbeault’s portfolio across three other Liberal MPs, two of whom were already in cabinet and the third a cabinet minister until just recently.
Taking over Guilbeault’s core role as Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, which covers arts, history, sport, diversity, and languages, former Immigration Minister Marc Miller has returned to cabinet. Miller was a close supporter of Trudeau who was not included in Carney’s cabinet after the switch in premiership, and is infamous among pro-Palestine advocates for his refusal to help Palestinian Canadian families evacuate their loved ones from Gaza.
Previously the Parliamentary Secretary to Steven Guilbeault in his role as Environment and Climate Change Minister, Minister Julie Dabrusin took that role over in May on a permanent basis, after Terry Duguid held it as caretaker between March and the 2025 Canadian Federal Election.
In the wake of Guilbeault’s resignation, Minister Dabrusin now absorbs his role supervising Parks Canada. She gained some brief notoriety in August this past summer, when her staffers accidentally invited a reporter into a group chat where budget cuts to her ministry were being discussed. Someday, I hope a politician’s staff goof up like that to give me a scoop.
Finally, taking over the vague and immaterial role of Québec Lieutenant is Joël Lightbound. This cabinet role did not exist at all between 2015 and 2019, as Trudeau unlike Carney is a Quebecker, and while Trudeau did add it for his second term, it has always been held by someone who also has a real cabinet job. Lightbound is already the Minister for Public Services and Procurement, a role in which he needlessly provoked Canada Post workers into resuming a strike by threatening their jobs.
What’s more interesting is the next shuffle, which will be coming very soon. The same way that Carney did a shuffle in March to appoint caretakers, many of whom did not remain in cabinet after the Liberals won re-election in May, he is doing a mini-shuffle here to keep Guilbeault’s portfolios alive in the short-term.
In the long-term, the Prime Minister needs to reconfigure his cabinet to adjust for other people who will be leaving. Since Chrystia Freeland resigned as Minister of Transport and Minister of Internal Trade in September, Steven MacKinnon and Dominic LeBlanc have taken over those respective portfolios. But both of them already have extremely busy roles in cabinet, with MacKinnon being Government House Leader and LeBlanc being Minister for U.S. Trade and Intergovernmental Affairs.
There needs to be a larger rebalancing of portfolios to ensure that the MPs in cabinet are being assigned appropriate amounts of work, rather than one Minister doing half a job while another does three jobs. And there also needs to be an honest analysis of whether Secretaries of State are proving useful in any degree, when they’ve had very little prominence since their introduction, and Parliamentary Secretaries already exist to serve the same purpose.
All of these factors are things that Carney’s PMO understands well enough, and are why numerous Liberal Party sources I’ve consulted can confirm they’ve been planning a larger cabinet shuffle.
One source claims that on December 15th, we will see the real shuffle, while another claims the holidays may push it to January. Yet another claims it will be by-election writs on December 15th and a cabinet shuffle in the January slot, but there is firm consensus among my sources that a proper shuffle is coming down the pipeline.
This shuffle will naturally look different as a result of Guilbeault’s resignation, and indeed it is that resignation which now requires the Prime Minister to conduct two shuffles rather than one.
But once that last shuffle happens…as an avid poker player, may I say one last thing?
Enough of all the shuffling. Please. Stop.