It‘s fair to say that Mark Carney’s first cabinet meeting wasn’t a roaring success. Then again, that is only true if you believe it‘s always a bad thing when a minister goes off message.
Steven Guilbeault, freshly minted as the minister of Canadian identity and culture, appeared to do just that at the May 15 meeting when he made an argument for why Canada shouldn’t build more oil pipelines.
The government-owned Trans Mountain facility isn’t being used at full capacity, global demand for oil will peak in the next five years, and anyway there are no companies interested in building an east-west pipeline right now, he told reporters on his way into the meeting.
Just two days earlier, Mr. Carney had said in an interview that he would support the construction of new pipelines if there was a consensus for doing so, and that he was prepared to help build that consensus.
He also happens to be stickhandling the delicate task of repairing Ottawa’s relations with Alberta, where there is resentment over the previous Liberal government‘s emphasis on fighting climate change at the expense of the West‘s oil-and-gas livelihood.
Mr. Guilbeault‘s comments were confusing in that context and slightly weird. They left people wondering what the government‘s position is and how it will play out in terms of policy. They were also well outside the bounds of Mr. Guilbeault‘s role as minister of Canadian identity and culture.
It was not a display of sharp politics. But in an important way it was welcome, for the reason that it might be the manifestation of something thought to be extinct: a Liberal government that lets cabinet ministers speak their minds freely.
After a decade of bemoaning the vacuous uniformity of thought and scripted messaging in the governments of Justin Trudeau, if would be odd to clutch our pearls over the sight of Mr. Guilbeault demonstrating a little independence.
A single instance of this is not conclusive evidence of a northern Camelot in which the best and brightest are free to debate policy without the fear of getting called on the carpet, and who then stand in magnificent solidarity once a cabinet consensus is reached.
But given what we’ve been through – a Parliament sidelined repeatedly by a calculating prime minister, MPs treated like biotic voting machines, and cabinet ministers forced to execute policies dictated to them by the Prime Minister’s Office under threat of demotion – the mere thought of that possibility is spine-tingling.
A healthy democracy needs cabinet ministers who question their prime minister. As opposed to, to use an extreme counter-example, them soullessly mouthing the fallacies and lies of their leader, as U.S. President Donald Trump’s cabinet of curiosities does every day.
There is much to be gained in allowing ministers to speak their minds – a healthier democracy for one, a better informed public for another.
It is very useful to know that Mr. Guilbeault, who was Mr. Trudeau’s minister of the environment and climate change, is clinging to his former boss’s dismissal of the oil sector’s importance to the economy.
That tells the public that there is not a consensus in cabinet about pipelines, that some ministers see no problem with the fact Canada sends more than 95-per-cent of its crude exports to its unreliable neighbour, and that Mr. Carney still has to convince his team that expanding Canada’s energy partnerships is vital to its economic security.
This may seem chaotic to some, and a political failing, but it is a better representation of how the messy business of democracy is supposed to work than a cabinet of obedient message deliverers who move in neutered lockstep.
So, too, is a government caucus that isn’t reduced to platitudes and mindless fealty to the prime minister. The Liberal caucus will meet for the first time Sunday and, by law, will have to vote whether to give itself the power under the Reform Act to spark a leadership review at any time.
Conservative caucus members did that at their first postelection meeting, putting their leader Pierre Poilievre on notice that he can’t ignore them.
The Liberals should do the same. It would be strong indication that the Carney Liberals are moving on from the Trudeau years and can now tolerate the inconveniences of representative democracy. Wouldn’t that be something?