COLUMN: On Parliament Hill – Carney’s cabinet: Failing upwards

With the announcement of his “new” Cabinet last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney is clearly picking up where he and Justin Trudeau left off.

Rather than send a clear signal that the era of Justin Trudeau and his disastrous inner circle was over, Mr. Carney chose, instead, to double down, appointing 14 Trudeau-era ministers.

While experience is vital to this kind of role, particularly given Mr. Carney (zero parliamentary experience) himself is a novice, experience with a consistent track record of scandal and failure hardly merits another chance, let alone a third or a fourth.

Take Sean Fraser, the former Immigration Minister, who lost one million people and caused the immigration crisis. He was the Housing Minister who gave us the current housing crisis. Now, as Justice Minister and Attorney General (AG), he’s responsible for addressing the Liberal crime crisis, and as AG, he plans to “work from home.”

Nothing signals the lack of change in direction more strongly than the appointment of former Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland. Freeland added more than half-a-trillion dollars to our debt causing mass inflation and the cost-of-living-crisis. Canadian taxpayers are on the hook for a billion dollars a week just in interest payments on her debt. Nothing would have sent a clearer signal of change than removing the disastrous Freeland from Cabinet. Mr. Carney re-appointed her.

Likewise, radical activist Stephen Guilbeault. How can Mr. Carney claim pipelines are a priority when he keeps the poster child of the Trudeau anti-energy agenda in power? Despite his removal from the Environment portfolio, Guilbeault has continued his anti-energy crusade and falsehoods in the early weeks of the new administration.

Philippe Francois Champagne, who allowed mass corruption at SDTC, is now the Finance Minister. The Auditor General found that Sustainable Development and Technology Canada (SDTC) appointed Liberal insiders to run the program, who, in turn, gave $400 million in taxpayer money to their own companies. The Auditor General found a whopping 186 separate conflicts of interest within the program. The RCMP is investigating corruption at SDTC and, as with previous investigations, the Liberals are blocking the RCMP from getting the documents they need to determine who in the government broke the law. Champagne is also responsible for the deals that saw taxpayers pay billions to incentivize multi-billion-dollar car companies to set up shop in Canada. Deals that are now falling through, leaving taxpayers on the hook. This is the man promoted by Mark Carney to oversee Canada’s finances.

Other familiar faces stay in Cabinet, among them Mélanie Joly. She and Trudeau diminished Canada’s standing on the world stage—Patty Hajdu, who, as Health Minister, spectacularly mishandled the federal COVID response. The list goes on.

To make matters worse, some of the new faces in Cabinet are equally problematic.

Take Mr. Carney’s appointment of former Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson as Housing Minister. During Robertson’s time as mayor, he increased homebuilding taxes by 141 percent, and home prices shot up 149 percent, making Vancouver the least affordable housing market in North America. When asked in a recent interview if the government should work to bring down the skyrocketing prices that lock millions of Canadians out of the housing market, Robertson’s answer was “no”! Moreover, during his tenure as mayor, Vancouver saw a 600 percent increase in overdoses as he supported Justin Trudeau’s legalization of hard drugs.

In short, if the goal was change—a fresh start and a new direction, to show Canadians a clear departure from Trudeau-era failures, Mr. Carney has failed to demonstrate that to Canadians.