{"id":44217,"date":"2018-07-20T05:00:02","date_gmt":"2018-07-20T09:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44217"},"modified":"2018-07-19T12:02:36","modified_gmt":"2018-07-19T16:02:36","slug":"trudeau-becomes-the-first-prime-minister-ive-ever-covered-who-has-demoted-himself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/07\/20\/trudeau-becomes-the-first-prime-minister-ive-ever-covered-who-has-demoted-himself\/","title":{"rendered":"“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I\u2019ve ever covered who has demoted himself”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Paul Wells<\/a> analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So much has changed, culminating \u2014 for now \u2014 with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and Fran\u00e7ois Legault. Certainly that\u2019s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.<\/p>\n

So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn\u2019t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that\u2019s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it\u2019s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it\u2019d be Walter Hill\u2019s 1979 classic The Warriors<\/em>. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it\u2019s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse\u2019s Head\/ In Your Bed.<\/p>\n

The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair\u2019s job on the border-crossing file isn\u2019t only to get up Doug Ford\u2019s nose, though that\u2019s a handy bonus. It\u2019s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals\u2019 back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible<\/em>, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.<\/p>\n

LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau\u2019s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that\u2019s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn\u2019t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It\u2019s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I\u2019ve ever covered who has demoted himself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle: So much has changed, culminating \u2014 for now \u2014 with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and Fran\u00e7ois Legault. Certainly that\u2019s the way to bet it. Even […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,53],"tags":[1188,887,458],"class_list":["post-44217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-dougford","tag-justintrudeau","tag-parliament"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bvb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44217"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44219,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44217\/revisions\/44219"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}