Juno News - Carney eyes MAJOR cabinet PURGE

00:00:00.000 And welcome to Straight Up. I am your host, Mark Bertrand. I appreciate you tuning in.

00:00:10.380 Shaking up the liberal government. Prime Minister Mark Carney could be ready to,

00:00:14.480 well, launch a major shakeup of his cabinet. That according to an exclusive in the Toronto Sun.

00:00:20.100 The moves could mean dropping some of the mainstays from the Trudeau era and elevating

00:00:25.380 others. In his column, Brian Lilly writes as follows. This is all part of a plan to shed

00:00:31.680 Trudeau era deadwood and have Carney attract new faces and new talent to try and put his own stamp

00:00:39.120 on the liberal party. Now, one key departure is expected to be that of Melanie Jolie, the current

00:00:45.620 industry minister. This headline, Melanie Jolie, I's Paris ambassador role is Carney plans major

00:00:53.340 cabinet overhaul. Now, Jolie has been a close personal friend of Justin Trudeau's for two

00:00:58.860 decades. When she ran for the leadership of the liberal party, she carried the flag for the

00:01:03.260 Trudeau wing, pushing for a continuation of his policies. Is her departure, impending departure,

00:01:10.180 a sign that Carney is purging the cabinet of Trudeau loyalists? Well, others could follow Jolie out the

00:01:17.300 door. Brian Lilly writes, there could be political risks to that. He will be joining us

00:01:23.200 to talk about that story minutes from now. After Carney dismissed a question by a reporter this

00:01:29.260 week about whether he'd spoken to President Trump, we learn the PM may be soon traveling to Washington,

00:01:35.560 D.C. next week. CBC is reporting that Carney may attend the draw for the FIFA World Cup in which

00:01:42.820 Canada, the United States and Mexico are jointly hosting next year. Now, conservative leader,

00:01:48.680 Pierre Polyev ripped Carney after the PM flippantly said, who cares in response to the question of

00:01:55.600 whether he'd spoken to Trump. Since he took office, not only has he failed to get the promised

00:02:01.100 deal, but American tariffs on aluminum, autos and steel have doubled. On forestry communities,

00:02:08.080 they have tripled. The prime minister says, who cares? All of us on this side of the house

00:02:13.620 care about the communities that are being emptied out in our forestry, the steel workers in Hamilton

00:02:20.260 who don't have jobs to pay their mortgages. We care about those people. Why doesn't he?

00:02:26.360 Well, for all the talk of an imminent pipeline announcement, B.C. Premier David Eby says he

00:02:31.480 doesn't feel threatened by that. Eby, a hardline opponent to the proposed pipeline,

00:02:36.340 says there's no point being threatened by a project that doesn't exist. Let's listen.

00:02:41.140 Not threatened by a project that doesn't actually exist. The entire proposal from Premier Smith is a

00:02:48.320 communications exercise. There is no company, there's no money, there's no route, there's no

00:02:53.400 nothing. And so, you know, I try to keep that in front of mind as I wrestle with the fact that the

00:03:02.700 entire country seems to be particularly interested in this non-existent project when British Columbia

00:03:11.720 is delivering tens of billions of dollars in real projects, thousands and thousands of jobs,

00:03:17.140 billions of dollars of revenue that will flow to federal and provincial coffers if we can close

00:03:22.100 these deals which are approaching final investment decision in the next 12 months.

00:03:25.280 It's been widely reported that Prime Minister Carney and Alberta Premier Daniel Smith will soon be

00:03:31.540 announcing a deal that includes a pipeline this week. And I'm now joined by Brian Lilly,

00:03:38.360 columnist with the Toronto Sun. And he's got this exclusive headline, Melanie Jolie eyes Paris

00:03:45.160 ambassador role as Carney plans major cabinet overhaul. Welcome to the show, Brian.

00:03:51.240 Thanks for having me. Wouldn't you love to go live in Paris at the Canadian embassy,

00:03:54.860 Mark? I mean, it's, it's in the eighth arrondissement. It's a historic Hotel de Rigny.

00:04:02.320 You're down the street from Emmanuel Macron's presidential palace. You get invites to all the

00:04:08.000 best parties, all the best shoppings. Like this is what you want, right? You, this is what you want

00:04:13.360 as your reward for being a loyal liberal soldier. Except it may not be entirely a reward. I mean,

00:04:19.500 if I read your column correctly, uh, Carney's looking to make some changes and she's one of 0.74

00:04:25.180 the changes that he wants to make. Isn't that so? Yeah. So it appears to me that there's a bit

00:04:29.880 of give and take here. So, uh, Carney definitely wants to make changes. He wants to put his own

00:04:34.420 stamp on the liberal party. Of course, we saw during the trust in Trudeau era that Trudeau tried to take

00:04:40.060 the liberal party to the left of the NDP. He followed the Kathleen Wynne plan. No surprise.

00:04:45.680 Many of the people around, um, Trudeau, when he took office, when he became leader,

00:04:50.440 were former Queens Park people who had been around Kathleen Wynne. Uh, I call them the Gerard

00:04:56.200 Kennedy wing of the liberal party. You know, Kennedy was, uh, uh, politician at various levels of

00:05:02.120 government. He tried to run for the leadership of the liberal party was unsuccessful, but all the

00:05:08.460 people around him went on to great things in the PMO or to become cabinet ministers like marrying

00:05:13.640 or become prime minister like Justin Trudeau. And they very much wanted a very left wing liberal

00:05:19.780 party. So that's what they did. Mark Carney. I'm not one of these people that says, oh, it's really

00:05:24.920 a conservative government or Mark Carney's a conservative. I don't buy that. He's still very

00:05:29.020 much a liberal, but he's not a new Democrat pretending to be a liberal. And that's kind of the

00:05:33.860 difference right now. So Carney's trying to put his own stamp. He's trying to shift the

00:05:38.460 party closer to the center. I'm not going to say the center, but closer to it. And so he wants to

00:05:43.660 get rid of Trudeau era Deadwood and then areas where he can put in, you know, potentially star

00:05:49.440 candidates, whether it's Chrystia Freeland in Toronto, um, with university Rosedale or with

00:05:55.820 Scarborough Guildwood, where Bill Blair, the former public safety minister and Toronto police chief is

00:06:00.660 North Vancouver, where Jonathan Wilkinson is. And now we're hearing Melanie Jolie in a Hanset

00:06:06.540 Cartierville. That's the North end of Montreal. Fairly safe liberal seats. Not all of them,

00:06:11.740 especially North Vancouver and Scarborough. Those could potentially, if the conservatives play it

00:06:16.880 right, go blue, but fairly safe liberal seats. And so if he gets rid of these people, then he can bring

00:06:24.620 in his own candidates. So he wants to move these folks out. Jolie says, okay, but if I'm going,

00:06:30.700 I want something, I want to go to Paris. I want to be the ambassador to France. What's funny is that

00:06:38.860 the current ambassador to France is a guy named Stéphane Dion. Maybe you remember him as leader of

00:06:43.740 the Liberal Party more than a decade ago. Justin Trudeau's early on foreign affairs minister.

00:06:50.080 Why is he the ambassador to Paris, to France and Paris? Because Trudeau wanted rid of him in 2017

00:06:56.380 and shipped him off to Europe to get rid of him and allow other people to run. He was originally

00:07:01.960 the ambassador to Germany and a special representative to the EU. Then in 2022 became

00:07:07.820 ambassador to France. So, you know, this is becoming a liberal rite of passage, I guess. When we're done

00:07:14.100 with you, we'll ship you off somewhere. I think that the big diplomatic appointments in Paris,

00:07:21.140 in Washington, in London, should be political people, not diplomats. But is Melanie Jolie the

00:07:27.560 right one? I don't know. She hasn't been very good at any of her portfolios yet.

00:07:32.240 Yeah. I mean, is this due to changes in the energy sector and the talk about pipelines? You know,

00:07:38.520 is that why you weed people out who might be, to your point, you know, left of center and hardliners as

00:07:46.300 far as climate ideology goes, it could the two be married in terms of connected, where you get rid

00:07:54.760 of people who are going to be real sticks in the mud about policies related to the energy sector?

00:08:00.400 You know, what's funny is that Jolie is not someone who has pronounced on that as much as some of her

00:08:07.720 colleagues. Is she more on the progressive left-wing side of the Liberal Party? Absolutely. But she's a

00:08:14.860 Becker. So I think that goes without saying. I think that it is just that she is of that Trudeau ilk,

00:08:24.700 where, you know, for lack of a better term, virtue signaling, posturing, these are more important

00:08:32.380 than results. And if we believe the hype on Carney, he believes in results over posturing. So,

00:08:40.580 you know, look, she shows up to the meeting with the Swedes about the Gripen Jett wearing military 0.99

00:08:49.540 style green outfits. And look, I know some progressives are saying, oh, how dare you say

00:08:56.540 that? Look, someone that wore that as a uniform, that's exactly what she was doing. She was wearing 1.00

00:09:02.900 olive drab. That's what we call it in the Canadian Armed Forces. It's not green. It's olive drab.

00:09:07.620 And she wore that and military-esque outfits to, oh, look, I'm here to buy fighter jets from the 0.99

00:09:14.680 Swedes and we'll get 10,000 jobs. That's performative. It's not results oriented. 1.00

00:09:20.900 Carney doesn't want that. He doesn't want, he also doesn't want someone who has leadership ambitions

00:09:26.000 around. She was looking at running for the Liberal leadership when Trudeau resigned and then thought,

00:09:32.500 well, nobody's going to win. This is what she told people. We're not going to win,

00:09:36.060 so I'm not going to run this time. Which means, well, next time. Except the guy who did win the

00:09:42.180 Liberal leadership won the election. And he doesn't want someone like that around him. Also, as I pointed

00:09:49.960 out, not exactly the most confident minister. She was Minister of Heritage in 2017 for Canada's 150th.

00:09:57.060 And she screwed up putting a skating rink on the front lawn of Parliament Hill. 1.00

00:10:00.620 Now, you say there could be political risks to Carney if this isn't done too well, if it's done

00:10:07.360 in a rash manner or too quickly. How is that risk possible?

00:10:14.860 Well, look, he's in a minority situation. He can't afford to lose votes. So he's got to handle this

00:10:23.680 properly. If he, you know, from what I'm told, the Liberals are looking to line up by elections all at

00:10:33.760 once for Wilkinson, Blair, Freeland, and now Jolie. There could be others. Like, I know they want to

00:10:42.860 get rid of Stephen Guibault, the former environment minister now in charge of what was called Heritage,

00:10:47.960 forget the name that they've given it now. Wilkinson's riding, as I said, it's been conservative

00:10:55.860 in the past. It was at one point a reform in Canadian Alliance riding. It's been blue more

00:11:01.800 than it's been red over the last 30 years. Guibault's riding has been both Locke and NDP prior to him

00:11:08.980 running. So, you know, they could lose a couple of these. Scarborough-Gilwood, you know, if the

00:11:14.560 conservatives get their act together, could win that. So there is some risk. He, what does he

00:11:20.300 really want? He wants a majority government. And if he puts all of these out and things aren't going

00:11:25.820 well at the time of the election, well, then that could see him lose one or two of these. Now, I doubt

00:11:33.420 he'd lose all of them, but he could lose a few of them. So, but let's say, you know, hear me out, and

00:11:40.160 they announce all of this just after the House rises for the Christmas break, the week of December

00:11:44.940 15th. He does a cabinet shuffle, drops some useless people like Lina Dieb in immigration, or, 0.95

00:11:51.620 you know, shuffles Gary and DeSangri out of public safety into something he's more suited for.

00:11:56.820 And then, you know, these people all resign, and he calls the by-elections for late January,

00:12:03.860 early February. Well, the NDP has no leader, and they have no money. So they're not going to be

00:12:07.900 organized for a by-election. The conservatives are completely focused on Pierre Polia's

00:12:12.440 leadership review. So if the liberals are smart, they get as many of these people to resign at once,

00:12:18.600 call a by-election for the end of February, or end of January, early February, and it's kind of like

00:12:24.420 a sneak attack. Then you have a better chance of winning. These are the types of discussions that

00:12:30.140 are happening on the Hill. I'm not endorsing these. I'm just telling you what's happening.

00:12:33.780 This is kind of what they're looking at doing. And then there still are some liberals that want to

00:12:40.340 do a spring election, and if not spring, then fall, if they can get to use the old party Quebec

00:12:46.820 wall term, the winning conditions. Right. That was my next question, is a speculation around an election

00:12:53.740 next year, and whether these moves are designed, and you've sort of touched on that, to position the

00:12:59.320 party a little bit more towards the center, make it more moderate, and broaden its appeal, presumably

00:13:04.840 to people who might otherwise vote conservative. Is that what's going on here, getting the party ready

00:13:10.360 to fight an election?

00:13:12.520 I think so. And look, even if they're more left-wing people, bring in people who are still competent,

00:13:21.680 rather than people that are interested in showing you the right thing.

00:13:26.460 One of the biggest problems with the Trudeau government is they didn't care about results.

00:13:34.860 You know, if you said the right thing about ending poverty, that was better than doing

00:13:40.460 something that would lift people out of poverty. And there can be left-wing governments that are

00:13:45.580 competent, that can get things done. And especially you look at, you know, Prairie New Democrats that are

00:13:52.940 very pragmatic. You know, Roy Romano over the years, you know, things like that. Wob Canoe right now,

00:13:59.340 very popular. These sorts of leaders can do well. But for Trudeau, they didn't care about the results.

00:14:06.140 They cared about the press release, and the news conference, and the announcement. And then they

00:14:10.460 forgot that they ever said anything about whatever issue they were talking about. So Carney's looking

00:14:15.340 for people that are going to come in and say, okay, how do I get results? How do I, you know,

00:14:21.980 deliver on something? Whether it is the whole issue of getting a pipeline to Tidewater, whether it is the

00:14:30.780 issue of building up large-scale nuclear reactors or small modulars, building Canada's energy

00:14:37.420 infrastructure. You know, as much as I have skepticism I do about how he's handling it,

00:14:44.060 I do believe he wants to do something to improve the Canadian economy. I couldn't say that about

00:14:49.020 Justin Trudeau. So he's looking for competent people to go in, and he wants to put his own stamp

00:14:55.100 on the party. Will he be able to do it? Depends on who he can recruit. You know, still in a minority

00:15:02.300 situation, and Mark, you've been around politics a long time. If I come to you and I'm like, hey, Mark,

00:15:06.380 I'd like you to run. You know, we're in government. We can get you in cabinet. This would be great.

00:15:11.100 And you're like, yeah, but you're in a minority and you're going to an election in six months. So

00:15:15.420 why would I run? That's kind of the thing that he's in right now. So will he be able to recruit

00:15:21.020 that top talent? That's a big question for him and part of the risk that we were talking about earlier.

00:15:27.100 Well, maybe he wants people who are ideologically in sync with him. And if you are in sync with Carney and

00:15:33.260 you believe in the kind of policies he wants to push, maybe he'd be more inclined to run.

00:15:38.780 But I want to ask you about the who cares comment as well, because you've been writing about this as

00:15:42.700 well. Yeah. A comment tossed off by Carney in response to a question about Trump and whether

00:15:48.860 he'd been in contact with Trump. What do you make of that? I mean, sometimes, you know, he says things

00:15:56.300 that are tossed off, dismissed, you know, it almost comes out of his mouth before he gets a chance to

00:16:01.260 prevent it from doing so. And I think this was one of those times he just, you could sense that

00:16:07.100 there's frustration there and you really saw it with that reaction. And now here he is going off to

00:16:11.900 DC next week for the FIFA thing. What can you draw from this?

00:16:17.820 He's still not quite a politician. He's done better than I ever expected, Mark. I, you know,

00:16:26.300 someone that covered him when he was the Bank of Canada governor, I thought, well, he's a bit wooden.

00:16:31.500 He has trouble communicating sometimes. He's going to have trouble relating to the average person.

00:16:38.620 He's done far better than I expected. I mean, obviously, so he won the election. So, you know,

00:16:44.860 you've got to hand him that, whether you support him or not, you got to hand him that. He and his

00:16:48.860 party won the election. The Liberals had no business winning, but he was able to pull it off.

00:16:55.340 But he still gets those moments where he just sounds really annoyed, and especially with women

00:17:00.300 reporters. He just, with reporters in general, but with women reporters especially, and this was

00:17:07.180 Ashley Burke from CBC. She was asking a very valid question. You know, is the president returning

00:17:13.180 your calls or your texts? Are you talking to him? And then, you know, the second part of her

00:17:17.180 question was about, and which countries would you, you know, draw a red line on doing business with?

00:17:23.340 Well, he answered the second part at length and then didn't answer the first part. And so she yelled 0.77

00:17:28.540 out, but what about talking to the president? And he not only said, who cares, but it was the wave of

00:17:36.380 the hand. Who cares? And he's waving his hand saying, who cares? It's a detail. It's a detail.

00:17:40.940 Well, I'm sorry, I'm from Hamilton. You know who cares? People working at Selk and DeFasco.

00:17:47.820 You know who else cares? People working in Algoma, at Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. People working

00:17:54.700 at the pipe plant in Regina, or the steel mill in Edmonton. People working at aluminum places,

00:18:02.540 people working in auto parts. Any of these tariff impacted industries care deeply about this.

00:18:08.940 So, you know, look, he had some good wins on this trip. $70 billion Canadian, $50 billion US in

00:18:16.860 promised investments from the UAE. There's not a lot of detail on there. We don't know what it's

00:18:22.140 going to be, but the Emiratis have the money, so I'm not worried about something showing up. I mean,

00:18:27.020 that's not a big investment for them. It's big for us. It's not for them. So yeah, something's going to

00:18:33.820 show up, and if it's $25 billion US instead of $50 billion, well, we're still going to be happy.

00:18:38.860 He negotiated that deal with India and Australia on things like critical minerals,

00:18:47.100 providing energy. I hope that's LNG, but also small and large nuclear reactors. That's a good deal.

00:18:54.460 So he had the good deal with the UAE. He had the good deal with India and Australia.

00:18:58.060 And then he's asked about the US, which is still more than 70% of our exports. And he says, who cares?

00:19:03.260 Well, that takes away from everything that he's just done before, because we're talking about

00:19:07.340 who cares instead of his wins. It's a dumb own goal by Mark Carney. You know,

00:19:14.860 is he trying to play hard to get with the Americans? I don't know. But if I'm a steel worker,

00:19:19.580 if I'm an auto worker, if I'm an aluminum worker, I'm pissed off at the moment. And guess what? I have

00:19:24.940 family in all of those areas. This is not going over well. Being dismissive of women, that's a major 0.84

00:19:31.980 red flag. I mean, they supported him massively. And we always hear about how Polyev has a problem with

00:19:38.700 women voters. And now we find out that maybe Mark Carney has an issue with female reporters and is

00:19:46.460 dismissive of them a little bit. I mean, that could be a grenade. I mean, if-

00:19:51.580 Oh, it could be. And look, both of them can be dismissive of journalists. So what? Guess what?

00:19:57.580 That's part of the job. I've been at this a long time. I've had lots of politicians, including Justin

00:20:02.300 Trudeau, stare me down, talk down at me, be aggressive. This is just how the world works.

00:20:11.100 But Carney has a specific issue with female reporters, be it Ashley Burke at CBC, Rosemary 1.00

00:20:17.740 Barton. Look inside yourself, Rosemary. Exactly. Stephanie Levitt, Levitt's at the Globe and Mail.

00:20:25.740 The woman that interviewed him at the Canadian Club recently, I believe her name's Amber Canwar. I

00:20:31.820 apologize. I don't know her. If I got the name wrong, I apologize. He was dismissive of her,

00:20:37.500 if you recall that conversation. She tried raising the issue of, well, the industry says there are

00:20:43.420 problems with the regulatory environment. No, no, there's not. No, no. And he was very aggressive

00:20:48.620 and dismissive. This is an ongoing thing. And if I'm one of his handlers, I'm in a bit of a panic

00:20:55.020 and saying, how do I get the boss to change? Because all of these people, by the time you're at the age,

00:20:59.980 Mark Carney is, it's hard to get them to change. It's hard to get any of us to change. But if you're

00:21:04.860 one of his handlers, you're saying, if this keeps up, this becomes, as you said, a grenade,

00:21:10.620 this becomes a major problem. And it will turn off voters if it continues.

00:21:15.340 Last question, I want to ask you about the upcoming, assuming it happens, is an announcement

00:21:20.460 regarding possible pipeline deal. And you've got EB out saying there is no deal. So why should I be

00:21:26.540 threatened by any of that? Any thoughts about that as we head to Thursday and this apparent announcement?

00:21:33.580 Well, Premier Smith's office isn't confirming or denying anything. Neither is Carney's PMO.

00:21:43.420 You know, I'm still being told by Smith's office that they're cautiously optimistic, that they

00:21:48.780 are hopeful for good things. So look, she's still being a good soldier. She's playing along.

00:21:53.900 So is Scott Moe on the canola tariff. So he is clearly, unlike Trudeau, willing to give them

00:22:00.460 something. I know some of their voters are very frustrated that they're saying anything nice about

00:22:05.020 Mark Carney, rather than just trying to put him in a headlock, give him newbies and wait for him to

00:22:09.340 cry uncle. But these are serious issues for the respective economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

00:22:16.380 And they've got to take these issues seriously. Sounds like there's going to be something. The

00:22:20.140 question is, how many caveats are on it, Mark? Does Daniel Smith have to go out and do the work

00:22:26.220 to get BC and the various First Nations groups on board? Or does she have a partner in the federal

00:22:32.300 government whose responsibility it is to do this? So is it, well, if you can go out and sell it,

00:22:37.900 we'll give you the commission later after we take our cut? Or is it yes, we're partners? That's a big

00:22:44.220 part that we don't know at this point. Brian Lilly, the Toronto Sun. How do people find you?

00:22:49.180 Brian Lilly.com, torontosun.com. Check it out. You can find me on social media. I am ubiquitous.

00:22:57.180 Thank you so much for coming on the show. We appreciate it.

00:23:00.460 Thank you.

00:23:01.340 And that is it for this edition of Straight Up. Appreciate you tuning in, my friends. Let's do it

00:23:05.100 again soon, shall we? Bye-bye for now.

Juno News - November 25, 2025

Carney eyes MAJOR cabinet PURGE

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