Juno News - January 13, 2021


Trudeau boxes himself in during cabinet shuffle

Topics
cabinet shuffle challenges
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Omar Al-Gabra Mark Carney
Curfews are unconstitutional Getting Out of the House

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

220.55

Word count

1,332

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the challenges that Justin Trudeau faces when it comes to building a cabinet, and how to deal with them. We also talk about the challenges of having a gender-balanced cabinet and how they relate to the Prime Minister's Office.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 So it looks like Justin Trudeau has made a minor cabinet shuffle following the departure of Navdeep
00:00:09.880 Bains who previously served as the innovation minister. Now a lot of people are going to talk
00:00:14.200 about what this shuffle means and does it mean that an election is imminent but I want to focus
00:00:18.880 a bit more about cabinet shuffles and building a cabinet in general and what are some of the
00:00:23.140 challenges specifically that Justin Trudeau has boxed himself into with some of his policy
00:00:27.680 platforms and some of the way that he's been talking about building his government. Now the
00:00:31.860 first challenge that I want to bring up is the sort of regional challenge and that affects generally
00:00:35.460 every government and that's where you don't want to have too many MPs from one region one province
00:00:40.400 in cabinet or high profile in government because you really want to promote your government as a
00:00:45.980 national government. So you don't want to have too many MPs from Ontario or from Quebec from the
00:00:50.040 Atlantic provinces from out west etc but you also don't want to have not enough. So for example in
00:00:55.380 Quebec you know you might have a limited number of seats and so you do want to have that Quebec
00:00:59.260 representation but you don't want to have too much so that it seems biased or maybe lopsided
00:01:05.200 towards one particular province or region not to necessarily pick on Quebec. Now this is further
00:01:11.100 complicated by the fact that in Ontario for example the Liberals have a very high number of seats in the
00:01:16.260 city of Toronto and so as a percentage of your caucus so that all of the MPs that are in your party
00:01:21.560 as a percentage of the caucus the Toronto area MPs make up a huge bunch and so you're going to have
00:01:26.540 to put maybe a couple of them in some ministerial positions or parliamentary secretary positions so
00:01:31.600 that's kind of like an assistant to the minister in the house but you're going to have to put some
00:01:35.520 of these people in caucus and that may or may not upset some of the other regional interests or sort
00:01:41.280 of regional representation that you have because you simply have a lot of people in one part of
00:01:45.400 the country and maybe not enough in another part of the country. The other issue is that the caucus is
00:01:51.320 kind of like a team but they're not really like a baseball team or some kind of sports team you know
00:01:56.140 on a sports team you have people that play different positions so you might have a you know
00:01:59.480 forward a defenseman a goalie you know baseball you have a shortstop but you may not want to put
00:02:04.080 them on first base etc. These people play specific positions maybe train for these positions
00:02:08.560 they have specific skills for those positions maybe they you know just think a particular way
00:02:13.580 it's better for that position but with caucus with MPs first of all you've only got who you have
00:02:19.140 elected so forget the you know 338 candidates that you put forward but you've only got who you've
00:02:23.840 elected or gotten elected. Second you have to figure out where you know in addition to the geographic
00:02:29.820 representation what skills do these people have where we're going to slot them in what can this person
00:02:35.260 do what can that person do what's their background you know maybe this person has maybe a medical
00:02:39.180 background or a legal background a business background so you're going to try to find some
00:02:43.160 portfolio that matches that particular person this person might have all the skills and background
00:02:47.840 and they simply are not a very good manager maybe they're not good in front of the cameras and so
00:02:52.360 you don't necessarily want a high profile person as you know as much as they may be qualified or you
00:02:58.620 know fit that position but they might make you look really bad and say something embarrassing and so
00:03:03.100 you don't necessarily want them in a very visible portfolio or if you're going to very very much limit
00:03:08.360 the amount of camera time that they get so those are two kind of things but the specific box that
00:03:14.180 Justin Trudeau has put himself into is his goal to have a gender parodied uh cock gender parodied
00:03:21.200 cabinet so an equal number or give or take between men and women now that poses a problem because you
00:03:26.940 may only have a certain number of men or certain number of women in your party and again when you combine
00:03:32.220 the representation by geographic region when you combine the skills and the particular skill sets of these
00:03:38.360 that may box you in further because you might be looking for you know a certain number of women 1.00
00:03:43.100 a certain number of men a certain number of this group or that group but you don't necessarily have
00:03:47.640 the people with the skills that you want to put in and so then it becomes a question for you
00:03:51.400 you know what do you do do you stick to that that goal of putting in a gender gender balanced cabinet 0.85
00:03:57.480 do you maybe you know have a like a 60-40 split do you maybe talk about that you just kind of ignore it
00:04:03.620 you know I think that it's maybe a mistake to ignore some of these things especially since
00:04:07.840 I think a lot of people would like to see more people involved in politics and if maybe there
00:04:13.140 are not as many of a particular group people that you would like to see involved that's definitely
00:04:16.920 something that we should maybe talk about but the question really is for people building cabinets
00:04:22.260 and for the prime minister's office what are they going to do about these things given the sort of
00:04:26.560 incentives constraints and maybe handicaps that they do have when thinking about these particular
00:04:30.700 things now this cabinet shuffle is again not so big and so when you are making such a shuffle
00:04:37.340 before a possible election it really is an opportunity to change face on some of these
00:04:42.880 very important files and the files that are being changed these are innovation again has to do with
00:04:48.100 some issues with China and some foreign stuff investment into this country purchasing of large
00:04:52.240 firms you're going to have global affairs which is a foreign affairs department that's where
00:04:55.800 Mark Garneau is going that's you know again a very huge file a lot of stuff to go on there
00:05:00.020 you have transport that's Omar Al-Gabra that stuff is probably taking new importance now especially
00:05:05.460 with COVID where we want to keep our infrastructure and supply chains going strong so these are big
00:05:10.960 files they may do well for the liberals and again they you know they've been polling at near majority
00:05:16.080 territory for a little while and it's really up to the conservatives what are they going to make of
00:05:20.440 this are they going to be able to take advantage of this is there anything for them to even take
00:05:24.360 advantage of you know maybe they'll shuffle their shadow cabinet which is these sort of critics
00:05:28.540 you might hear about the critics in the news so they might shuffle those people as well
00:05:32.020 but it's a very big opportunity for the opposition parties to maybe make their voice heard if they
00:05:38.820 haven't already and it's an interesting one for the government to try and rebuild their cabinet and
00:05:43.440 get ready for a potential election on the horizon so as always a lot of interesting stuff to think
00:05:48.820 about but for True North I am Sam Ashkenazi thank you so so much for watching this video please
00:05:53.420 don't forget to hit this subscribe button and the notification bell so you can stay up to date with
00:05:57.220 all the latest and greatest videos from True North so once again I'm Sam Ashkenazi and thank
00:06:01.520 you so much for watching