After thinking a bit more about it, and seeing some of the reaction over the Twitter Machine over the weekend, I find myself coming back to Chantal Hébert’s weekend column about Trudeau treating his rookie ministers like cannon fodder, and I really have a hard time with it. Part of why I have difficulty is because it ignores some of the actual day-to-day realities as to why there were so many rookies in cabinet, which was that there were not a lot of veterans to choose from, and in order to maintain regional and gender balance, while still ensuring that you had enough veterans to do the other jobs of being a party in power, like having committee chairs who had some experience, then of course you were going to have rookies in cabinet. As well, the fact that Trudeau is behaving far more in the ethos of government by cabinet than his predecessor means that some of these rookies are going to be saddled with responsibility (and yes, this is a far less centrally-controlled cabinet, as I’ve spoken to staffers who used to work at Queen’s Park and have regaled us with the vast differences between how things operated between them).

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/873874200116822017

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/873874526542737408

https://twitter.com/EmmMacfarlane/status/873876146395467776

I also find the implicit notion that it’s young women ministers being thrown under the bus to be a problem, because I’m not so sure we’d hear the same complaints if it were a male minister who has been handed a tough file and it doesn’t go according to the expectations of the pundit class. Yes, Joly made a bad call with Madeleine Meilleur, but I would hardly call Joly incapable, and she is juggling a lot of other files on her plate at the moment. She’s not incompetent, and Trudeau hasn’t thrown her under any bus. Maryam Monsef? She handled a file that was basically a flaming bag of dog excrement and managed to come out intact with a promotion to a line department with a hefty agenda (whereas “Democratic institutions” is a make-work project with staff assigned from PCO). Monsef did her job, better than most people give her credit for, and the fact that the Rosemary’s Baby that was electoral reform got smothered in the cradle is not a black mark on her because she didn’t micromanage the committee. The fact that the Liberals on that committee dropped the ball and didn’t make their own case, and in fact let themselves be railroaded by the other parties is not Monsef’s fault (though one has to wonder how much blame to assign to her for letting Nathan Cullen manipulate her into accepting the “proportional” nonsense in committee make-up that doomed it). If anyone blames Karina Gould for electoral reform being cancelled, they’re the ones at fault – not Gould. Trudeau made that call (rightfully), and has taken his lumps for it. And if Hébert or anyone else (like Ed Broadbent for one) thinks that these poor young women should have been either kept out of cabinet instead of being given difficult files and a chance to prove themselves because they’re women, then I think that’s a bigger problem. I’m not seeing any cannon fodder – just some ministers doing their best with some of the problems handed to them.

Good reads:

• Harjit Sajjan says “all options are on the table” about replacement fighters, and did meet with Lockheed Martin in Singapore while Super Hornets remain in question.
• NATO is asking for Canadian police trainers in Afghanistan.
• Documents show that Foreign Affairs was already grappling with Canada’s waning influence on the world stage before the 2015 election, not just since Trump.
• Health Canada is looking at banning all advertising of junk foods for children and youth under 17.
• Here’s a look at the Senate Human Right’s committee’s study on Canadian prisons.
• Éric Grenier maps the contours of the NDP leadership race to date, given its particular rules.
• A Superior Court judge has upheld the NDP decision to disqualify a would-be leadership candidate, but does say the party is not immune from judicial review.
• At the NDP debate yesterday, Jagmeet Singh was under fire for not explicitly ruling out Kinder Morgan, plus they all lapped up the Jeremy Corbyn smugness.

Odds and ends:

Senator Nicole Eaton talks about paired kidney donation, which she undertook before the death of her husband.