Justin Trudeau met with the press yesterday and offered a few bits of post-election news – namely that he was not going to seek any kind of formal or informal coalition (not that he would need to, given how the seat maths work out), that the new Cabinet would be sworn in on November 20th, and that yes, the Trans Mountain pipeline is going ahead, no matter how much huffing and puffing certain opposition parties may try to engage in (for all the good it will do because it’s not something that would come before Parliament in any meaningful capacity in any case). Not that there should have been any doubt – he has expended so much political capital on the project that not doing so would make no sense. The November 20th date is later than he took to decide on a Cabinet after the last election, and Trudeau remarked that he has a lot of reflection to do with the loss of all of his Alberta and Saskatchewan seats, and that is no doubt part of the task ahead.
To that end, Trudeau didn’t give any indication whether he would appoint a senator or two to Cabinet to fill those geographic holes (and I will be writing more on this in an upcoming column) – but did say he was going to introduce changes to the Parliament of Canada Act to make the “independent” Senate more permanently so (not that he can legislate the new appointment process, but rather it deals operationally with salaries for caucus leaders). The “facilitator” of the Independent Senators Group is already decrying that any plan to put senators in Cabinet would be somehow “counterproductive” to the whole independent Senate project, which is of course ignorant of history and Parliament itself. I do find myself troubled that Trudeau singled out the mayors of Calgary and Edmonton as people he would be consulting with as part of his “reflection” on how to rebuild trust with Alberta and in terms of how to somehow include them in his Cabinet-making process, because they have agendas of their own, and it would seem to just exacerbate the whole urban-rural divide that the election results are so indicative of.
Trudeau has some options for getting that Alberta and Saskatchewan representation in Cabinet, from Senators, to floor-crossers, of simply appointing non-Parliamentarians to the role (which is permissible, but goes somewhat against the convention that they seek seats as soon as possible). Here’s Philippe Lagassé explaining some of the options and dynamics:
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187081027254194183
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187081821948915717
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187083301086990336
https://twitter.com/PhilippeLagasse/status/1187084679859638272