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Paul Wells on PM Trudeau’s cabinet shake up

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Rechie Valdez teared up a bit taking her oath. It was nice.


Posted with permission from Substack author Paul Wells


The army you have

Exciting new combinations of Liberals and syllables

I skipped almost the entire cabinet-shuffle business on Wednesday. I think I’ve mostly managed to avoid getting jaded in this job, but there are days, boy howdy. Welcome, Minister Blah Blah Blah to the crucial office of Provision, Preparedness, Children and Popular Song. Congratulations, hug your kids. Next.

Then here was Rechie Valdez’s voice catching as she took the oaths (one for entry into the Council of the Elders and the other to join the Resonant Circle of the One, or whatever) and for just a minute, boredom took a holiday. The people who do these jobs should be emotional about them. Optimism is a good thing. Small businesses are definitely on the list of things worth caring about. Go get ’em, minister.

 

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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of days like this. During the 2021 campaign, when things were going badly, the official line out of the Trudeau brain trust was that the prime minister “doesn’t do shakeups.” And yet here’s one now. What’s changed?

There are always two ready answers to such a question. For one, the world has changed, as it always does. Previous shuffles addressed the astonishing 2016 votes for Brexit and Trump, and the less epochal but still significant election of Doug Ford as Ontario premier in 2018. In late 2021, when Trudeau was randomly firing one of the most experienced ministers in his cabinet, it might still have been possible to believe the PM’s third term in office wouldn’t be dominated by Russia, China, and the knock-on effects from a sharp increase in immigration. The misplaced optimism of that bygone era 20 months ago can no longer be maintained.

Second, the electoral context has changed. “We have all the time in the world before the next election” has become “We sure don’t,” and the readers who get cross when I link to horse-race polls are going to hate clicking on this.

I guess this shuffle is designed to address the Poilievre threat? Kind of? Listlessly? A year ago Trudeau was already getting advice to make sharp, noticeable changes in his team, message and style. (Yes, I just linked to myself.) Today he put Sean Fraser in charge of Housing and Marc Miller in charge of Immigration. Those might be the two most encouraging moves among dozens, both for Liberals who hope “good communicators” won’t turn out to be a sad joke, and for citizens who hope strong administrators might, even if only occasionally, be put in charge of challenging files.

 

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The rest of the day’s news is puzzling. Seamus O’Regan to Labour? I thought the boss liked him. Pablo Rodriguez to Transport would seem to be yet another case of ministerial burnout on all those Web Giant-Killer bills that have become the torment of a succession of Heritage ministers. Pascale St.-Onge replaces him on the censorship ‘n’ subsidies beat, ringing a new variation on the eternal question: Why do they call it Canadian Heritage if only ministers from Quebec are allowed to do the job?

Gary Anandasangaree at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Arif Virani as Minister of Justice and Attorney-General are two cases of rookie ministers promoted to tough jobs. I’ve heard good things about both of them. Both have relevant committee and parliamentary-secretary experience. Virani was Jody Wilson-Raybould’s parliamentary secretary; she seems not to have kept many fond memories. (In her memoir she calls him one of the “talking heads” who were sent out “to make comments that evidence has now shown were not accurate or right.” In general, Trudeau, a non-lawyer mostly counselled by non-lawyers, seems to be chronically unsure why he should have a justice minister or what they are good for.)

Freeland, Guilbeault, Champagne and Joly remain in their previous jobs, evidence of their clout. On the other hand, I maintain that Rodriguez’s being shuffled was evidence of his clout. By now it’s clear that Freeland writes her own rules: she does the work she wants to do, to varying degrees of success, and nobody in this government can make her do anything else. Her fate is bound up with the prime minister’s. Probably neither of them expected it, but the stability of the tandem is now part of Trudeauworld’s game physics.

Cabinet shuffles defy confident prediction, or should. Will Jean-Yves Duclos make a difference as Public Services and Procurement Minister? He should. He’s a detail man in a detail job. But ministers are rarely better than they are permitted to be by circumstances and by the circle around the PM. Duclos will shine if this government wants to buy stuff, and not if it doesn’t.

That 2021 bit of campaign spin wasn’t entirely false. In some ways this prime minister really doesn’t do shakeups. He keeps his chief of staff, his indispensable deputy, his own way of thinking and talking about his government. Everything else swirls around. He came to office promising real change. Increasingly what’s real is what doesn’t change.

 

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armed forces

Top Brass Is On The Run Ahead Of Trump’s Return

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Morgan Murphy

With less than a month to go before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the top brass are already running for cover. This week the Army’s chief of staff, Gen. Randy George, pledged to cut approximately a dozen general officers from the U.S. Army.

It is a start.

But given the Army is authorized 219 general officers, cutting just 12 is using a scalpel when a machete is in order. At present, the ratio of officers to enlisted personnel stands at an all-time high. During World War II, we had one general for every 6,000 troops. Today, we have one for every 1,600.

Right now, the United States has 1.3 million active-duty service members according to the Defense Manpower Data Center. Of those, 885 are flag officers (fun fact: you get your own flag when you make general or admiral, hence the term “flag officer” and “flagship”). In the reserve world, the ratio is even worse. There are 925 general and flag officers and a total reserve force of just 760,499 personnel. That is a flag for every 674 enlisted troops.

The hallways at the Pentagon are filled with a constellation of stars and the legions of staffers who support them. I’ve worked in both the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Starting around 2011, the Joint Staff began to surge in scope and power. Though the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is not in the chain of command and simply serves as an advisor to the president, there are a staggering 4,409 people working for the Joint Staff, including 1,400 civilians with an average salary of $196,800 (yes, you read that correctly). The Joint Staff budget for 2025 is estimated by the Department of Defense’s comptroller to be $1.3 billion.

In contrast, the Secretary of Defense — the civilian in charge of running our nation’s military — has a staff of 2,646 civilians and uniformed personnel. The disparity between the two staffs threatens the longstanding American principle of civilian control of the military.

Just look at what happens when civilians in the White House or the Senate dare question the ranks of America’s general class. “Politicizing the military!” critics cry, as if the Commander-in-Chief has no right to question the judgement of generals who botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, bought into the woke ideology of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or oversaw over-budget and behind-schedule weapons systems. Introducing accountability to the general class is not politicizing our nation’s military — it is called leadership.

What most Americans don’t understand is that our top brass is already very political. On any given day in our nation’s Capitol, a casual visitor is likely to run into multiple generals and admirals visiting our elected representatives and their staff. Ostensibly, these “briefs” are about various strategic threats and weapons systems — but everyone on the Hill knows our military leaders are also jockeying for their next assignment or promotion. It’s classic politics

The country witnessed this firsthand with now-retired Gen. Mark Milley. Most Americans were put off by what they saw. Milley brazenly played the Washington spin game, bragging in a Senate Armed Services hearing that he had interviewed with Bob Woodward and a host of other Washington, D.C. reporters.

Woodward later admitted in an interview with CNN that he was flabbergasted by Milley, recalling the chairman hadn’t just said “[Trump] is a problem or we can’t trust him,” but took it to the point of saying, “he is a danger to the country. He is the most dangerous person I know.” Woodward said that Milley’s attitude felt like an assignment editor ordering him, “Do something about this.”

Think on that a moment — an active-duty four star general spoke on the record, disparaging the Commander-in-Chief. Not only did it show rank insubordination and a breach of Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 88, but Milley’s actions represented a grave threat against the Constitution and civilian oversight of the military.

How will it play out now that Trump has returned? Old political hands know that what goes around comes around. Milley’s ham-handed political meddling may very well pave the way for a massive reorganization of flag officers similar to Gen. George C. Marshall’s “plucking board” of 1940. Marshall forced 500 colonels into retirement saying, “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed; you give mediocrity a great deal and they will fail.”

Marshall’s efforts to reorient the War Department to a meritocracy proved prescient when the United States entered World War II less than two years later.

Perhaps it’s time for another plucking board to remind the military brass that it is their civilian bosses who sit at the top of the U.S. chain of command.

Morgan Murphy is military thought leader, former press secretary to the Secretary of Defense and national security advisor in the U.S. Senate.

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Business

For the record—former finance minister did not keep Canada’s ‘fiscal powder dry’

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From the Fraser Institute

By Ben Eisen

In case you haven’t heard, Chrystia Freeland resigned from cabinet on Monday. Reportedly, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Prime Minister Trudeau’s plan to send all Canadians earning up to $150,000 a onetime $250 tax “rebate.” In her resignation letter, Freeland seemingly took aim at this ill-advised waste of money by noting “costly political gimmicks.” She could not have been more right, as my colleagues and I have written herehere and elsewhere.

Indeed, Freeland was right to excoriate the government for a onetime rebate cheque that would do nothing to help Canada’s long-term economic growth prospects, but her reasoning was curious given her record in office. She wrote that such gimmicks were unwise because Canada must keep its “fiscal powder dry” given the possibility of trade disputes with the United States.

Again, to a large extent Freeland’s logic is sound. Emergencies come up from time to time, and governments should be particularly frugal with public dollars during non-emergency periods so money is available when hard times come.

For example, the federal government’s generally restrained approach to spending during the 1990s and 2000s was an important reason Canada went into the pandemic with its books in better shape than most other countries. This is an example of how keeping “fiscal powder dry” can help a government be ready when emergencies strike.

However, much of the sentiment in Freeland’s resignation letter does not match her record as finance minister.

Of course, during the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, it’s understandable that the federal government ran large deficits. However, several years have now past and the Trudeau government has run large continuous deficits. This year, the government forecasts a $48.3 billion deficit, which is larger than the $40 billion target the government had previously set.

A finance minister committed to keeping Canada’s fiscal powder dry would have pushed for balanced budgets so Ottawa could start shrinking the massive debt burden accumulated during COVID. Instead, deficits persisted and debt has continued to climb. As a result, federal debt may spike beyond levels reached during the pandemic if another emergency strikes.

Minister Freeland’s reported decision to oppose the planned $250 onetime tax rebates is commendable. But we should be cautious not to rewrite history. Despite Freeland’s stated desire to keep Canada’s “fiscal powder dry,” this was not the story of her tenure as finance minister. Instead, the story is one of continuous deficits and growing debt, which have hurt Canada’s capacity to withstand the next fiscal emergency whenever it does arrive.

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