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Standing in front of Rideau Hall on Tuesday, Carney beamed. “Our government will deliver its mandate for change with urgency and determination,” he said. “We’re going to deliver that mandate with a new team, purpose-built for this hinge moment in Canada’s history.” 

Carney spent his election campaign explaining that hinge moment: The choice between mediocrity and irrelevance or a radical remake of the Canadian economy and a chance for Ottawa to lead the world. The prime minister cannot helm such a massive pivot without a lot of help.

Let’s start with our new foreign minister. Melanie Joly is out of the job, shuffled into her dream gig as Minister of Industry and replaced with Anita Anand. Given that I called for Joly’s ouster last year, you would think I’d be happy — but it’s hard to ignore that swapping foreign ministers right now feels risky. Joly was increasingly keen to prove her ability to win over allies and forge new diplomatic ties in recent months. And Anand, despite being an exceedingly capable manager, has no real foreign policy experience. 

If the wisdom of Anand’s appointment is unclear, Carney’s selection for her junior minister is downright perplexing. At a time when Canada desperately needs to step up in its contribution to global security and humanitarian assistance, Carney has selected Surrey MP Randeep Sarai.

Sarai is lawyer and real estate mogul who had his license suspended in 2005 over a litany of complaints. A scathing decision from his regulatory body found his behaviour and professional failures “.” As an MP, Sarai made the obscene decision to — a man charged, but never convicted, for attacking former B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh — to join the prime minister’s ill-fated trip to India in 2018. He has since been subject to a litany of bad press in the Indian media.

Worst of all, Sarai has no experience in international development. He is, however, an effective political organizer.

On the defence file, things are worse, as Carney has totally blundered in dropping Bill Blair. Yes, he was one of the older ministers and a hangover from Trudeau’s early days: But he was also pushing Ottawa to take defence seriously long before Donald Trump came back to power. And he succeeded in getting the government on track to spend two per cent of GDP on defence by 2030.

His replacement, David McGuinty, is capable but his recent years on the public safety file have been marked by the same status quo. The RCMP has grown increasingly unsustainable, we have fallen behind on intelligence collection, and our prisons have slumped further into disrepair. 

The bright spot here comes from Carney’s appointment of former fighter jet pilot Stephen Fuhr to handle military procurement. One of Carney’s wonkiest campaign promises involved giving the military the power to procure its own gear again: Fuhr is a smart hire to get that done. Partnering him with Blair’s experience and vision would have been an even smarter move.

On the economic portfolios, there really hasn’t been much change at all. François-Philippe Champagne remains as finance minister, while Chrystia Freeland sticks around as minister of transport with the added responsibility for internal trade. These two have been core to Ottawa’s economic policy for much of the past decade, which means which also means it’s unlikely they’ll be fixing the ills of their own legacies. A perfect illustration: The pair had long lauded their ability to attract automaker Honda to Ontario — with the promise of lavish government subsidies — to build electric vehicles. Just as the two of them arrived at Rideau Hall for the swearing-in, Honda announced it was postponing the $15 billion electric vehicle and battery plant while also moving production of one of its most popular gas models to America instead. 

Nowhere on the grounds was Carlos Leitão, Quebec’s former finance minister who was recruited to run by Carney. Over Leitão’s tenure, Quebec surpassed Ontario in economic growth while bringing the province from deficit to huge surplus. You would think he would be in high-demand in this economy-focused government, but apparently not.

The freshest face on the economic files is Tim Hodgson, whose past gigs include a long stint at Goldman Sachs, a tenure at the Bank of Canada alongside Carney, and a spell at HydroOne. As Minister for Natural Resources, it will be his responsibility to find new markets for Canadian energy while keeping Alberta’s increasingly-unhinged premier happy. He’s a smart pick for the job.

So far, a mixed bag. But one of the most necessary areas of change will be in the machinery of government itself. Over the past decade, the Government of Canada has gotten worse at delivering services, slower at building things, and has itself become a hindrance to private sector growth. To fix that, the civil service needs reform: Silos need smashing, processes need streamlining, and productivity needs to go way up. The man responsible for that massive task is Shafqat Ali.

Ali is a reformer realtor with a thin record in Parliament. Why he was selected for such a pivotal gig is far from clear. Even more bizarre is that, as President of the Treasury Board, he is responsible for enforcing official bilingualism in the civil service — yet he didn’t even bother to read any of his oath of office in French, as many of his fellow anglophones did.

Worse still is Carney’s approach to the still-burning housing crisis. To fix it, he has bounced progressive thinker Nathaniel Erskine-Smith — who correctively diagnosed the problem with housing, but barely had the time to start working on the solution — in favour of former Vancouver mayor Gregor Robertson. It’s a galling choice: Robertson’s decade in power maps perfectly onto prices spiralling out of control as new construction remained sluggish. Indeed, he consistently for new residential units, something Carney has, correctly, identified as a huge hindrance on fixing this crisis.

While there is always much teeth gnashing about the limited impacts of gender parity quotas on tapping talent, in this cabinet, some of the most inspired choices are women. Neophyte MP and Minister of Health Marjorie Michel has an impressive CV that includes both work in the civil service and as a ministerial chief of staff. Carney also has three northern women handling the Arctic and Indigenous files: Former Yellowknife mayor Rebecca Alty, Anishinaabe educator Rebecca Chartrand, and former Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees Mandy Gull-Masty. These are some brilliant choices.

One of the great failures of Trudeau’s government was not who occupied the roles but the amount of power they wielded. Despite what he said publicly, Trudeau did not trust his ministers to pursue their own initiatives. He micromanaged their offices, tolerated laziness and incompetence, and ousted capable ministers for superficial reasons. 

Carney says he’s insisting on a return to a more “traditional” state, a “true cabinet government, with everyone expected and empowered to show leadership. To bring new ideas. To bring new focus. And to take decisive actions.”

That’s perhaps the most encouraging thing Carney said on Tuesday. And yet it was immediately undercut by the fact that Carney held a press conference flanked by his new team, but not one was invited to speak.

Time will tell how much change is really coming to Ottawa, but Tuesday was a real opportunity to be bold: To reward skill and experience instead of fundraising prowess; to put less emphasis on politically-sensitive communities in order to keep effective operators in place; perhaps even to ditch gender parity — and appoint more women than men. 

This cabinet may yet surprise us. But I’m already hearing from members of his caucus who feel that this team represents a bad omen for Carney’s tenure. Change was necessary, and there is some — but in refusing to think big, Carney has likely gone with change of the wrong kind.