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Carney didn’t name Trudeau as the missing piece of this new federal cabinet, but his message — that this is the not-Trudeau cabinet — was crystal clear. 

“Canadians elected us with a mandate for change. So there is a great deal of change in this cabinet, by necessity,” Carney said, boasting that he’d created a “perfect” mix by building a team that’s made up of half rookies, half experienced hands. 

The other message that it sends is that this is a prime minister not afraid to cut people loose, even those Carney installed around him when he did his first shuffle after winning the leadership, such as Toronto’s Nate Erskine-Smith and Bill Blair, or Jonathan Wilkinson from British Columbia. 

While the cuts were no doubt brutal to those who didn’t get the call for cabinet this time, it’s not the worst reputation for Carney to acquire early, as a prime minister who won’t cling to ministers when it’s time for them to move on. 

Trudeau showed flashes of this during his time as Liberal leader too, but Carney is laying down the law with his ministers before most of them have had a chance to hire their own teams. 

One other big difference Carney seemed keen to establish is that his PMO won’t be holding hands of any ministers, new or old. 

“This cabinet is smaller and more focused than those of previous governments,” Carney said. “It will operate with a commitment to true cabinet government, with everyone expected and empowered to show leadership, bring new ideas, to have a clear focus and to take decisive actions to accomplish their work in a return to more traditional cabinet.”

That’s a delicate, but definite criticism of how Carney saw Trudeau’s government operating — too much from the centre, where decisions or problems pile up and can take ages to be resolved. 

Whether Carney can pull that off is another question. Trudeau came to the job of PM promising to decentralize government too, but this is a world in which many issues don’t fit into neat, ministerial boxes, with plenty of overlap, and the PMO is often needed to oversee developments that span multiple ministries. 

Carney is also so far displaying strict discipline over who speaks for his government at the moment. He said several times on Tuesday that the buck stops with him on all matters dealing with Canada-U.S. relations and Donald Trump. And as was the case a week ago when Carney met with Trump, Carney did all the talking on Tuesday — not any of his new or old ministers. 

This too could be at odds with his vow to cultivate “true ministerial government,” with cabinet members speaking for themselves without waiting for the go-ahead from the PMO. 

The new Carney cabinet isn’t totally exorcised of the ghost of Trudeau, as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was eager to point out on Tuesday,  listing all the old ministers who had survived the Carney cuts. Poilievre is predicting that Trudeau policies on everything from housing to the environment are just being repackaged. 

“Mr. Carney talked a good game about reversing liberal policies in these areas, but now we have to find out if he was serious, and so far, it’s not a promising start,” he said. 

Carney has stuck to Trudeau’s policy — an innovation in 2015 — of gender parity in cabinet and he restored a ministry in charge of women’s issues, which was cut in his first try at cabinet-making, to much criticism. 

This is a sign — a welcome one — that Carney is still learning on the job and that he and his team have been hearing the criticism about the “bro culture” that seemed to be swirling around the early team coalescing around the new Liberal leader. 

Trudeau has kept himself far from the spotlight, deliberately so, since Carney took over and it’s unclear how much the two men would be talking these days, though there’s no real sign of bad blood between them.

Trudeau was present in one way at the swearing-in on Tuesday, with the choice of Marjorie Michel as Canada’s new health minister. Michel, who served as deputy chief of staff to Trudeau, ran and won in her old boss’s Papineau riding in Quebec and Trudeau did show up to help her during the campaign.

Trudeau was probably expecting Carney to put some distance between them with this new ministry, so he likely shrugged off a lot of the not-Trudeau talk. But Michel’s appointment would have heartened him — Papineau still has a seat at the cabinet table.