Back in November 2015, Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau and his then-wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau greeted their daughter Ella-Grace at Rideau Hall in Ottawa as Trudeau arrived for a swear-in ceremony with his cabinet.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
Nobody got any hugs this time.
Perhaps you, like me, thought you remembered the sunny-ways stroll up the Rideau Hall driveway in 2015, when Justin Trudeau and his first cabinet arrived to be sworn in after their surging majority win.
But even if you think you remember how joyful and giddy and self-congratulatory and stage-managed that day was, I promise you the reality is wilder than whatever you recall.
Dozens of shiny cabinet ministers and their spouses striding up the driveway en masse – purposeful, humble and tastefully overcoated! Adorable children flocking to their parents at exactly the right moment! A crowd of thousands rippling along the rope line as if they were waiting for a royal wedding procession to pass!
Even Mr. Sun got the memo, beaming his glorious autumn smile down upon that glowing political moment.
The whole thing was, simultaneously, a marvel of political stagecraft that it was impossible not to admire on some sort of sausage-making level, and also very extra, as the youths say.
But on Friday, it was the turn of Prime Minister Mark Carney (a phrase that’s going to feel for a while yet as if it’s the first week of January and you’re trying to remember what year it is). And when he and his new cabinet arrived at Rideau Hall to be sworn in, there was none of that. There was very specifically none of that.
They arrived in pairs or small groupings, mostly without family members in tow. Only a tiny knot of curious public onlookers gathered to see things unfold. There were no sprinting kids, no royal waves.
When Mr. Carney arrived – last and all alone – he materialized at the edge of the driveway and strode briskly toward Rideau Hall, detouring only briefly to tell the reporters who swarmed him that “We’re really focused on action at this time, and that action will start right now.”
Liberals send off Trudeau, welcome Carney in a strange, wistful, forgetful event
Inside, the ceremony, too, was all head-down austerity. After each of his ministers was sworn in – 23 in all, compared to 37 in the Trudeau cabinet it replaced – Mr. Carney offered them a handshake and sometimes a few quick words, then stood with Governor-General Mary Simon for the requisite posterity photo.
When it was their turns, François-Philippe Champagne, the new Finance Minister, initiated a business-bro forearm squeeze and Chrystia Freeland – until last Sunday, Mr. Carney’s chief leadership rival and the former finance minister who precipitated Mr. Trudeau’s resignation with her own – leaned in to whisper something, but that was about it for human theatre.
When Mr. Trudeau’s ministers were sworn in, on the other hand, a key part of the ritual was the Prime Minister greeting them with a deep embrace and long, meaningful eye contact.
If things went sideways later, those photos became howling indictments. Every time Mr. Trudeau chucked someone out of cabinet, or they leaped down the evacuation slide on their own, there was the inevitable photo from the Rideau Hall ballroom of the pair looking as if they were saying farewell on a drizzly train platform before one of them headed back to the front.
Political hugs can come back to bite you, so perhaps they’re better avoided in the first place.
But on Friday, the ostentatious absence of glad-handing and any other frills that might have been festooned across the moment was no less of a self-conscious statement than the glowing ticker-tape parade of 2015.
“Canada’s new government is changing how we work so we can deliver better results faster to all Canadians,” Mr. Carney said after the ceremony. “We have new ministers with new ideas ready to respond to new threats and to seize new opportunities.”
There was a profound overhanging weirdness that was so obvious and omnipresent that it was almost invisible, like wallpaper.
Unless everyone has severely misread Mr. Carney’s clear signals that he will trigger an election rather than waiting for his government’s near-certain defeat when the House of Commons is set to resume on March 24, he will be back at Rideau Hall in a matter of days. Ms. Simon’s staff might have offered the Prime Minister some pastries on Friday while he waited to be sworn in that will likely still be edible when he drops by again to bring down Parliament.
So, this new cabinet is the vision he is presenting to worried, furious Canadians scowling at the southern border. If voters buy what he puts in the shop window – if public opinion keeps doing what it’s been doing for the past two months – then presumably many of these people would keep their new jobs, and it would be thanks to one of the most stunning comebacks in Canadian political history.
But if, on the other hand, public opinion reverts to some version of where it was for an entire year before the past two months, then that cabinet proudly showcased by Mr. Carney becomes fodder for some truly evil future pub trivia questions: For 100,000 points, who was the federal health minister for 96 hours in March, 2025?
On Friday, the Prime Minister referred to his front bench as “Canada’s new government” again and again, and it’s a concept he’s certain to keep hammering for the obvious reason that he wants to cut ties with the now-toxic reputation of the former Trudeau government.
But there’s something else this lean, mean trade-war machine government calls to mind. It’s there in the ultra-pragmatic minimalism, the studied austerity that conveys seriousness of purpose, the sense of doing away with anything extraneous to focus on the matter at hand.
On Friday, Canada met its Steve Jobs Black Turtleneck government.
