There are three ways for the Prime Minister to put Mark Carney in Cabinet, and they would all go horribly.
Each of these gets progressively riskier, until we have to ask ourselves, why bother?
As The Globe and Mail reports, Prime Minister Trudeau has asked Mark Carney to join the government. Does this mean he will soon be replacing Minister Freeland on the Finance portfolio, or that there will be a massive cabinet shuffle around him? Is the hierarchy of power in the Liberal Party of Canada about to change beyond recognition?
No. Not at all. Sources in that article report the Prime Minister has assured Minister Freeland that her job is safe, at least for now. Additionally, the Prime Minister has told Mr. Carney that he has two options: (A) run in a by-election, or (B) wait to run in the general election. Clearly, Mr. Carney is favoured enough with the Prime Minister that he could pick a open riding and the nomination would be accelerated for him.
But there are problems with this approach, and the Prime Minister, unlike Mr. Carney, does not have the luxury of patience. While Mr. Carney would benefit from time serving in government to bolster his political resume, he has the ability to wait for a more opportune moment where victory is more certain. Prime Minister Trudeau, on the other hand, wants Mr. Carney sooner rather than later, to demonstrate that the Liberals are not a sinking ship and that strong candidates want to run under the Liberal banner.
Thus, if Mr. Carney does not feel that he can win a by-election in any of the currently vacant seats, he may hold out for an alternative option. Contrary to public belief, there are alternative options to get someone into the government without putting them through an election. However, these options have become increasingly rare in usage, and are so likely to incite public controversy that it would ruin any benefit of bringing Mr. Carney into the fold.
By-Election Seat Selection Perfection
According to Elections Canada, as of the current date there are three vacancies in the House of Commons which will require a by-election to be called if an early general election remains untriggered. Each of these three ridings has a separate deadline for when the by-election must have a writ issued, and the election date must be between thirty-six (36) to fifty (50) days after the issuance of the writ.
The first of these ridings is LaSalle–Émard–Verdun, composed of multiple boroughs in Montréal, Québec. This riding was vacated by the Hon. David Lametti roughly half a year after he was dropped from the Prime Minister’s Cabinet in a shuffle, and the Canada Elections Act requires a writ to be issued on July 30th at the latest. The short notice that this would require Mark Carney to make a decision on is perhaps why we already know he’s opted against it.
For this by-election, we have confirmed that the Liberal candidate is Laura Palestini, a Montréal city councillor and former four-term borough councillor with deep roots in LaSalle, including sitting on the board of the LaSalle Hospital Foundation. On background, local Liberals have communicated to me that they are enthusiastic about her candidacy, and happy they have a strong local candidate rather than a parachute from outside the community like Mr. Carney.
The Tories have nominated Louis Ialenti, co-owner of a made-to-measure men’s tailor shop, but the 338Canada model currently projects the Conservatives to come in fourth in LaSalle–Émard–Verdun. The Bloc Québécois and the NDP are tied at a close second to the Liberals in the projections, and a strong local candidate like Ms. Palestini is necessary to defend against that two-pronged attack. She will have greater chances of victory than Mr. Carney would have even in his most optimistic scenario.
The next open candidacy for a by-election would be in Elmwood–Transcona, located in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This riding consists of several blue-collar residential areas, previously their own municipalities prior to the Amalgamation of Winnipeg in 1972. This riding has been held by the NDP in every race except one, the 2011 Blue Wave which delivered former Prime Minister Harper to his first and only majority government.
From 1988 to 2008, it was held by NDP MP Bill Blaikie; after resigning, he was replaced by Jim Maloway, the contemporary provincial NDP MLA in the same riding. Mr. Blaikie then himself ran for Mr. Maloway’s vacated provincial seat. Mr. Maloway himself was displaced in a close contest by Conservative candidate Lawrence Toet in 2011. Finally, in 2015, Bill Blaikie’s son Daniel rose up to reclaim his father’s seat for the NDP, defeating Mr. Toet by only 61 votes. The younger Mr. Blaikie then defeated Mr. Toet again in 2019, by an appreciably larger margin.
Accepting an offer to work in Premier Wab Kinew’s office in Manitoba, Daniel Blaikie has now resigned his federal seat in exchange for a transition to provincial politics, much like the elder Mr. Blaikie and Mr. Maloway before him. As such, the riding is now unheld, and a by-election must have a writ issued by September 29th at the latest; any writ dropped on that final date would have the by-election scheduled between November 4th and November 18th.
The electoral record clearly indicates that while the NDP are normally resilient in this riding, their veil can be pierced by the Conservatives during a significant blue wave. There is no path to electoral victory for any Liberal in this riding, and if there was, it would be for someone with significant labour bonafides, which Mr. Carney does not possess.
The Conservative candidate, on the other hand, is a union member running on the platform that the Liberals and the NDP have abandoned labour. That’s a strong message against an NDP candidate who is Executive Director of a Business Improvement Zone in Winnipeg, and thus has closer ties to capital over labour.
338Canada’s model projects the NDP leading the Conservatives, but also reflects significant upward momentum for the Tories after the debut of their new candidate, compared to their projections from the previous weeks. The Liberals, who have not yet nominated a candidate, are projected for a distant third; there is zero likelihood that Mr. Carney attempts to run a race in this riding.
The final seat vacancy in the House of Commons is for the riding of Cloverdale–Langley City, located in British Columbia and composed of the City of Langley, the Cloverdale neighbourhood of the City of Surrey, and a small western slice of the Township of Langley, all within the Metro Vancouver Regional District. The Surrey Langley SkyTrain Project to extend the Expo Line light metro will run through all three municipalities, and is planned to open in 2028.
This riding was first created in the 2013 Representation Order, and it was won by Liberal candidate John Aldag through the momentum of the 2015 Red Wave under Prime Minister Trudeau. In 2019, the riding flipped back to the Conservatives on a close margin, with Tamara Jansen unseating Mr. Aldag. However, in a political comeback, Mr. Aldag returned once again as the Liberal candidate in 2021, directly challenging Ms. Jansen and successfully reclaiming his old seat.
In the present day, Mr. Aldag has resigned from his federal seat as a Liberal, instead now pursuing the BC NDP nomination for the province’s upcoming general election this October. With the Federal Liberals on a downward trend, and the BC Liberals effectively dead as a party and replaced by the far-right BC Conservatives, the BC NDP appear to be the most attractive option for maintaining his political future.
Mr. Aldag clearly wishes to continue serving in public office, but does not believe he will be able to rewin his seat as a federal Liberal, and thus he is jumping ship to the next best opportunity. This lack of confidence from an incumbent who was previously unafraid to fight hard battles should deeply concern any Liberal hoping to win Cloverdale–Langley City in his absence.
The 338Canada projections heavily favour the Tories to swing the pendulum back in their favour, with a high possibility they win over fifty percent. The latest possible date the writ could drop is November 30th this fall, but such a late date would cause the by-election to occur between January 5th and January 19th. I would expect this by-election to have a writ issued at an earlier time, to avoid overlap with the holiday season where volunteer turnout would be low.
There are two by-elections where the Liberal nomination is vacant and Mr. Carney could choose to run, but both are clearly so unattractive to the Liberals that there is no reason for him to blow his first opportunity on such a poor chance of victory. As aforementioned in the beginning of this piece, Mr. Carney has every incentive to continue being patient before jumping into the fray, meanwhile the Prime Minister has every incentive to pull Mr. Carney into government at the earliest opportunity.
So, with no good by-elections for Mr. Carney to run as the candidate in, and with the need to incentivize Mr. Carney to join before the next general election, the Prime Minister may be forced to consider unusual measures. Those measures, merited or otherwise, are so uncommon in modern Canadian politics that they would invite…significant disquiet amongst the public.
Did You Remember The Senate Exists?
Once upon a time, it was regularly normal, if infrequent, for a Prime Minister to appoint a senator to their Cabinet, rather than a Member of Parliament. Considering the explicitly partisan nature of the Senate, from the start of Confederation right up until the expulsion of all 32 Liberal Senators from the Liberal caucus in 2014, it’s not surprising that past Prime Ministers were more eager to draw upon the senators in their caucus in order to fill their cabinet.
Sometimes, this was done because a senator was genuinely the most qualified person for the job in caucus, but other times, this was done to fill regional or linguistic disparities when a caucus did not have enough MPs from that background; in doing so, the Prime Minister ensures their cabinet is fully representative of the diversity of the Canadian public.
This happened in the 21st Canadian Ministry, the cabinet of former Prime Minister Joe Clark, who appointed francophone Senators Jacques Flynn, Robert de Cotret, and Martial Asselin due to the severe lack of francophone representation in his caucus. With virtually no francophone representation elected as MPs in either Québec or Ontario, appointing Franco-Canadian senators was deemed far more palatable than having no Franco-Canadian representation in Cabinet at all.
While Senator Flynn and the future Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Asselin had already served in the Senate since the 1960s, Senator de Cotret was appointed to the Senate in 1979 by Joe Clark for this exact purpose; de Cotret would resign from the Senate in 1980 to attempt to regain his former seat in the House of Commons, but would only succeed in returning as an MP in 1984.
When Pierre Elliot Trudeau reclaimed the Premiership from Joe Clark in the 1980 election, he appointed Senator Bud Olson to his Cabinet as Minister of Economic and Regional Development, simply as a matter of Olson's outsized power and influence within the Liberal Party. While senators have not been appointed recently to any cabinet, there is little doubt that the practice remains constitutionally valid and well-established by precedent.
Indeed, not only have many senators served in various cabinets, there are two Prime Ministers who served their entire term as Senators rather than as MPs, Sir John Abbott and Sir Mackenzie Bowell. The former was eventually able to turn over power to his favoured successor, but the latter would see himself betrayed by his own cabinet and forced to resign the Premiership, albeit serving his party in the Senate for several more decades until his natural death.
Over in the United Kingdom, where the House of Lords is an upper house of appointees much alike Canada’s Senate, a Lord was serving in the Prime Minister of the UK’s cabinet up until this very month. After booting Suella Braverman from his Cabinet, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak shuffled his Foreign Secretary into Braverman’s former role of Home Secretary, which thus necessitated filling the role of the Foreign Secretary.
Instead of appointing any MP to the vacant position of Foreign Secretary, Mr. Sunak granted former Prime Minister David Cameron a life peerage, creating him Baron Cameron of Chipping Norton. In much the same way that Prime Minister Joe Clark made Robert de Cotret a Senator, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made David Cameron a Baron, believing that participating in the upper house of Parliament granted some additional legitimacy to his participation in cabinet.
This did draw criticism from members of Prime Minister Sunak’s caucus, angry that loyal MPs had been overlooked for promotion in favour of recruiting outside talent. I would expect Prime Minister Trudeau to face similar blowback from within his own caucus if he placed Mr. Carney in the Senate to give him a role in Cabinet, passing over one of them.
Nonetheless, the British public largely tolerated Baron Cameron’s appointment on the basis that he was one of the few Tories in Sunak’s Cabinet they deemed competent at his role. Baron Cameron was indeed far more competent at doing his job than any of the Tories sitting as MPs, and it is a sign that more Prime Ministers should embrace humility and draw upon the experience of their predecessors. The problems that Prime Minister Trudeau would face, however, are unique to the Canadian political landscape, and they are ultimately problems of his own design.
For one, the British House of Lords is still explicitly partisan, with the Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats all represented by Lords, as well as minor parties such as the Greens and Plaid Cymru. In contrast, the Senate in Canada is now explicitly non-partisan, by Prime Minister Trudeau’s own design. There are 105 seats in the Senate of Canada, and the Conservative Party now holds only twelve of those seats, less than an eighth. They are the only political party which has any remaining representation in the Senate.
The rest of the Senate is represented by either the Independent Senators Group, the Canadian Senators Group, the Progressive Senate Group, or choose to remain unaffiliated with any of the above. These technical groups serve the same function as a partisan caucus does, allowing for additional financial resources to be allocated for mutual benefit, alongside the individual budgets of each senator. Government legislation is itself introduced by the Representative of the Government in the Senate, an unaffiliated senator who treats their role as functionary rather than partisan.
If the Prime Minister were to appoint Mr. Carney to any of the ten current vacancies in the Senate, he would be undoing one of his few lasting accomplishments, and would be giving Pierre Poilievre the political legitimacy to ram through as many Conservative senators as possible and re-politicize the Senate. There are three scenarios in which Mr. Carney could be elevated to the Senate, and none of them would be perceived well.
If he were made a Liberal senator, and then placed in the role of Representative of the Government in the Senate, the opposition and the commentariat would rightly ask why the job couldn’t continue to be done by an unaffiliated senator, as it currently has for almost a decade. It would immediately scar the legacy of the Trudeau Premiership further than it already has been.
If Mr. Carney were made a Liberal senator, and then given a proper Ministerial position in Cabinet, there would be massive uproar from the opposition, as the hypothetical Minister Carney would only do Question Period in the Senate, and not in the House of Commons, making him unable to be questioned by non-senators. While the remaining Conservative senators would be able to pose some questions, they are smaller than all the technical groups and their time is allocated accordingly; the NDP, Greens, and Bloc have no senators, and as a result would be completely unable to pose questions to Mr. Carney.
In the final scenario, if he were appointed to the Senate not as a Liberal, and not for the purposes of joining the Prime Minister’s Cabinet, but instead a non-partisan senator able to join any of the technical groups, it could perhaps be justified on Mr. Carney’s extensive economic experience, but it would provide none of the benefits that the Prime Minister seeks from bringing Mr. Carney into the fold.
He would not be able to say that he’s recruited someone to his government, as Mr. Carney would join neither the Liberal Cabinet nor the Liberal caucus. The Prime Minister also would face serious political acrimony, as the “independent” process for selecting senators would clearly have had a thumb placed upon the scale. There is no doubt that Mr. Carney genuinely meets and exceeds the criteria to become a senator, but unfortunately his public flirtation with the Liberal Party will cast aspersions on any supposedly non-partisan appointment.
Mr. Carney, in turn, would gain some parliamentary experience in the Senate, but a far different kind of experience from what he truly needs to lead an electorally competitive party. Unless he would plan to feign independence during Mr. Trudeau’s Premiership, and then run for the Liberal leadership while remaining in the Senate with the goal of re-introducing partisan senators, this would not be a suitable arrangement for either the Prime Minister or Mr. Carney.
With no by-elections where Mr. Carney is likely to be victorious, and no capacity to appoint him to the Senate without destroying the non-partisan independence that it took the Prime Minister a decade to enshrine, there is a single option left to put Mr. Carney in the Prime Minister’s government. Unfortunately, it is also the option most likely to enrage the mass public.
Who Needs Democracy?
You may be horrified to discover that not only is it possible for someone to become Prime Minister of Canada without sitting as an MP or a senator, but that it has already repeatedly happened, with three different people! Consistent between all of them, is that the House of Commons did not sit while they served, and yet merely their position as Leader of the party that last held confidence of the House of Commons prior to dissolution, meant that by convention they still exercised the powers of Prime Minister.
In the 7th Canadian Ministry, Sir Charles Tupper was only sworn in as Prime Minister after Parliament had been dissolved, and lost the election before the next Parliament formed. In the 23rd Canadian Ministry, John Turner was sworn in on June 30th, and while Parliament had not dissolved, he did not himself have a seat as either an MP or a Senator; after the September election, Brian Mulroney would be sworn in to replace Mr. Turner as Prime Minister before the next Parliament began in November.
Finally, in the 25th Canadian Ministry, Kim Campbell served as Prime Minister without facing Parliament, holding the office during the summer break and the election period. While she remained an MP during that summer break, the moment she requested the Governor General dissolve Parliament, she was no longer an MP, and never served a day in either the House or the Senate as Prime Minister before being succeeded by Jean Chrétien.
There are no asterisks, there are no “Acting” titles prefixed, all three of these individuals were legitimately the Prime Minister of their day by virtue of obtaining leadership of their political party. These leadership selection processes are arcane, arbitrary, and unfair, and there is no political will to allow Elections Canada greater oversight over these leadership contests, but none of that legally matters. Canada’s constitutional law simply does not require any Prime Minister to serve in the House of Commons or the Senate.
So, the question is, if the Prime Minister can be a private individual, can a normal cabinet Minister do the same? After all, if both a Prime Minister and a normal Minister can sit in the Senate, and a Prime Minister isn’t required to hold office in either the Commons or the Senate, then it should logically follow that a Minister would not be required to hold such office either.
There are also completely valid reasons why a Prime Minister would want to appoint someone to their cabinet who isn’t an MP or a senator. As our American friends to the south demonstrate, the President’s Cabinet is composed not of elected congresspeople or senators, but rather of individuals the President feels are most suited to the task of executive management in that field. The skillset needed to succeed as a legislator is frequently very different from the skillset needed to succeed managing a large organization, and the reason good Prime Ministers are so rare is because they need to be very skilled at doing both.
Nonetheless, in Canada and other Westminster parliamentary democracies, such separation between Parliament and Cabinet simply would not be tolerated by either political opposition or the mass public. There’s two core reasons that Canadian and British Prime Ministers have appointed people to the Senate or House of Lords before placing them in their cabinets, and those reasons are pragmatic rather than hard limitations.
Firstly, the opposition would be incandescent with rage, as they would be completely unable to hold a member of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet to account during Question Period. Beyond the limitations mentioned in the previous section that having a minister in the senate would place on the opposition, having no opportunity to question the minister in either upper or lower house would be a serious affront to the rights of the opposition parties. Frankly, the opposition would be well within their rights to raise hell if this were ever to occur.
Secondly, while hypothetically permitted, and likely to be constitutional, the legal validity of such an appointment has not actually been tested in the courts. Not only would this kind of appointment draw significant political blowback, it is also extremely likely to become the target of legal challenges. Mr. Carney will become the topic of significant public controversy, pundits will start slinging around the phrase “constitutional crisis”, and every Liberal Party member will ask why we inflicted this torture upon ourselves.
This is the worst option, by far. Do not poke this political bear.
Nothing To Do But Wait.
There are no upcoming by-elections where Mr. Carney has a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the race. There is no way for Prime Minister Trudeau to place Mr. Carney in the Senate without destroying over a decade of his own work as Leader of the Liberal Party. And there is no way for the Prime Minister to place Mr. Carney in Cabinet without granting the latter a parliamentary seat, unless he wants to pour kerosene on the political flames he’s desperately trying to smother.
There is no option for the Prime Minister to get what he wants, no matter what kind of arrangement is made. Mr. Carney, meanwhile, has the luxury of being patient and waiting for the next general election, or perhaps waiting even further beyond that. The Prime Minister needs good news as soon as possible, but Mr. Carney can wait for the best possible opportunity, and not settle for anything less.
If Mr. Carney has the keen political instincts that his surrogates and boosters claim he does, then he’ll rely on his patience and discipline. There’s no rush to get him immediately into Parliament, or Cabinet, or anywhere directly involved with Prime Minister Trudeau. Mr. Carney’s political ambitions are frankly better served by keeping a healthy distance from the Prime Minister, and taking care not to intermingle their brands.
Right now, all Mr. Carney can do is wait patently, and seize the right opportunity when it presents itself. Best of luck to Mr. Carney in proving his mettle. And best of luck to the Prime Minister in proving his own.