All three Canadian queer cabinet ministers promoted during shuffle 

All three queer cabinet ministers in Justin Trudeau’s government got promoted in one form or another during last week’s cabinet shuffle, but there are a few different dynamics at play for each of those ministers, and each of them now has more responsibilities and some serious challenges in each of their new portfolios. It bears mentioning off the top that Marci Ien has retained her portfolio as minister for women and gender equality and youth, and remains in charge of the 2SLGBTQI+ Secretariat.

Randy Boissonnault got a major promotion, moving from tourism and associate minister for finance, to being named minister for employment and workforce development, as well as the minister for official languages. He is now not only the senior minister for Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC)—a massive department where four other ministers also claim some share of responsibility—but also leads the official languages ministry. That’s two departments he’s responsible for, which is a lot for any minister to take on.

As the minister for employment, Boissonnault will have his work cut out for him, as the government has been working on a major overhaul of the Employment Insurance system for a few years now. It’s extremely contentious work, and has the ability to be either a political hand-grenade, or a poisoned chalice. EI reform has long plagued many governments, considering that we have regions in the country that depend on it for seasonal industries. The eligibility rules around those industries are a constant battle, particularly because they vary from place to place in the country depending on particular conditions in those areas. Trying to come up with a fairer system has never been an easy task, and while Boissonnault’s predecessor, Carla Qualtrough, has done a lot of the heavy lifting here, it will be up to him to put it over the finish line—something that was supposed to have happened at least six months ago. In either case, Boissonnault will have to sell the changes, when they are eventually released, and wear the fallout from them if they prove unpopular.

For the official languages file, there is a certain amount of sense in giving it to a Franco-Albertan like Boissonnault because of the message it sends about trying to promote French outside of Quebec, and in ensuring that these minority-language communities can access services. The government just passed their major reforms to the Official Languages Act this year, but there may yet be some fallout from that, particularly among anglophones in Quebec who feel that the bill served to diminish their rights; this could have particular electoral consequences for the Liberals in that province.

Seamus O’Regan remained in the role of labour minister, but was given additional responsibilities in also being named the minister for seniors, which is a bit of an odd portfolio within the scheme of the government because most services for seniors are handled at the provincial level (with the exception of income support programs like Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS)). Nevertheless, O’Regan has done fairly well in the labour portfolio and has managed to resolve a number of labour issues without back-to-work legislation, even when threatening to use powers that have never been exercised before when it comes to the recent B.C. port strike, and he has been promising legislation to ban the use of replacement workers in federally-regulated industries before the end of the year.

As for the seniors portfolio, O’Regan will have to contend with the calls coming primarily from the NDP and the Bloc to enrich the OAS and GIS for seniors between 65 and 75 after the government already increased benefits for those over 75, under the justification that many seniors have increased expenses and depleted savings the older they get and need the additional help. I also wonder if he won’t be able to help use his federal leverage to help prod the provinces into providing more supports for queer and trans seniors, and to help deal with the pernicious problem of many having to go back into the closet when they go into care.

Pascale St-Onge has been given the portfolio that she has been aiming for since her arrival into politics: Minister of Canadian Heritage. Much like when the prime minister decided to first put Steven Guilbeault into a different portfolio than environment when he was first put into cabinet, likely to give him some experience first, St-Onge’s background is within Quebec’s media and cultural sector union. In that role, she had long been pushing the government for legislation around Canadian content on streaming platforms, and to help rebalance the power imbalance between media outlets and web giants—bills that got passed this past spring. Those bills have also landed Canada in a major fight with web giants like Google and Meta, who are using their market dominance to try and punish Canada as a warning to other countries not to introduce similar legislation. St-Onge will have to be able to stand up to these web giants’ abuse of dominance (while Canada’s competition law landscape is weak), and ensure that we don’t back down, because that would invite them to punish governments for future attempts to curtail their powers, whether with privacy legislation or AI regulation. Even more to the point, she will have to do a better job of communicating the problem of that abuse of dominance better than her predecessor did.

This being said, St-Onge’s time in the sports portfolio left a bitter taste in the mouths of many in Canada’s athlete communities who have been calling for a public inquiry into abuse in sport, for which St-Onge was largely non-committal and didn’t do a good job of acknowledging the concerns or the stories of the survivors. It’s also being remarked upon that it may be why Qualtrough was moved into the sports portfolio, because she will have to fix or at least manage the mess that St-Onge wasn’t able to very effectively.

I will be watching to see if the prime minister shuffles gay MP Rob Oliphant from his current position as parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs when those posts get shaken up over the next few weeks (because several of them became ministers in the shuffle). Oliphant has done a lot of work on the Africa file for this government as their attention to it has started to fade (and they downgraded their “emerging Africa strategy” to an “Africa framework”), and it would be a shame if that work winds up being all for naught.

Boissonnault, O’Regan and St-Onge have their work cut out for them, and we will wait and see if they are able to run with the additional challenges they have been handed, or if the accumulated weight of an eight-year-old government’s baggage drags them down.