The West has the same number of seats but their influence in the nation’s cabinet has been reduced in the last two governments.
In 2019, Winnipeg’s Jim Carr was appointed special representative for the Prairies after longtime Liberal Member of Parliament Ralph Goodale lost his Saskatchewan seat. Like it or not, senior members of cabinet bring a lot to the table from their regions.
Carr reportedly kept the phone lines open with the three conservative premiers and senior ministers in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Manitoba. And he often met with industry groups and business during his term.
Now that role has been dropped from cabinet, along with Carr.
The Winnipegger had held significant cabinet roles important to the West and was considered a star minister before he stepped back for health reasons shortly after the 2019 election. Before that he served the post-2015 Liberal government in natural resources and international trade.
Carr was also well-known for raising issues from the West.
This time around, Manitoba maintained its four Liberal seats. Saskatchewan elected none and Alberta went from none to two.
Winnipeg’s Dan Vandal is the new Minister of Northern Affairs with responsibility for the recently minimalized Regional Development Agency for the Prairie provinces, the successor to Western Economic Diversification that once included British Columbia. That province now has its own Pacific Economic Development agency.
We hope the new PrairiesCan, as the government has dubbed it, will flourish despite the absence of a star minister.
Will PacifiCan pacify voters in the lower mainland and maintain the line drawn over petroleum and mining resources important to the Prairies? That portfolio does have a minister of significance: Harjit Sajjan, a retired police officer and six-year Minister of National Defense who is now Minister of International Investment.
Randy Boissonnault from Edmonton has the tourism portfolio and will have an associate’s role in finance.
Those two cabinet seats are unlikely to adequately represent agriculture, food, energy, forestry and mining in Canada’s West.
We can hope that Alberta-born Chrystia Freeland, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, will seize any opportunities to pick up loose Prairie pucks in the cabinet arena. However, she represents Rosedale, one of Toronto’s most desirable of neighborhoods.
Vancouver MP Jonathon Wilkinson is slotted into natural resources. Formerly Minister of Environment and Climate Change, he isn’t seen as a positive placement by the three prairie provinces who continue to squabble over the carbon tax.
Perhaps Wilkinson will remember the challenges of his home province of Saskatchewan, and his years working at the right hand of Roy Romanow, when prairie files land on his desk.
Steven Guilbeault, a former Greenpeace activist and Quebec MP, isn’t a popular choice in the West either, as he replaces Wilkinson in the environment spot.
Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau, reappointed to that role, showed herself to be a quick study on agriculture in the last term. She rapidly reacted to many issues facing farmers and the agriculture industry.
The eastern Quebec MP has made headway in renovating federal-provincial business risk management programs and has been more onside with producers’ demands in this area than have provincial politicians. She is also reported to have represented producers’ perspectives at the cabinet table on international trade and on the effects of the carbon tax on farms.
All told, however, the new federal cabinet has scant western influence in terms of ministerial appointments.
Without significant regional seats at the big kids’ table, farmer organizations will need to invest significantly in lobbying this term. That is among the few ways they will be heard over the din from their well-represented urban siblings.
Karen Briere, Bruce Dyck, Barb Glen and Mike Raine collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
