The current cabinet has 38 ministers, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Freeland said she would reduce it to no more than 20 ministers
OTTAWA — Former finance minister Chrystia Freeland is proposing to have a leaner and more effective team in government if she becomes Liberal leader on March 9.
In a press release, Freeland said that she would reduce the size of the current ministerial cabinet and staff in the prime minister’s office by 50 per cent which she says will end PMO’s top-down approach and will give more power to ministers to do their work.
The current cabinet has 38 ministers, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Freeland said she would reduce it to no more than 20 ministers, effectively slashing it in half.
“A cabinet led by Chrystia Freeland will be more focused and more effective – balancing regional diversity and breadth of experience to ensure Ministers are given the space to meaningfully contribute to governing,” reads the press release.
Freeland is also promising to bring back regional ministers and ministers of state, which are junior cabinet positions meant to assist a senior cabinet minister.
For instance, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre served as minister of state for democratic reform from 2013 to 2015, before he was promoted as minister of employment on top of his democratic reform duties in the months prior to the 2015 election.
Freeland’s team would not immediately say if those junior ministers would be included in the hard cap of 20 nor if she would keep Trudeau’s gender parity in cabinet.
The sprawling team at PMO includes longtime chief of staff Katie Telford and her staff, policy advisors, an issues management team and a communications team, among others.
In slashing the number of staff members by half, Freeland appears to want to respond to longstanding frustration amongst caucus members and staffers that Trudeau’s office has become too centralized and has been spearheading most of the government’s decisions.
She is promising to end the “overreach” of PMO and to “empower” ministers, MPs and all Canadians to “more meaningfully contribute their ideas to make our country better.”
She said it was her view that the federal government should keep its fiscal powder dry to respond to a possible tariff war with the U.S. which could come as early as Feb. 1.
But the Conservatives are pushing back against Freeland’s apparent rebranding as a “blue Liberal” by reminding Canadians that she stood by Trudeau for nine years, serving as finance minister for four of them, and was set to present a $62 billion deficit last month.
National Post
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