Danielle Smith's cabinet: New doors and handles, but Jason Kenney's frame
CBC
In the run-up to her cabinet announcement, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was fond of citing what former Reform Party leader Preston Manning said about cabinet making, even though he never actually won power to select a cabinet himself.
Smith's borrowed wisdom goes like this: You have to make a cabinet with the wood you're given. She would extend the metaphor: "And we've got some pretty good wood."
Sure, she had the same bits of lumber that Jason Kenney had to deal with beforehand. But given how much she criticized her predecessor and his team's decisions, it wasn't expected that she'd keep so many key components of Kenney's woodworking in place.
Scanning the faces of Smith's cabinet, two things are immediately clear.
First, with only four women among the 26 ministers joining Smith, it's the most gender-imbalanced cabinet in a long time, since then-premier Ed Stelmach picked only two women back in 2006.
Also, the faces look very familiar.
For the (arguably) five most influential and big-budget portfolios, Smith kept Kenney's picks intact: Travis Toews returns to Finance, Tyler Shandro stays in Justice, Jason Copping in Health, Adriana LaGrange in Education and Demetrios Nicolaides in Advanced Education. (In another of the big ministries, Sonya Savage leaves Energy to rookie Peter Guthrie, but lands in the heavily-overlapping Environment file.)
Bitter folks both outside and inside the United Conservative fold will recognize two of those faces (Toews and Shandro) from the infamous Sky Palace patio whisky-and-wine gathering, that iconic image of the haughty attitudes that ultimately sank Kenney's fortunes. Some change this is, those people might fume.
These are the Kenney ministers who did so many things Smith has deplored. They enacted the COVID vaccine mandates and business restrictions, closed schools during the pandemic, slow-walked the fair deal panel's recommended reforms on provincial police and pension, and did nothing after that referendum to do — um, something or other — with equalization.
Smith will now ask Copping to dynamite an Alberta Health Services board that contains a couple of members he appointed (including the chair), and task Shandro to help enact a Sovereignty Act he'd shown no favour toward during the leadership campaign.
These ministers have spent their entire political careers with their watches set to Kenney Standard Time. Can they adjust so quickly and nimbly to the Smith Zone?
Smith, in explaining her changes and non-changes in one interview Friday, said that she wanted to offer some stability amid all the change she wants to implement.
And there are some inherent advantages to a novice premier keeping the past regime's veterans in place — they retain institutional knowledge and bring ample understanding and context to their portfolios, while the premier is still trying to learn the ropes, absorb the briefing binders and get introduced to key figures and officials.
But this also stands to create problems for Smith — an authority imbalance.