Mark Carney unveils his crisis cabinet

Standing outside Rideau Hall on Tuesday, Mark Carney said his new cabinet — the first real cabinet of his time as prime minister — was "purpose-built for this hinge moment."

Carney has long been fond of thinking of this current moment as a hinge — even before its real depths were clear. The Hinge was the title of the book he was planning to publish this month, before the opportunity to become prime minister of a G7 nation came along.

It is perhaps a more hopeful way of saying "crisis" — or an overlapping series of crises, like what the prime minister and his new cabinet now face.

Carney did not shy away from the word "crisis" during this spring's campaign. In particular, the multi-layered threat posed by Donald Trump was, in Carney's view, a "once-in-a-lifetime crisis." But the economic and security crisis that Trump suddenly represents for Canada sits beside a housing crisis that has been building for decades. And the premier of Alberta is now inviting a national unity crisis.

In that sense, whether purpose-built or not, what Mark Carney unveiled on Tuesday was a crisis cabinet. 

Myriad considerations go into constructing a cabinet in a representative democracy. But on first blush, Carney could at least try to signal change.

Of the 29 members of cabinet, including the prime minister, 14 ministers are entirely new. Nine of those ministers are also rookie MPs.

As the Conservatives were quick to point out, that still leaves 14 ministers who sat around the cabinet table with Justin Trudeau. But even those ministers have all changed jobs. Meanwhile, former ministers like Bill Blair, Jonathan Wilkinson, Jean-Yves Duclos, Karina Gould and Marc Miller — all prominent figures during the Trudeau era — have been left out entirely.

Since Trudeau's last real cabinet — the one that existed before Chrystia Freeland resigned as finance minister on Dec. 16 — nothing has gone unchanged. And at 29 members, this is the smallest Liberal cabinet since Jean Chrétien was prime minister.

Amid the change, Carney has opted for experience on many of the biggest files.

François-Philippe Champagne has maintained the finance portfolio while Mélanie Joly is now the industry minister and Anita Anand moves to foreign affairs. Dominic LeBlanc will lead on trade negotiations with the United States, while Patty Hajdu will be minister for jobs and families.

Whatever Carney's experience in the public and private sectors, he is still a rookie parliamentarian and so it is perhaps unsurprising that he has opted to put experienced hands in charge of some of the major jobs.

But given the stakes involved, Carney's most interesting moves might be a pair of assignments he gave to relative newcomers.

Tim Hodgson, a former banker with Goldman Sachs who served as an adviser to Carney at the Bank of Canada, had been a rumoured possibility for finance, but he will instead be minister of energy and resources, which is a fraught file at the best of times — and these are not the best of times.