Trudeau's cabinet shuffle offers lots of change — but not big change

A little over an hour before members of the new cabinet began strolling up the tree-lined driveway to Rideau Hall, Abacus Data released new survey results that suggest 81 per cent of Canadians feel it's time for a change in government.

Though the poll's results are suboptimal for the Liberals, they don't necessarily portend doom for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government. Of those who want change, more than half say they see a good alternative to the Liberals. But 31 per cent say they don't see a better option.

Recent byelections have shown stronger Liberal support than most polls suggest.

So while Canadians might be tiring of a government now approaching its eighth anniversary, they're also not quite clamouring for one of the other parties on offer.

Perhaps Wednesday's cabinet shuffle will go some small way toward satisfying voters' desire for change. Still, some important things remain the same.

There are now new ministers for defence, health, public safety, justice, agriculture, heritage, immigration, housing, revenue, employment, small business, social development, sport, transport, fisheries, Treasury Board, veterans affairs and Crown-Indigenous relations.

There's also an entirely new portfolio — citizens' services (the new minister, Terry Beech, at least becomes the answer to a future trivia question).

Trudeau has tended in the past to demote rather than banish. This time, he was less willing to offer second chances.

Marco Mendicino, who might have expected to get a less-prominent portfolio after his rocky time as public safety minister, was instead bounced from cabinet entirely. Between retirements and other exits, more than a half-dozen people who were ministers when the week began are ministers no longer.

Seven Liberal MPs were elevated to fill the empty chairs around the cabinet table. They are decidedly younger than the group they're replacing (the average age of the departing ministers is roughly 61, while the average age of the incoming ministers is about 47). They are broadly more diverse. Several of them, as luck would have it, also represent ridings where there was a reasonably close race in 2021.

Some of the changes within cabinet are particularly notable.

Pascale St-Onge tags in as the new point person for the government's tussle with the Internet giants — a fight that pushed Pablo Rodriguez to his limits. Karina Gould, who oversaw the government's child care legislation (and is herself expecting a child in January), will now be one of the government's most prominent faces and voices in Parliament as House leader.

Marc Miller, who seemed to bring both momentum and stability to Crown-Indigenous relations, takes over at immigration, one of the pillars of the government's economic agenda.

Moving Sean Fraser, the former immigration minister, to housing gives the government a better "communicator" (in the parlance of official Ottawa) to fight the battle over housing affordability. Moving Jean-Yves Duclos to public services and Anita Anand to Treasury Board seems at first glance to risk sidelining two of the more credible figures in the Trudeau government, but a government source suggested on Wednesday that there is a plan to deploy them as key economic ministers.