CGE LEADERSHIP SERIES 26 / Canadian Government Executive / Spring 2025 Trudeau didn’t. it was a lot more diffuse in terms of accountabilities because of that. It’ll be interesting to see if Prime Minister Carney kind of has a small kind of core group that he’s going to turn to that are clearly his senior ministers that he’ll be relying on to get him through the next couple of years. Graham Flack Because I saw Mark operate with Minister Flaherty and Prime Minister Harper in a crisis, I am pretty confident he will understand not wasting the crisis and the potential that the window in which you can exercise the leverage you have. And Canada had considerable leverage internationally during the financial crisis that that that doesn’t endure forever. So, he will be very, very focused on the need to act quickly not just because of the external factors, but because the conditions will be there. domestically to enable him to do the things that were probably impossible before. I think he will be very focused on need for speed, to not waste the opportunity and drive super quickly. That part I’m pretty confident on. On how he will organize, you never know until a prime minister is in office and how they’re going to do it. I had 31 ministers over my career, over half as a deputy. What I observed over my career is a significant decline in the authority ministers were able to exercise. And I think that has been highly damaging to effective government in Canada. And so in my wish list the prime minister would return to a more traditional Westminster style government and the attributes of that and some have highlighted them already. It would be a smaller cabinet. Not a minister of everything, but ministers who have wide ambit of authority and make judgments within their authorities. As Marta said, you need a decision-making body in cabinet. I’m still a fan of the of the Mulroney model and a P and P and Operations committees as the two inner cabinets that can drive things collectively; not through political staffers in the Prime Minister’s office, but through elected ministers who drive the collective decisions that can’t be taken by ministers. But with that would be a reduction in both the size and authority of political staffers, particularly the Prime Minister’s office. And I think that is going to be critical to him executing the broader parts of his agenda. If you try in any organization, government, private sector, if you try to centralize the running of a wide range of priorities through some central function, you will fail. You just don’t have the decision making bandwidth in the in the center of government. You don’t have the operational expertise in the center to understand it like it is. There is no company that successful in the long term in the world that centralizes all their decision making at the top of the organization, so this is as true of governments as it is there. So that would be my wish list. Lori Turnbull Thank you very much. Our theme is federal government transition in a time of uncertainty. So I just want to paint a little bit of a picture of the, the ways in which things are uncertain or the causes of uncertainty. Obviously, we have the situation with Trump and tariffs, which is uncertain because this is a total reset of our relationship with the United States. We don’t know what Trump means and what he doesn’t. There’s economic uncertainty that goes with that and is exacerbating a national unity crisis. This is the second part of the uncertainty in that you really have a pretty strong urge on the part of some provincial premiers to put their hands up and say it is not ‘Canada first’, it’s our province first which leads to a kind of zero-sum situation for dealing with Trump. What is Carney going to concede? What is he not going to concede? How will that affect different provinces and how Canadians care or are concerned about the quality of life in other provinces with which they may not have a connection? Carney has a minority government, not a majority, so it does mean that he has to push this through a House that he doesn’t totally control. Then he goes to the Senate and it’s another story where the Senators are more independent now. You’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen in the Senate. They may seek to amend legislation rather than simply pass it. Then the bill has to go back to the House. Even if you get the bill passed, eventually, it’s a much longer and less predictable process. There are now questions about how to engage with the Carney government. How to get our issues on the agenda. How does that how is that whole process around advocacy? What kind of public service do we need to provide support during that? If you were to say, here are the skills we need, here are the things we need to focus on from the public service side, what would be the ideal configuration? Graham Flack So I think there’s never been a higher level of importance that the public service needs to accord than now to speaking truth to power. Because I think the situation’s pretty dire. The solutions that have broad party support are going to fall short of what’s necessary to begin to really seriously address the challenge that’s in front of us. We all know the productivity challenge and Canada’s economic growth challenge has been a challenge throughout our whole careers in public service. But, the per capita GDP performance of Canada over the last decade has been truly catastrophic. And that was before Trump. We are among the most trade-dependent democracies in the world. What’s our number one source of exports? Fossil fuel exports. What’s our number two source of revenues from exports? Autos. I was a deputy of intergovernmental affairs that tried and failed to move interprovincial trade barriers. I think there’s a window now to drive that. We should absolutely do so, But I think the upside economic gains from internal trade barriers are not as significant as some are hoping for. On the international trade diversification front, we have among the most diverse set of trade agreements in the world in terms of access to other markets. Export Development Canada is world class, one of the best at the world of what it does. Our Trade Commissioner Services is one of the best in the world. And yet we’ve hardly seen the neighbor needle move at all in trade diversification. So the idea that we’d take or 10 or 20 points of trade that currently go to the U.S, and easily move them to other markets, I think is completely unrealistic in the near term. So, I think that truth to power is about some of the hard choices that are going to be need, need to be made. The most Trump-proof exports we have are our natural resource exports because they’re global commodities with a global price. They include agriculture, but they certainly include fossil fuels. Australia and the United States had zero net LNG exports ten years ago. Now, Australia is the number two LNG exporter in the world, and the United States is the number one LNG exporter in the world; $20 billion in revenues to the Australian Treasury every two year from LNG. Canada has virtually limitless LNG potential. We have one facility, one LNG facility that hasn’t yet exported, it’s only about to begin exports. And those are both, I would argue, a climate sensitive solution in terms of getting countries like India off of coal. LNG consumption is go-
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