Premier David Eby has begun the earliest stages of crafting his next cabinet, after a week of one-on-one phone calls with MLAs.
It’s not going to be an easy task.
He’s facing 12 vacancies from veterans he’ll have to fill.
Five ministers were defeated in the election — including Education Minister Rachna Singh, Agriculture Minister Pam Alexis, Lands Minister Nathan Cullen and ministers of state Dan Coulter and Andrew Mercier.
Seven ministers retired — Finance Minister Katrine Conroy, Forests Minister Bruce Ralston, Transportation Minister Rob Fleming, Environment Minister George Heyman, Indigenous Relations Minister Murray Rankin, Labour Minister Harry Bains and minister of state Mitzi Dean.
That’s a lot of experience out the door. It equates to almost 43 per cent of the cabinet turning over.
The first step for Eby will be to determine if he even keeps a 28-person cabinet, or if he starts redrawing ministries and creating new ones.
Right now, the full cabinet is actually 43 people, once you include parliamentary secretaries. That’s only a few positions shy of the entire NDP caucus, after it was reduced to 47 seats in last month’s election.
It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the premier gives every single person either a cabinet post, a parliamentary secretary position or a caucus job such as chairperson or whip. Doing so would allow Eby to hand out fancy titles and pay increases to all his MLAs, ranging from almost $24,000 to $60,000, which are important incentives from a premier who just presided over major electoral losses and for whom caucus management will be a growing problem.
However, it won’t solve the problem of what to do with the most important, core, ministries.
There, things get sticky.
Eby will have to decide whether to keep Health Minister Adrian Dix.
He’s the longest-serving health minister in provincial history, and he guided the province through COVID-19. But there was a massive voter backlash in the election over health care, specifically around long wait times, ER closures, staff shortages and continued lack of family doctors.
The public wants action, not numbers, on the issue. Dix may be out.
Finance is the next most critical portfolio, though it’s unclear what the position actually entails anymore. Conroy spent her 22-month tenure rubber-stamping Eby’s massive spending spree, which has driven the provincial deficit to more than $9 billion and accumulated record debt.
Does the premier want the next finance minister to stand up to him, and try to actually rein in spending? Or, is it a paper position to produce a budget where all the decisions are already made out of the premier’s office?
Either way, the new finance minister will have to be able to devise out-of-the-box solutions to ease the affordability crunch voters indicated in the election was their top priority. Rebates, tax cuts, fee reductions, and other cost-of-living measures need to be devised and executed quickly, while also being squeezed by the limited availability of cash. It’ll be a tough gig.
A cabinet also requires balance, not just in gender and diversity but also in geographic representation. The former will be easy for the New Democrats, who have a diverse caucus with a large number of women. But geographic parity will be impossible after election losses.
The NDP only has five MLAs in all of rural B.C.
Vernon’s Harwinder Sandhu and Kootenay’s Brittny Anderson were both rookies last term. But now they look like veterans compared to first-timers Steve Morissette in Kootenay-Monashee, Tamara Davidson in North Coast-Haida Gwaii and Randene Neill in Powell River-Sunshine Coast.
Look for Sandhu and Anderson to get called up to the front bench, but all five may end up in cabinet positions if for no other reason than because the NDP needs desperately to make up ground in rural B.C.
The NDP’s bench strength took a significant hit in the election, so keep an eye on some new names to make the cut to cabinet as well, including Christine Boyle (Vancouver-Little Mountain), Terry Yung (Vancouver-Yaletown) and Jessie Sunner (Surrey-Newton) to name a few.
The full cabinet will be named Nov. 18 at Government House in Victoria.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 16 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for Glacier Media. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
