New Canadian PM-elect Justin Trudeau has barely had time to work out where the mail room is, and he’s already delivering even more than he promised on diversity in his government.
It’s been nearly two months since Turnbull took over the Prime Ministership from Tony Abbott. He is still riding the wave of skyrocketing opinion polls and the collective national sigh of relief.
As Tim Dunlop wrote for ABC’s The Drum,
Nearly everything Mr Abbott did left people in despair: his first budget; his onion eating; his reintroduction of knighthoods, and then giving one of them to Prince Philip; his winking; his endless broken promises; his hyper-masculine attitude; his craven use of national security; his national-flag orgy every time he had a press conference; his instinct to treat opponents as enemies; his instinct to divide the nation; his flicking tongue; his inability to articulate anything remotely like a vision for the country.
We’re still waiting to see if Turnbull will be able to turn the party he now heads in a different direction. The touchstone issues of climate change and tax reform are still on hold, his actions on social issues like same sex marriage and equal representation of women have been symbolic rather than substantive. If he’s going to hold on to the political capital he got by replacing Abbott, he’s going to need to do a lot more to prove he’s not all mouth and no trousers.
Speaking of trousers, Canada has just elected a new PM, Justin Trudeau. You’ve probably heard about him, but just in case you haven’t, this is him:
And this
There’s more (you’re wlecome), but let’s get back to the point.
Canada’s ex PM Stephen Harper headed their Conservative party, which had been in power since 2006. He and Tony Abbott were huge fans of each other. Nuff said?
Harper was firmly booted out (99 seats to Trudeau’s Liberal party’s 184 seats) on 19th October. Liberal party in Canada means actually liberal, as in the opposite of Eric Abetz.
Trudeau promised, among various other common sense/bleeding heart liberal items (depending on your POV) to ensure gender equality in his cabinet. Which he did, 15 of the 30 people in the Trudeau cabinet are women.
The fact Trudeau was so firm about this does not mean it was an easy process. As Bloomberg reports:
For Trudeau, 43, a self-declared feminist who won a majority government last month in part by saying he’d bring new voices to Ottawa, selecting a 50-50 cabinet wasn’t so simple. He chose from among 134 men and 50 women Liberals MPs, and some long-standing male legislators were left out, including retired Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie and former Toronto police chief Bill Blair. The new gender division comes on top of existing cabinet-making criteria for regional, linguistic and ethnic representation, including the practice of selecting at least one minister from each of the country’s 10 provinces.
But he went so much further than that. This summary has been going viral on Facebook all morning.
He’s not just aiming for equal gender representation, he’s got a cabinet that is actual representative of all of Canadian society. Aboriginal women, men with disabilities, refugees, minority groups, gay men and gingers! The handsome prince of democracy has become the fairy godmother granting wishes all over the place.
Male dominated governments in the UK, US and other places I’m sure we could think of if we tried hard enough, are watching with increasing nervousness as Trudeau strides about slamming down mics and generally showing how easy it is to be a white man in a position of power and use that power to lift the disadvantaged rather than the privileged.
Ex Minister for Looking Cool in Leather Jackets, Malcolm Turnbull putting three more women in cabinet doesn’t look all that impressive any more does it?