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Cabinet Making 101

Michael Wernick
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management
University of Ottawa

Last revised February 25, 2025

2025 could be a year of three Prime Ministers, like 1984 and 1993. That means at least one and probably two times that a new Prime Minister will face the task of forming a first Cabinet and deciding how it should be structured. What goes into the decisions about Cabinet formation?

There will be many subsequent opportunities to modify the personnel and the configuration as the government learns and evolves, but the core design issues and considerations of startups and shuffles are the same.

Cabinet formation is about two things, the people and the structure.

PART ONE: THE PEOPLE

The PM has to work with the material available

As much as a PM, or their transition team, can think about Cabinet selection in the period leading up to the election, and have tentative lists tucked away, in the end, they must wait to find out who makes it into their caucus of MPs and play the cards they have. Sometimes they may have to wait out a recount to be sure. (cf. Amarjeet Sohi in 2015)

Until recently, PMs would draw on a Senator or two to bolster their hand (Sharon Carstairs, Jack Austin, Marjorie LeBreton). Stephen Harper named defeated candidate Michael Fortier to the Senate in February 2006 to be able to name him to Cabinet.

Otherwise, after the initial startup, the PM will have to wait for by-elections or the next national election to recruit new talent. Examples of refreshing a Cabinet that stand out are Pearson’s recruitment of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier in 1965, Chretien’s recruitment of Stephan Dion and Pierre Pettigrew in 1996 and Harper’s recruitment in 2008.

Cabinet selection pursues multiple goals

Transition teams juggle three considerations:

  • Political Signaling

When the final Cabinet list is posted, there will have to be geographical distribution, but they may not have a lot of MPs, if any, from some provinces. They will also be looking at the cumulative pattern of the Cabinet with respect to gender, race, religion and ethnicity, and the political signals sent by specific appointments to specific jobs. It is always appealing to be able to name the first of a kind. The political signaling could also be about the professional background of the new Minister, playing to the belief that a deep background in a field is a predictor of Ministerial competence.

  • Personnel Management (Politics)

Past partisan politics always comes into play. The PM will be pulled between rewarding loyalists, especially people who were important to securing the party leadership or winning the election, versus pursuing a “team of rivals” approach that co-opts former leaders or defeated leadership candidates. It can be risky to leave out any significant faction within the party as it can create grievances to be nursed.

  • Personnel Management (Governing)

If the party has been out of power for a while, and many of the MPs are either new or have only known life on the Opposition benches, it can be very difficult to forecast which MPs are going to take to the job of Cabinet Minister. Some turn out to be pleasant surprises and some turn out to be duds or the source of future scandals.

It helps if some of the options are people who served effectively in a previous federal or provincial Cabinet. The correlation with pre-politics accomplishment in other walks of life is very loose. Cabinet is a team, and some people will be better at collaboration and mobilizing colleagues than others. Some will be better at driving a workplan and getting things done. Some will be better at public communication, advocacy and persuasion or be able to reach communities in languages other than English and French. Some will be better at chairing committees and task forces and keeping the government’s agenda moving.

There is one last step that may take some options off the table. Prior to selecting a Cabinet PMs will put prospective Ministers through a vetting process, supervised by someone on the transition team. The Privy Council Office will coordinate background checks by CSIS, the RCMP and other agencies for flags including criminal records, outstanding warrants and investigations, financial issues that would open the person to pressure, contact with foreign governments and interests and any personal conduct issues. Candidates may be asked to have a private chat with the Ethics Commissioner to discuss how to deal with anything that could be considered a perceived conflict of interest. A deep check of their social media history will be conducted but may be more or less redundant because the opposition parties and media have probably already done one and surfaced any issues that would call the appointment into question.

PART TWO: THE STRUCTURE

Landing on a structure of Cabinet and its committees can be seen as a time management problem solving for more than one variable:

  • Making best use of the PM’s time
  • Making best use of the group’s time together
  • Making best use of each Minister’s time

The more time around the Cabinet table, the less time is available for other parts of their jobs: House of Commons time; departmental business; travel and meetings with stakeholders; constituency time. The PM will therefore look for a combination of size, layering and committee structure that works, always keeping in mind and checking on all the personnel considerations in Part 1.

Size?

There is no optimal number of Ministers. The advantage of a larger Cabinet is that it helps meet the first two objectives: political signaling and personnel management. A larger number allows the PM to make more geographic regions, identity groups and party factions feel included, and it provides the government with a deeper roster to send out as communicators and advocates to events, interviews, and meetings with stakeholders. It also lets the PM reward a larger number of MPs, broaden the team, and develop a deeper roster for future Cabinet shuffles. From the perspective of governance, having more perspectives and points of view around the Cabinet table can help avoid political and policy blind spots.

On the other hand, a larger Cabinet can drag down productivity. The more people around the table, the more potential interventions, and something has to give – more truncated discussion getting through fewer items per meeting or needing more meetings. Thirty Ministers making two-minute interventions chews up an hour. There will also be more turf and boundary and interpersonal issues to manage and more spokespersons to coordinate.

Concentric circles of power

A large full Cabinet chaired by the PM will use of a lot of their time and draw the PM into tactical and transactional items that consume a large share of Cabinet time instead of strategic policy and politics or resolving serious internal differences of view.

St. Laurent and Diefenbaker chaired more than one Cabinet meeting per week and made little use of committees. This had the effect of pinning them, and a lot of Ministers, in Ottawa. Later PMs landed on using Cabinet committees to clear the smaller transactions and to do the initial policy and political due diligence, so that time at full Cabinet with the PM in the chair was optimized.

The other approach is to create explicit layers within Cabinet, perhaps best seen as concentric circles or a solar system with the PM at the center.

One way to enhance use of PM time, keep a focus on long term goals, and increase productivity is to create a smaller inner circle, personally chaired by the PM, just as many boards in the private and not-for-profit sectors have executive committees. These smaller strategic committees have often been named “Planning and Priorities, or “P&P” in Ottawa parlance. Political signaling and personnel considerations still influence the choice of members, but they are a bit less binding because the PM always has representation in the full Cabinet to point to. There are also governance considerations – it would be rare to leave out the Finance, Foreign Affairs and Justice Ministers, because they work at the intersection of so much Cabinet business.

If the PM names an explicit “inner Cabinet” or P&P committee, they will have to decide whether it has the final say, “ratification”, on items that have previously been discussed at committees, and decide how often the larger full Cabinet should meet. Some PMs have only convened full Cabinet once a month and used it mostly as a political sounding board on more partisan matters, and a place to approve appointments.

PMs can create an outer layer of less senior Ministers. They can name Ministers of State and Ministers without Portfolio. A Minister of State plays a supporting role, either assisting a senior Minister with a specific area or task within a larger portfolio or working at the seams between Ministers on cross-cutting issues or stakeholder interests.

In Canada Ministers of State have been explicitly provided for in legislation since 1971 (the Ministries and Ministers of State Act, last updated in 1985).

Naming Ministers of State can help a PM with political signaling – a Minister for XYZ says “this is important to us” and “you are important to us”. It can free up time of more senior departmental Ministers by taking on interviews, meetings and events. It also can help fill out representation in Cabinet by geography and identity. A PM can be creative with bespoke positions. Popular usages include demographic and identity interests (youth, seniors, multiculturalism, persons with disabilities); economic sectors (small business, tourism, science) or functions (parks, sport). Less frequently the PM may name a Minister Without Portfolio with floating assignments.

From a governance point of view, Ministers of State can be a mixed blessing. They are considered members of the “ministry”, sworn in as Privy Councilors and bound by Cabinet solidarity and Cabinet secrecy. They may take some of the load from senior Ministers. At their best they add to the Cabinet’s “bandwidth”.

But they are always ambitious politicians who want to be visible and influential so they create net additional work that must be supported by a political office and by some part of the public service. Naming a Minister of State leads to another set of choices by the PM about whether to realign the structures of government – it may make sense to pull together pieces of the public service as some sort of secretariat or mini-Ministry, or it may make sense to plug Ministers of State into existing departments. There will always be at least one senior public servant assigned as the main full-time support.

Whether Ministers of State are involved in policy and political decision making, or consigned to a representation role, is primarily decided by the receptivity of the senior Ministers. Whether they actually help to close seams within government or instead just create new boundary and turf issues is primarily a function of their interpersonal and political skills. Sometimes it works very well and sometimes not.

A problem with naming explicit Ministers of State is that it often creates negative feedback that runs counter to the desired political signaling – critics will say “they only gave this a junior Minister so clearly they don’t care about you”. It can draw more attention to who is deemed to be “senior” and “inner circle”, which can be a problem for political signaling and for personnel management.

That is why more recent PMs prefer to be able to say all Ministers are equal (see Harper in 2006 and Justin Trudeau). They name Ministers of State but drop the “of state” in public usage.

One subtle complication is that most PMs like to name a “political Minister” for each region or even each province. The role is independent of any departmental assignment. It is to keep a watchful eye on the partisan interests of the government, working with the party apparatus, making sure the MPs are not neglecting their partisan fundraising and promotional tasks, and screening proposed appointments to flag partisans of the opposite teams.

To recap, the range of options for the circles of power are:

  • one tier – a full Cabinet with no P&P and no explicit Ministers of State
  • two tier – full Cabinet with a P&P committee.
  • three tier – full Cabinet with a P&P committee and explicit Ministers of State

Canadian PMs long ago broke with practice in the UK, where PMs may name junior Ministers in supporting roles who are not included in Cabinet meetings.

Parliamentary Secretaries are another category, MPs chosen to assist Ministers with their Parliamentary role, shepherding legislation, keeping a watchful eye on Parliamentary committees and caucus. They are not Ministers. Paul Martin made his Parliamentary Secretaries members of the Privy Council to increase their security clearance, but he is the exception.

Committees – Meetings Bloody Meetings

The advantage of having committees of Cabinet is to create sustained focus and to get things done. The output is decisions. They can add hours of deliberative time to each month – perhaps as much as 150 hours each year. Having the same group of Ministers around the table week after week gradually increases their individual and collective depth of knowledge and like any team they can get better with experience.

A lot of basic due diligence within the government can be cleared away through committee work – costing, legal risk, implementation and coordination issues, implications for international or intergovernmental relations, communications plans. This frees up time at Cabinet, or P&P. The PM has constant eyes and ears on committee work thorough the political Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Privy Council Office (PCO).

One way to streamline Cabinet business is to name an “Operations Committee” that is explicitly mandated to deal with traffic flow of smaller transactions and help keep the government’s agenda or the PM’s time from being sidetracked. The Chair of such a committee automatically exerts a great deal of power over colleagues. It is also possible, either as a substitute for an Operations Committee, or a sidebar to one, to name small groups of Ministers tasked with overseeing functional areas such as Parliamentary Business, reviewing communications strategies, or providing input on litigation strategies.

Modern practice, out of necessity, is to have some group of Ministers pre-assigned to act as an incident response table in case of emergencies.

Beyond that, the PM has wide discretion regarding the size, membership and mandates of Cabinet committees, how often they are expected to meet, and whether they are permanent or temporary. Over time, the configurations will change.

Essentially the choice is between a small number of committees with a larger membership, or a larger number of committees with smaller membership. The PM will be mindful of how many hours per month they may be pinning down Ministers in meetings and the cumulative load on each Minister.

Unlike the days of St. Laurent and Diefenbaker, it is now possible for Ministers to use secure connections to join meetings from other locations, so they are not necessarily pinned down in Ottawa. Nevertheless, they often come to feel they are spending too much time in meetings.

RECAP:

One of the most intense tasks facing a newly elected Prime Minister is Cabinet making. They don’t always get it right the first time and will have opportunities to make changes. But the initial selection of the team and the structural design of Cabinet and its committees will have a lasting effect on the style and the effectiveness of the government.

Michael Wernick
Jarislowsky Chair in Public Sector Management
University of Ottawa

Last revised February 25, 2025

2025 could be a year of three Prime Ministers, like 1984 and 1993. That means at least one and probably two times that a new Prime Minister will face the task of forming a first Cabinet and deciding how it should be structured. What goes into the decisions about Cabinet formation?

There will be many subsequent opportunities to modify the personnel and the configuration as the government learns and evolves, but the core design issues and considerations of startups and shuffles are the same.

Cabinet formation is about two things, the people and the structure.

PART ONE: THE PEOPLE

The PM has to work with the material available

As much as a PM, or their transition team, can think about Cabinet selection in the period leading up to the election, and have tentative lists tucked away, in the end, they must wait to find out who makes it into their caucus of MPs and play the cards they have. Sometimes they may have to wait out a recount to be sure. (cf. Amarjeet Sohi in 2015)

Until recently, PMs would draw on a Senator or two to bolster their hand (Sharon Carstairs, Jack Austin, Marjorie LeBreton). Stephen Harper named defeated candidate Michael Fortier to the Senate in February 2006 to be able to name him to Cabinet.

Otherwise, after the initial startup, the PM will have to wait for by-elections or the next national election to recruit new talent. Examples of refreshing a Cabinet that stand out are Pearson’s recruitment of Pierre Trudeau, Jean Marchand and Gérard Pelletier in 1965, Chretien’s recruitment of Stephan Dion and Pierre Pettigrew in 1996 and Harper’s recruitment in 2008.

Cabinet selection pursues multiple goals

Transition teams juggle three considerations:

  • Political Signaling

When the final Cabinet list is posted, there will have to be geographical distribution, but they may not have a lot of MPs, if any, from some provinces. They will also be looking at the cumulative pattern of the Cabinet with respect to gender, race, religion and ethnicity, and the political signals sent by specific appointments to specific jobs. It is always appealing to be able to name the first of a kind. The political signaling could also be about the professional background of the new Minister, playing to the belief that a deep background in a field is a predictor of Ministerial competence.

  • Personnel Management (Politics)

Past partisan politics always comes into play. The PM will be pulled between rewarding loyalists, especially people who were important to securing the party leadership or winning the election, versus pursuing a “team of rivals” approach that co-opts former leaders or defeated leadership candidates. It can be risky to leave out any significant faction within the party as it can create grievances to be nursed.

  • Personnel Management (Governing)

If the party has been out of power for a while, and many of the MPs are either new or have only known life on the Opposition benches, it can be very difficult to forecast which MPs are going to take to the job of Cabinet Minister. Some turn out to be pleasant surprises and some turn out to be duds or the source of future scandals.

It helps if some of the options are people who served effectively in a previous federal or provincial Cabinet. The correlation with pre-politics accomplishment in other walks of life is very loose. Cabinet is a team, and some people will be better at collaboration and mobilizing colleagues than others. Some will be better at driving a workplan and getting things done. Some will be better at public communication, advocacy and persuasion or be able to reach communities in languages other than English and French. Some will be better at chairing committees and task forces and keeping the government’s agenda moving.

There is one last step that may take some options off the table. Prior to selecting a Cabinet PMs will put prospective Ministers through a vetting process, supervised by someone on the transition team. The Privy Council Office will coordinate background checks by CSIS, the RCMP and other agencies for flags including criminal records, outstanding warrants and investigations, financial issues that would open the person to pressure, contact with foreign governments and interests and any personal conduct issues. Candidates may be asked to have a private chat with the Ethics Commissioner to discuss how to deal with anything that could be considered a perceived conflict of interest. A deep check of their social media history will be conducted but may be more or less redundant because the opposition parties and media have probably already done one and surfaced any issues that would call the appointment into question.

PART TWO: THE STRUCTURE

Landing on a structure of Cabinet and its committees can be seen as a time management problem solving for more than one variable:

  • Making best use of the PM’s time
  • Making best use of the group’s time together
  • Making best use of each Minister’s time

The more time around the Cabinet table, the less time is available for other parts of their jobs: House of Commons time; departmental business; travel and meetings with stakeholders; constituency time. The PM will therefore look for a combination of size, layering and committee structure that works, always keeping in mind and checking on all the personnel considerations in Part 1.

Size?

There is no optimal number of Ministers. The advantage of a larger Cabinet is that it helps meet the first two objectives: political signaling and personnel management. A larger number allows the PM to make more geographic regions, identity groups and party factions feel included, and it provides the government with a deeper roster to send out as communicators and advocates to events, interviews, and meetings with stakeholders. It also lets the PM reward a larger number of MPs, broaden the team, and develop a deeper roster for future Cabinet shuffles. From the perspective of governance, having more perspectives and points of view around the Cabinet table can help avoid political and policy blind spots.

On the other hand, a larger Cabinet can drag down productivity. The more people around the table, the more potential interventions, and something has to give – more truncated discussion getting through fewer items per meeting or needing more meetings. Thirty Ministers making two-minute interventions chews up an hour. There will also be more turf and boundary and interpersonal issues to manage and more spokespersons to coordinate.

Concentric circles of power

A large full Cabinet chaired by the PM will use of a lot of their time and draw the PM into tactical and transactional items that consume a large share of Cabinet time instead of strategic policy and politics or resolving serious internal differences of view.

St. Laurent and Diefenbaker chaired more than one Cabinet meeting per week and made little use of committees. This had the effect of pinning them, and a lot of Ministers, in Ottawa. Later PMs landed on using Cabinet committees to clear the smaller transactions and to do the initial policy and political due diligence, so that time at full Cabinet with the PM in the chair was optimized.

The other approach is to create explicit layers within Cabinet, perhaps best seen as concentric circles or a solar system with the PM at the center.

One way to enhance use of PM time, keep a focus on long term goals, and increase productivity is to create a smaller inner circle, personally chaired by the PM, just as many boards in the private and not-for-profit sectors have executive committees. These smaller strategic committees have often been named “Planning and Priorities, or “P&P” in Ottawa parlance. Political signaling and personnel considerations still influence the choice of members, but they are a bit less binding because the PM always has representation in the full Cabinet to point to. There are also governance considerations – it would be rare to leave out the Finance, Foreign Affairs and Justice Ministers, because they work at the intersection of so much Cabinet business.

If the PM names an explicit “inner Cabinet” or P&P committee, they will have to decide whether it has the final say, “ratification”, on items that have previously been discussed at committees, and decide how often the larger full Cabinet should meet. Some PMs have only convened full Cabinet once a month and used it mostly as a political sounding board on more partisan matters, and a place to approve appointments.

PMs can create an outer layer of less senior Ministers. They can name Ministers of State and Ministers without Portfolio. A Minister of State plays a supporting role, either assisting a senior Minister with a specific area or task within a larger portfolio or working at the seams between Ministers on cross-cutting issues or stakeholder interests.

In Canada Ministers of State have been explicitly provided for in legislation since 1971 (the Ministries and Ministers of State Act, last updated in 1985).

Naming Ministers of State can help a PM with political signaling – a Minister for XYZ says “this is important to us” and “you are important to us”. It can free up time of more senior departmental Ministers by taking on interviews, meetings and events. It also can help fill out representation in Cabinet by geography and identity. A PM can be creative with bespoke positions. Popular usages include demographic and identity interests (youth, seniors, multiculturalism, persons with disabilities); economic sectors (small business, tourism, science) or functions (parks, sport). Less frequently the PM may name a Minister Without Portfolio with floating assignments.

From a governance point of view, Ministers of State can be a mixed blessing. They are considered members of the “ministry”, sworn in as Privy Councilors and bound by Cabinet solidarity and Cabinet secrecy. They may take some of the load from senior Ministers. At their best they add to the Cabinet’s “bandwidth”.

But they are always ambitious politicians who want to be visible and influential so they create net additional work that must be supported by a political office and by some part of the public service. Naming a Minister of State leads to another set of choices by the PM about whether to realign the structures of government – it may make sense to pull together pieces of the public service as some sort of secretariat or mini-Ministry, or it may make sense to plug Ministers of State into existing departments. There will always be at least one senior public servant assigned as the main full-time support.

Whether Ministers of State are involved in policy and political decision making, or consigned to a representation role, is primarily decided by the receptivity of the senior Ministers. Whether they actually help to close seams within government or instead just create new boundary and turf issues is primarily a function of their interpersonal and political skills. Sometimes it works very well and sometimes not.

A problem with naming explicit Ministers of State is that it often creates negative feedback that runs counter to the desired political signaling – critics will say “they only gave this a junior Minister so clearly they don’t care about you”. It can draw more attention to who is deemed to be “senior” and “inner circle”, which can be a problem for political signaling and for personnel management.

That is why more recent PMs prefer to be able to say all Ministers are equal (see Harper in 2006 and Justin Trudeau). They name Ministers of State but drop the “of state” in public usage.

One subtle complication is that most PMs like to name a “political Minister” for each region or even each province. The role is independent of any departmental assignment. It is to keep a watchful eye on the partisan interests of the government, working with the party apparatus, making sure the MPs are not neglecting their partisan fundraising and promotional tasks, and screening proposed appointments to flag partisans of the opposite teams.

To recap, the range of options for the circles of power are:

  • one tier – a full Cabinet with no P&P and no explicit Ministers of State
  • two tier – full Cabinet with a P&P committee.
  • three tier – full Cabinet with a P&P committee and explicit Ministers of State

Canadian PMs long ago broke with practice in the UK, where PMs may name junior Ministers in supporting roles who are not included in Cabinet meetings.

Parliamentary Secretaries are another category, MPs chosen to assist Ministers with their Parliamentary role, shepherding legislation, keeping a watchful eye on Parliamentary committees and caucus. They are not Ministers. Paul Martin made his Parliamentary Secretaries members of the Privy Council to increase their security clearance, but he is the exception.

Committees – Meetings Bloody Meetings

The advantage of having committees of Cabinet is to create sustained focus and to get things done. The output is decisions. They can add hours of deliberative time to each month – perhaps as much as 150 hours each year. Having the same group of Ministers around the table week after week gradually increases their individual and collective depth of knowledge and like any team they can get better with experience.

A lot of basic due diligence within the government can be cleared away through committee work – costing, legal risk, implementation and coordination issues, implications for international or intergovernmental relations, communications plans. This frees up time at Cabinet, or P&P. The PM has constant eyes and ears on committee work thorough the political Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the Privy Council Office (PCO).

One way to streamline Cabinet business is to name an “Operations Committee” that is explicitly mandated to deal with traffic flow of smaller transactions and help keep the government’s agenda or the PM’s time from being sidetracked. The Chair of such a committee automatically exerts a great deal of power over colleagues. It is also possible, either as a substitute for an Operations Committee, or a sidebar to one, to name small groups of Ministers tasked with overseeing functional areas such as Parliamentary Business, reviewing communications strategies, or providing input on litigation strategies.

Modern practice, out of necessity, is to have some group of Ministers pre-assigned to act as an incident response table in case of emergencies.

Beyond that, the PM has wide discretion regarding the size, membership and mandates of Cabinet committees, how often they are expected to meet, and whether they are permanent or temporary. Over time, the configurations will change.

Essentially the choice is between a small number of committees with a larger membership, or a larger number of committees with smaller membership. The PM will be mindful of how many hours per month they may be pinning down Ministers in meetings and the cumulative load on each Minister.

Unlike the days of St. Laurent and Diefenbaker, it is now possible for Ministers to use secure connections to join meetings from other locations, so they are not necessarily pinned down in Ottawa. Nevertheless, they often come to feel they are spending too much time in meetings.

RECAP:

One of the most intense tasks facing a newly elected Prime Minister is Cabinet making. They don’t always get it right the first time and will have opportunities to make changes. But the initial selection of the team and the structural design of Cabinet and its committees will have a lasting effect on the style and the effectiveness of the government.