OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is keeping his key economic ministers in place, but Tuesday’s cabinet announcement emphasized the re-elected Liberal government’s hopes for climate action and cleantech, and appointed an experienced lieutenant to shepherd key pieces of Big Tech legislation through Parliament.

Here’s who you need to know in the 38-person ministry, and what they’ll need to tackle in their early months in office.

The minister: François-Philippe Champagne, Innovation, Science and Industry

His inbox: If returning Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is responsible for managing Canada’s economic present and its emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic, then the returning Champagne is the minister for guiding its economy into the future. The Liberals’ pre-election April budget pledged major capital injections for flagship scale-up and R&D programs, as well as hundreds of millions for strategies to develop the country’s AI, quantum and life-sciences industries. Champagne will be charged with overseeing all that spending, and likely with implementing the party’s campaign promise to establish a $2-billion Canadian version of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Since succeeding longtime incumbent Navdeep Bains in January, the Quebec MP has spent much of his time in the innovation portfolio announcing gobs of funding for symbolically and strategically important firms and industries. He’s also promised to focus on retaining Canadian IP and sought greater international cooperation on technology regulation and standards.

His challenges: Innovation-economy stakeholders will be watching closely to see what Champagne does with two files of longstanding concern. 

The August election call kiboshed Bill C-11, the government’s proposed overhaul of federal consumer-privacy and data rules; it had been stuck in the House of Commons since Bains introduced it in November 2020. Privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien labelled the legislation a “step back” from Canada’s existing 20-year-old law, and called for major changes; business lobby groups were split. In the meantime, provincial governments have been moving forward with their own rules, sparking fears of a patchwork across the country.

While the Liberal platform pledged to revive much of its Big Tech legislation in its first 100 days, it did not put a timeline on the privacy bill. Nearly 41 months after the government first launched consultations on data rules, Champagne now needs to decide whether to rework its privacy proposal once again, and find a spot for it on the legislative calendar.

Responding to a question from The Logic on Tuesday, he declined to provide specifics on either issue. “You would probably expect that five hours or so after being sworn in, it would be a bit quick for any minister to pretend that new legislation would be brought forward,” said Champagne, who’s been innovation minister for 10 months. The government will “focus on competition [and] making sure that within our country, we have the set of rules and the enforcements that goes with it, in order to protect [consumers] adequately,” he said.

Champagne will also likely work alongside returning Revenue Minister Diane Lebouthillier to reform the scientific research and experimental development tax incentive, which the Liberal platform promised to make “more generous” to risk-taking and inventive firms. Tech founders have long expressed concern that the program props up zombie companies that would fail without the regular federal cash infusion and that too much of its $3-billion-plus in annual payouts flows to subsidiaries of foreign firms. 

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The ministers: Steven Guilbeault, Environment and Climate Change; Jonathan Wilkinson, Natural Resources

Their inboxes: In one of the strongest signals in the shuffle, Trudeau moved ex-cleantech executive Wilkinson from environment to natural resources and replaced him with former Greenpeace climate activist Guilbeault. The departments share the regulation of the energy sector and will be charged with implementing the Liberals’ $15-billion climate plan, announced in December. Efforts to reduce emissions “will facilitate enormous opportunities for clean technology in Canada,” said Wilkinson, speaking at a Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) event in February. 

The Liberals’ April budget proposed tax credits for carbon capture, utilization and storage, and $319 million in funding over seven years for Natural Resources Canada to help develop the technology. Experts and energy executives told The Logic it will take a lot of time and capital to scale up such efforts.  

Before moving on any programs or legislation, Guilbeault and Wilkinson will likely join Trudeau in Glasgow next week at the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26). 

Their challenge: Many of the industrial and innovation programs designed to back cleantech firms that could contribute to emissions reduction are outside the environment and natural resources portfolios, or split across departments. For example, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) runs the new $8-billion Net Zero Accelerator (NZA). The program will “help large emitters implement technologies that are still quite a ways up the experience curve … from a price perspective,” Wilkinson said at the February SDTC event, suggesting his cleantech background and discussions influenced its design. 

But ISED also oversees SDTC, as well as funding for auto manufacturers looking to build electric vehicles in Canada, while the environment department manages popular consumer incentives for buying such cars. And the Liberals have also targeted some infrastructure spending—particularly via the arm’s-length Canada Infrastructure Bank—to green priorities. That will fall to new Infrastructure Minister Dominic LeBlanc. 

Between them, Wilkinson and Guilbeault will have to stickhandle Canada’s way through an “energy transition” away from fossil fuels and toward renewables, ideally placating both oil-and-gas-producing Alberta and Saskatchewan and increasingly hydrocarbon-hostile Quebec. And there’s the matter of the Trans Mountain Pipeline project from Alberta to the B.C. coast, which the federal government owns and which Trudeau has committed to completing in the face of objections from environmentalists and many Indigenous groups.

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The minister: Pablo Rodriguez, Canadian Heritage

His inbox: It will be Rodriguez’s job to make good on several promises from the Liberal election platform within 100 days: a summit on relaunching cultural industries, reintroducing legislation to bring foreign streaming services under the CRTC’s supervision through the Broadcasting Act, introducing a new bill to require some of those same companies to pay Canadian news producers for content, and introducing yet another bill to combat online harms such as illegal pornography and hate promotion.

His challenge: All these top-priority legislative plans are, to say the least, controversial. C-10, the Liberals’ previous bill to regulate video-streaming services like Netflix with things like Canadian-content requirements, died with the election call after senators refused to rubber-stamp the version passed by the House of Commons and sent it off for study by a committee that never met.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Rodriguez did not directly answer repeated questions about whether he’d re-introduce the legislation as is, or make changes to address criticisms that its provisions should not apply to user-generated content. “I’m going to take a look at that and be consulting, but the basis for the bill has to be to make sure that those web giants contribute to our culture like our own companies do,” he said. “And that’s fundamental.”

Notionally, the government is still considering the best way to make the Googles and Facebooks of the world pay for Canadian news, but the Liberal platform took a distinct side in a live debate over how to do it—coming out in favour of the Australian model of collective negotiations. Rodriguez’s predecessor in the portfolio, Guilbeault, also said the effort to redistribute revenues from content-sharers to content-makers needed to be international. 

Proposed terms for an online-harms bill, which the government put up for consultations in late summer, have been roundly panned by digital-rights groups as a compilation of some of the worst ideas in the sphere from around the world. Responding to a question from The Logic Tuesday, Rodriguez said he would “listen and consult,” including on the proposals.

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The other notable names

Markham, Ont.-area MP Mary Ng retains the small-business and international-trade files, adding economic development to her responsibilities. She oversees a portfolio of agencies that back firms looking to grow or sell abroad, including the Business Development Bank of Canada, which is now headed by Isabelle Hudon, former Canadian ambassador to France, and is due for a review of its mandate. Ng will also need to appoint a new CEO for Invest in Canada, the foreign-capital-attraction office launched in March 2018. 

In their first mandate, the Liberals consolidated the then-six regional development agencies (RDA) at ISED, in an effort to refocus them on supporting firms to scale up, export and adopt technology and “away from small-town gazebos to doing economic development,” a source close to Bains told The Logic earlier this year.

Tuesday’s shuffle spins them out again. From east to west, new Languages Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor will also oversee the Atlantic agency; Pascale St-Onge, a former cultural-sector union leader just elected in Quebec, will be responsible for the province’s RDA; former Ontario cabinet minister Helena Jaczek will run the agency for Southern Ontario, a major funder of local incubators and accelerators; new Indigenous Services Minister Patty Hajdu will also oversee the one for Northern Ontario; Manitoba MP Dan Vandal will be responsible for both the Prairies and territorial RDAs; and outgoing defence minister Harjit Sajjan takes charge of a newly established B.C. agency.

Elsewhere, Nova Scotia’s Sean Fraser takes over immigration as Otttawa tries to make up for a major drop in new arrivals during the pandemic, and innovation-economy executives call for the expansion of fast-track programs for skilled foreign workers. Predecessor Marco Mendicino is now responsible for Public Safety Canada, which, as The Logic exclusively reported, is considering changes to foreign-investment and export rules to protect domestically developed technology and data.

After shepherding the Liberals’ efforts to make deals on federal funding for child care with each of the provinces, Ahmed Hussen is now the minister responsible for housing. That hands him another knotty federal-provincial-municipal issue, though again with the federal treasury underwriting his efforts. The Liberals promised to make housing more affordable through a combination of financial assistance to buyers and incentives to cities and towns to zone for and build more. One immediate task: figuring out how a $4-billion “housing accelerator fund” will actually work.

Karina Gould, formerly the minister for international-development programs, takes over from Hussen as the minister for families and social development—read: “finishing the job on child care.” That means reaching deals with holdouts Alberta, Ontario and New Brunswick. The Liberals see $10-a-day child care as a major help to women in the workforce, particularly in sectors hit hardest by the pandemic.

Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough remains in place. The Liberals have yet to implement a major new training program announced in the 2019 budget, while the pandemic and accompanying digitization of industries has displaced workers who will need support and reskilling. New Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan will be charged with expanding programs like EI and making long-promised changes to gig workers’ rights.

There’s no space in the new cabinet for a digital-government minister; the Liberals previously made much of creating a separate role to oversee and overhaul Ottawa’s tech stack.