OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fixer suddenly has a whole lot of mending to do.

Dominic LeBlanc, Trudeau’s longtime friend and close political ally, already had his hands full when finance minister Chrystia Freeland threw Parliament Hill into disarray Monday with her sudden and scathing resignation.

LeBlanc had been tasked with addressing incoming president Donald Trump’s concerns about the security of Canada’s border with the United States; spearheading Canada’s response to a coordinated campaign by agents of India to harass and even kill Canadian citizens; and managing Ottawa’s sometimes fraught relationships with the provinces.

On Monday, Trudeau asked him to take on just one or two more things: managing the Canadian economy and government finances, and leading the charge against the incoming U.S. president’s tariff threats. 

“I guess I’ll start early in the morning and work late at night and probably won’t take a lot of weekends off,” LeBlanc quipped in response to a question from The Logic after his swearing in as finance minister Monday evening. 

He seemed only to be half joking. 

LeBlanc, 57, has a reputation for sailing through treacherous waters. 

In the last major cabinet shuffle he took over the public safety department after Marco Mendicino struggled through controversies related to foreign election interference, gun-control legislation and the transfer of serial killer Paul Bernardo to a medium-security prison. 

LeBlanc is credited with bringing a sense of stability to those files, if not resolving them. But he now faces another order of pressure. 

By the time the sun had set after Freeland’s abrupt departure from cabinet, he was ushered into a hastily prepared swearing-in ceremony at Rideau Hall—and the heart of another political maelstrom.

He met with finance officials the following morning, and by afternoon was already defending the projected deficits the government released in the fall economic statement, which blew through the fiscal guardrails Freeland set in the last budget. 

“Our government is very proud of the fall economic statement that we made public yesterday,” he told the House of Commons Tuesday.

“The fall economic statement speaks to growth in the Canadian economy, it speaks to supporting Canadians with serious affordability challenges.” 

Shortly afterward, he headed out of the Commons to lead a news conference on what the government intends to do about Trump’s border demands.

Flanked by three other ministers, the RCMP commissioner and the head of the Canada Border Services Agency, LeBlanc detailed plans for augmenting the Mounties and the border agency and co-operating with provinces and municipalities. (LeBlanc is also minister of intergovernmental affairs, incidentally.)

Then, like a knife tossed to a juggler who already seems to have his hands full, in came a reporter’s question about a policy Freeland apparently hated and that the other parties don’t support, either: “As the new finance minister, are you committed to the $250 cheques that your government plans to give out?”

LeBlanc snapped into finance minister mode, touting the government’s commitment to “affordability measures” and working with opposition MPs to find common ground.

Then it was back to being law-and-order minister. He pointed out to the RCMP’s Mike Duheme about the similar grey suits LeBlanc and Immigration Minister Marc Miller had on.

“Commissioner, did you notice that Marc Miller and I are wearing the same uniform?” LeBlanc joked.

It fell flat. But he’s not in cabinet for his comedy.

LeBlanc has been a career politician for 25 years, and served as a New Brunswick MP under Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin.

A two-time cancer survivor, he temporarily resigned his ministerial duties in 2019 to focus on treatment for non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He beat the cancer, won re-election and Trudeau re-appointed him to cabinet by the end of that year. 

 As for Trudeau, politics is a family business for LeBlanc, whose father Roméo worked as a press secretary for Pierre Trudeau before going on to serve as a Liberal MP, a cabinet minister and eventually as governor general. 

LeBlanc is even said to have babysat Trudeau as a child. 

Both Freeland and her predecessor Bill Morneau resigned as finance minister after accusing Trudeau’s office of putting political advantage ahead of sound fiscal policy.

The natural role of a finance minister is to keep the government’s spending impulses in check, historically putting the person in that job at odds with the prime minister. 

Many in the business community have balked at the size of the government’s projected deficits, and some worry LeBlanc’s close relationship with the prime minister and lack of formal experience in finance and economics could mean his ministry will retreat from its traditional role of saying no. 

“It feels a lot like a status-quo appointment, more than a recognition that there’s a problem and we need to address and get closer to fiscal discipline, which is what I think the message should be,” said Greg Taylor, chief investment officer at Purpose Investments.  

Despite LeBlanc’s thin experience in finance, his time as public safety minister should give him a leg up on his other new job as head of cabinet’s committee on Canada-U.S. relations. He takes the helm of that committee from Freeland, who served as its previous chair and led negotiations with Trump during the president-elect’s last administration. 

The committee was revived in the aftermath of Trump’s re-election and promise to impose 25 per cent tariffs on all imports from Canada, its goal to mitigate the economic impacts of the new administration.

It was LeBlanc, not Freeland, who accompanied Trudeau to a clandestine dinner date with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida earlier this month to talk about the security of the border between the two countries. 

Trump told Trudeau the tariffs would go ahead unless Canada cracks down on the flow of migrants and chemicals used to make illicit drugs going into the U.S. 

LeBlanc expected that would be his priority, and was getting ready to present his plan when he learned of Freeland’s public resignation letter. 

“I went to the office in the morning thinking that I should focus on this border security package,” LeBlanc said Tuesday in an interview with the CBC’s Information Morning in Moncton.  

He confirmed he was only asked to take up the post after Freeland had resigned, and he had no intention of taking the job ahead of time.

LeBlanc doesn’t expect to be juggling all these jobs for long, and will likely hand off the public safety portfolio at some point soon. 

He told the House he also spent part of Monday reaching out to officials in the U.S. about border security. 

“Canadians expect their government to be focused on their economic concerns, they expect their government to be focused on the real threat: what 25 per cent tariffs across the board would mean to the Canadian economy,” he said Tuesday during question period. 

Trudeau’s cabinet has been overdue for a shuffle since October, when four ministers announced they wouldn’t run again in the next election. Since then, former employment minister Randy Boissonneault resigned to address a controversy related to his past claims to Indigenous heritage, while Housing Minister Sean Fraser announced he won’t seek reelection.

The new cabinet, whenever it’s appointed, will carry the government into the first stages of trade talks with the U.S. and, if Trudeau hangs on as Liberal leader, may be the team the prime minister takes into the next election in hopes of turning around the party’s dimming prospects. 

LeBlanc told the radio program Tuesday he’s not worried about politics at the moment. 

“My job is to focus on the work that I have,” he said.

And he has a lot of it. 

With files from David Reevely