Ottawa MPPs will mainly stay in place

Some are being entrusted with big challenges

With a few minor adjustments to their responsibilities, Ottawa’s Liberal MPPs are keeping the cabinet jobs they had before the June 12 election. Though they’re primarily in technical, low-profile portfolios (unless something goes wrong), Premier Kathleen Wynne is nevertheless giving them some pretty significant responsibilities.

Yasir Naqvi has been rising quickly in cabinet, going from labour minister to community safety minister in a year and now adding duties as the government’s house leader. That last assignment isn’t as important in a majority government as in a minority, but legislation still needs to be shepherded and relations with the other parties still have to be maintained to make Queen’s Park function smoothly.

In Community Safety, Naqvi will be responsible for improving conditions in the province’s jails — which are overcrowded and frequently the subject of damning reports by the provincial ombudsman — and contending with a raft of small municipalities that rely on the Ontario Provincial Police contracts for public safety but are having more and more trouble paying the force’s high salaries.

Energy is one of the province’s ugliest files and it’s hard to tell whether keeping Bob Chiarelli in the portfolio is a vote of confidence in his low-key competence or a punishment for something.

Chiarelli has a mastery of the details in this complex job, though he’s not the cabinet’s most able salesman for unpalatable things like the hydro price increases Ontario’s looking at for the next several years. Above all, he has to make sure there are no fresh embarrassments. After that, his main task, which has defeated ministers in many governments before him, is to bust the culture in Ontario’s heavily regulated, heavily unionized electricity industry that’s filled whole chapters of the $100,000plus list with hydro workers.

Madeleine Meilleur is keeping her position as the province’s attorney general, to which she was promoted shortly before the election call, and her longer-standing place as minister responsible for francophone affairs. She gets to deal with the bogged-down courts (prisoners awaiting trial are most of the inmates in the province’s jails) and complaints about Ontario’s justices of the peace ( junior judges who handle routine but important matters). There are also challenges in the costs of accessing justice — Legal Aid Ontario is overstretched and most people don’t qualify for help — and in modernizing the courts’ approach to accused people with mental illnesses.

Grant Crack (Glengarry-Prescott-Russell), John Fraser (Ottawa South) and Marie-France Lalonde (Ottawa- Orléans), all of them relative newcomers, stay on the backbenches, though they’re all parliamentary assistants who will speak for ministers if they’re unavailable.

Crack has been given responsibility for education, Fraser for health, and Lalonde for both economic development and francophone affairs.