Trudeau hires new advisers after SNC-Lavalin scandal
Justin Trudeau is adding two new advisers to his inner circle — both with B.C. experience — as the Prime Minister’s Office shores up its ranks in advance of the fall election.
Ben Chin, who has been serving as chief of staff to Finance Minister Bill Morneau, is being pulled in to serve as senior adviser to Trudeau, as has been widely expected for a couple of months now.
Chin is a former journalist who has worked at Queen’s Park and as an aide to former B.C. Liberal premier Christy Clark. He was also tight with Trudeau and his team right from the beginning of Trudeau’s campaign for the Liberal leadership in 2012, so this is in many ways a move back to where Chin started in the Trudeau orbit.
Sarah Goodman, who has extensive private-sector experience in environmental issues, moves up in the PMO to director of policy. Before she went to work with Trudeau, Goodman was a founder of Treetop Strategy, a senior vice-president with the environmental charity Tides Canada and a vice-president at Weyerhauser, an international natural resources company.
Neither of these new aides moves exactly into the position vacated by former principal secretary Gerald Butts, but they will take on parts of the multiple-faceted role Butts served before resigning in the midst of the SNC-Lavalin controversy this year.
The British Columbia experience of both new advisers provides a glimpse into where the prime minister’s political sights are increasingly fixed as the fall election looms.
Fresh off the Liberals’ dismal fourth-place finish in a B.C. byelection won by the Green party last week, Trudeau appears to be acknowledging that some of his hopes for staying in power rest in the West Coast — and that he needs help doing so.
It’s also unquestionably an acknowledgment of damage done to those B.C. hopes with the explosive departure of former star B.C. minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, which set off the SNCLavalin saga that dominated headlines for the first few months of the year.
The byelection in NanaimoLadysmith was also a loss for the New Democrats, who have also made B.C. a priority in their electoral calculations. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh will be running to hold the seat he recently won in Burnaby, and hoping for any boost he can get from his provincial NDP allies, who hold power in B.C. with the backing of the Greens.
Climate change and carbon taxes are expected to be a leading issue in the fall election, and all the attention on B.C. shows that this is where the GreenLiberal-NDP jostling will be most intense.
Trudeau has long presented B.C. as his second home — the place where his mother, Margaret, was born, where her father, James Sinclair, was a prominent politician, and where Trudeau himself went to teach after graduating from university.
But recent polls haven’t been kind to Trudeau in his adopted second home, where his Liberals hold 17 of the province’s 42 seats in the House of Commons. At the end of March, even as the SNC-Lavalin controversy was dying down, a Research Co. poll showed that roughly half of British Columbians believed a different party should be in power in Canada.
Against this backdrop, it’s Chin’s promotion that will likely attract the most noise from Trudeau’s critics.
Chin was identified by Wilson-Raybould as one of the advisers who applied the earliest pressure to her to give SNCLavalin a deferred prosecution agreement.