Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Tuesday named a new foreign minister and removed other top members in his cabinet ahead of the election, he says Liberal Party insiders said this year.
Trudeau’s shocked when 43-year-old Navdeep Bains, unexpectedly announced that he was resigning from politics for family reasons. Navdeep Singh Bains PC FCPA MP is a Canadian politician who served as Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. He has two school daughters and had been working since November 2015, was a senior minister in Ontario, the populous province of the Liberal stronghold Ontario.
Canadian prime ministers have traditionally reshuffled his team if a cabinet member says they will not run in the next election.
François-Philippe Champagne, 50, will leave the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to step down for Bains. 71-year-old Mark Garneau change from transportation to become Canada’s fourth foreign minister in just four years.
Guernio’s main tasks will be to establish relations with the new US administration and to handle a major diplomatic dispute with China.
One of Champagne’s first jobs will be to decide whether or not to allow China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to supply the next generation of devices to the 5G network. Liberal sources say Ottawa will ban Huawei gear but has remained silent not to offend Beijing.
Bains was first elected in 2004, lost his seat in 2011, and returned to parliament four years after Trudeau came to power.
“The time has come for me to put my family first, and I couldn’t be happier about it,” Bains said in a video posted on Twitter.
Trudeau, who retained power in the October 2019 election but has only a minority of seats in the House of Commons, relies on other parties to govern.
He said the election could be held this year last week but stressed that he wanted to continue in office to focus on the coronovirus epidemic.
Backbench MLA Omar Algabra will replace Guarnio in transportation and Jim Carr rejoined the cabinet as a special representative for the Prairies, where liberals had failed to win seats in the last election.