Premier Alward has said he will cut the Cabinet to 15 posts. With himself, there are 12 Ministers from the Lord government and many more that have been MLAs for a while and will want their piece of the Cabinet table.
I suspect there will be no more than 1 or 2 new faces (i.e. that were not in the Lord government) around the Cabinet table that will be announced today.
That is unique – at least in recent New Brunswick political history. It’s almost like the public said “ooops” and asked for essentially the exact same team that was running things in 2005 to come back and run things in 2010.
Normally, there has been an “out with the old, in with the new” model.
The good news is that these guys and gals have been there before so there will not be much of a learning curve on the process of governing.
There will be a steep learning curve, I suspect, on how to govern in an austerity environment.
It’s a lot tougher environment these days.
I differ in thinking the learning curve on governing will be at least equally as steep because the requirements of governing successfully are changing. The advantage the reurnees may have is in not believing they have the answers, or that they are the answer.