Article content continued

If cabinets were real meritocracies, wherein the “best” person always got the job, we wouldn’t have health ministers with zero medical education, or defence ministers who haven’t served in the army. Julian Fantino’s pockmarked reputation at the Toronto Police Service and Ontario Provincial Police would have disqualified him from a cabinet position — instead of offering him the opportunity to thoroughly obliterate the veterans’ affairs file — and Pierre Poilievre would be off making “unparliamentary” hand gestures somewhere, instead of steering the country’s employment and social development projects.

But that’s now how these things work, even if we might still revere merit-based cabinet appointments as a concept, as Andrew Coyne does in a recent column. Politics, as we all very well know, is at minimum equal parts style and substance, and often times the principles of politics bleed into governing. Ought every individual be assessed solely based on his or her capabilities? Certainly. Will it happen? Not likely.

What will happen, unfortunately, is that whichever women are appointed to cabinet will at once be put under the microscope, as people inevitably try to assess who got there on her own merits and who was helped along in order to fill Trudeau’s quota promise. And that’s really too bad, since at present, we have no reason to believe the 50 women who are part of the Liberal caucus are anything but smart, savvy women.

Trudeau and his cheerleaders might think he is doing women everywhere a great service, but speaking as someone who uses the ladies bathroom, I know I would loathe to be part of a quota.

National Post

Robyn Urback • rurback@nationalpost.com | robynurback