A cabinet shuffle may well be coming in the next couple of months in Ottawa, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have already jumped the gun and created a new job for one of his ministers.

Chrystia Freeland, already Canada’s foreign affairs minister, is increasingly looking like the unofficial deputy prime minister to Trudeau.

Over the past few weeks, Freeland appears to be everywhere — especially everywhere Trudeau is not. While the prime minister has been keeping a strategic distance from the fray with President Donald Trump, it’s been left to Freeland to stand up in his place.

Where Trudeau speaks in diplomatic terms about Canada-U.S. relations at present, for instance, Freeland is the one using the more blunt language.

Here was Trudeau speaking at his press conference this week, when asked to explain why the U.S. president might be on an anti-Canada rampage: “I’m not in a position to opine on motivations of the president.”

Freeland, on the other hand, seems more willing to step into that territory, notably with an important speech she delivered earlier this month in Washington. “You may feel today that your size allows you to go mano a mano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win,” Freeland said to her American audience (and Trump, by extension). “But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s pre-eminence is eternal.”

Trudeau, like Stephen Harper before him, has no official deputy. It may well be that the position, which had a roughly 30-year lifespan in Canada, is now extinct. (The late, great Allan MacEachen was the first deputy PM in Canada, appointed to that role in the 1970s by the current prime minister’s father. The last person to hold the deputy’s title, at least to date, was Anne McLellan, who served in that role in the cabinet of Paul Martin from 2003 to 2006.)

If, however, we think of a deputy as someone who would jump into the job in the prime minister’s place, that job now apparently belongs to Freeland, the journalist and author turned into Canada’s top minister on the world stage. Note, too, that it was Freeland, not Trudeau, who sat down first with Doug Ford, soon to be the new premier of Ontario.

It’s been quite a ride for Freeland — one she might not have predicted five years ago this month, when Bob Rae decided to step down as the MP for the riding then known as Toronto Centre.

Freeland had been on Trudeau’s radar even before he became Liberal leader. Just this past week, I was going through old interview transcripts with Trudeau and found one from March of 2013. We were chatting for an ebook I was writing on him for the Star and I asked the usual question about what he was reading at the moment. He said he was reading Freeland’s 2012 book, Plutocrats. “So good, so good,” he said.

It wasn’t until a few months later that Trudeau finally persuaded Freeland to leave journalism and go into politics — a saga that Linda Diebel chronicled in this paper in late 2015, when Freeland was first sworn in to Trudeau’s cabinet.

While Freeland was definitely seen as a rising star back in those early days of Trudeau’s government, few would have picked her, still a rookie MP, as a likely deputy. Since the PM himself was so new to the job, we probably would have chosen political vets such as Ralph Goodale or Jim Carr to be the stand-in for Trudeau in emergencies.

But while this Trump tantrum may not (yet) be a full-blown emergency for Canada, it is most certainly urgent — and even without an official shuffle, the PM has assigned Freeland the task of being his deputy to deal with it.

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Susan Delacourt is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Ottawa. Follow her on Twitter: @SusanDelacourt

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