OTTAWA—It was already a shrinking group around Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet table.

The class of 2006, original members of Harper’s first 27-minister cabinet, have been steadily making their political exits over the past six and a half years.

Now, with Bev Oda’s announced resignation on Tuesday, only nine people around the current cabinet table can boast that they’ve been there since the beginning of Harper’s reign. Well, 10, if you include the prime minister himself.

That in itself is not a highly unusual rate of turnover — at roughly the same point in Jean Chrétien’s decade-long tenure, only 14 of his original, 1993-vintage ministers were still around.

“Strong, stable government,” to borrow Harper’s favourite phrase from the 2011 election, doesn’t automatically mean strong, stable cabinets.

But it does mean that weak ministers can hang on to office long past the point it seems obvious they should leave.

Harper usually dispenses with under-performing cabinet members in the same way as Chrétien did — quietly, cryptically, and long after the headlines die down about their misdeeds.

Oda, for instance, had been blundering in her job as International Co-operation Minister well before last year’s election and some observers were surprised when she made it back into cabinet. In a 2010-11 controversy over financing of the KAIROS international aid group, it was revealed that Oda had inserted the word “not” into documented advice from bureaucrats and she was ultimately forced to apologize for misleading Parliament.

“Any reasonable person confronted with what appears to have transpired would necessarily be extremely concerned, if not shocked,” Commons Speaker Peter Milliken said at the time.

Oda’s travails of this year — revelations of a pricey room change to the Savoy Hotel in London, complete with a $16 glass of orange juice — were less of an affront to democracy.

But they chipped away at the image of a government that likes to portray itself as the friend to “taxpayers” and “ordinary” Canadians. The lesson, whether intended or not, is that ministers can get away with sins in Parliament, but they are liabilities when their stumbles catch the attention of people outside the Ottawa bubble.

Helena Guergis, former minister of state for the status of women, found her career doomed after news emerged of questionable lobbying activities by her husband, former MP Rahim Jaffer. Maxime Bernier, meanwhile, lost his foreign affairs minister job when he left documents at his girlfriend’s house. In those two cases, the axe came swiftly down — exceptions to the slow and quiet departure style of Harper cabinet ministers.

Question marks are now hanging over two other members of the class of 2006 at the current cabinet table — Defence Minister Peter MacKay and Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.

The alarming cost overruns for the F-35 jets, as well as some high-profile stories about his use of military aircraft, have kept MacKay in the headlines throughout the past year, and not in a good way.

Toews, meanwhile, set off an online firestorm with his Internet-surveillance legislation and insults to critics, likening them to child pornographers. That in turn dragged Toews’ messy divorce into the fray and tabloid-like attention that never sits well with any PMO, least of all Harper’s.

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So almost as quickly as the news of Oda’s resignation emerged on Tuesday, politics-watchers were wondering whether similar announcements could be expected from Toews or MacKay.

It seems apparent that a shuffle is coming — that Oda’s announcement was part of a deck-clearing in advance. What remains to be seen is whether other charter members of Harper’s cabinet team are also heading to the exit doors, voluntarily or involuntarily.

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