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However, it’s not a foregone conclusion, either. Other Liberals could serve, including John McCallum, defence minister in the latter Chrétien years, and Marc Garneau, a former combat systems engineer, naval captain and astronaut. There’s also an outside chance Trudeau will appoint a female defence minister as a gesture of his determination to establish full gender parity in cabinet. Given Leslie’s star status, the logical berths for him beyond defence would be foreign or international development. All will be revealed Nov. 4, next Wednesday.

Setting aside whose nameplate goes on the door, Leslie’s thinking is sure to inform the government’s defence policy. It has two main prongs. First, as he articulated in a controversial report on military transformation in 2011, spending should be redirected from bureaucracy to weapons and warriors or, as he put it, “more teeth, less tail.” Second, defence procurement needs to be much more effective, responsive and timely. It is in the second area where the big decisions, accompanied by big dollar figures, lie.

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To begin, the previous Conservative government’s National Shipbuilding Procurement strategy has not been going well. Though Arctic patrol ships are under construction on the East Coast at the Irving shipyard, results on the West Coast are less encouraging.

Last spring, with the Harper government conscious of the delays that have plagued Seaspan’s effort to build a series of smaller Coast Guard vessels, and ultimately two much larger naval supply ships and a three-season icebreaker, talks went ahead with Quebec-based Davie Shipyard for a stop-gap. That program is on track and expected to provide the navy with a leased, converted tanker, for use as an oiler and supply ship until new ones are built.