Will the yes people keep winning at this week’s Liberal cabinet retreat?

The Liberal party’s stagnant, cult-of-personality corporate culture puts all of Canada at risk.

In the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, experts attributed much of its cause to corporate cultures that didn't value risk assessment. In lay terms, virtually no senior people in those banks (or their regulators) saw fit to question a system of high-risk policies and behaviour that eventually put the entire world at risk.

Given the volume of national crises and political scandals facing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government as it hits its eight-year mark, the same could be said for them too. 

So as Mr. Trudeau's cabinet begins a two-day retreat in Prince Edward Island, this risk-oblivious culture is about to be tested. Confronted with the realities of things like a national housing crisis, rapidly rising national greenhouse gas emissions, an abysmal level of national economic productivity, and a massively increased federal government that delivers piss poor service, all while Mr. Trudeau's government has faced multiple ethics scandals, Canadians are souring on the Liberal government and openly questioning their ability to come up with meaningful fixes to any of these issues.

That’s why Mr. Trudeau's cabinet, caucus and core team should make fixing their corporate culture a central issue for this week's cabinet retreat. Many of their policies, and the management approach those policies have been developed with, have failed. But hope for the Liberals having a moment of sobriety and changing course on these fronts is muted at best.

Here's why.

The first reason is exemplified with the message sent via Mr. Trudeau's recent cabinet shuffle: people who fail in Mr. Trudeau’s government fail upwards. For example, many of Canada's woes are structural and economic. Yet, Mr. Trudeau opted not to shake up his core economic team when he kept Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne in their respective roles. Both occupied their positions during much of the time when issues like the inflationary crisis and a drop in national productivity developed. Yet, they were kept in the same positions despite a cabinet shuffle that saw most of the rest of the cabinet change roles. The same is being said for Mr. Trudeau's most senior advisor, Chief of Staff Katie Telford. 

Mr. Trudeau keeping these people in their roles can only be interpreted as a vote of confidence in their work. That sends a pretty clear message to the broader public service, his caucus, and the Canadian public: he doesn't intend to change direction on those critical policy files. If the public is expected to buy into the notion that Mr. Trudeau can progress on core economic policy that is currently failing, he should have made changes here.

Further evidence of a rotten corporate culture within the Liberal government is Mr. Trudeau choosing to populate his cabinet with rookies who seem to have seemingly been promoted on the criteria of being able to toe the existing party line. None of Mr. Trudeau's new appointees or promotions within cabinet have a history of publicly being independent thinkers on policy or constructively challenging the direction in which the Liberals have been taking the country. Further, he seems to have demoted anyone who did. An organization that lacks a culture of encouraging constructive dissent cannot innovate. Said differently, if no one in Mr. Trudeau's inner circle is expected to be rewarded for challenging his policy direction, no one will. 

Compounding that problem is the broader Liberal caucus failing to put public pressure on its leader to change course. Suppose the Liberal caucus has privately been putting pressure on Mr. Trudeau to change directly. The message has yet to be received. And what few caucus grumblings have made it into public discourse have been made on a not-for-attribution basis and have predominantly focused on personal butthurt about not making it into the cabinet as opposed to complaints about the policy direction Mr. Trudeau. Outside of a few exceptions, few in the caucus have undertaken self-driven initiatives or messages to engage the public otherwise. In the broader Liberal caucus, courage is decidedly lacking.

And while Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has keeping a packed national outreach tour schedule, Mr. Trudeau has kept his domestic public engagements to a dismal minimum. Mr. Trudeau can't see the need for change if he continues to safely turtle himself away from the huddled masses in a cocoon of trusted advisors, soothing lobbyists, well-paid senior public servants, and assorted other fart-catching yes people in whose best interest it is to protect the status quo.

Mr. Trudeau's failure to change the decision-making culture in his party has far-reaching implications for Canada. Many of Canada's negative trends - violent crime, addiction, homelessness, poverty - all relate to the reality that Liberal policy in these areas has failed. Losing the plot on policy, specifically believing the talking points and refusing to do something different, also has political consequences for the Liberal party.

Aside from rapidly declining polling numbers in every region of the country, public opinion on Mr. Trudeau is hardening. Mr. Trudeau's negatives now are consistently at least ten percent higher than Mr. Poilievre in national polls. This trend could suggest that Canadians don't believe that the Liberal leader can change or that Liberal change from within is possible with Mr. Trudeau at the helm. That Liberal cabinet Ministers have spent the bulk of the summer, particularly after the cabinet shuffle, leaning on the same talking points on core issues like housing suggests to voters an unwillingness and lack of capacity to change. That Mr. Trudeau has yet to send out mandate letters to his Ministry in the same period also indicates that he has little left in the tank and isn't open to bringing in people with fresh perspectives that might challenge existing dogma.

Assuming the Liberal-NDP coalition holds, Mr. Trudeau will have two more years left on his current electoral mandate. If he runs again (as he's said he will), he will presumably ask Canadians for four more. Confronted with a decline in standard of living, many Canadians are wondering the following. If eight years of Mr. Trudeau-led policies have led the nation to this state, where would the country be after six more? And without charge to the dogmatic yes-person corporate culture that seems to have calcified in the Liberal party, the answer to that will undoubtedly be a change election.

So as Mr. Trudeau continues to dine out on a corporate culture that has kept his ego feeling good about himself and his ideology, he should beware that what nourishes him is also destroying the fortunes of many Canadians and his political party.