Buckley Belanger, Sask.'s sole Liberal MP, appointed as secretary of state for rural development

Saskatchewan MP Buckley Belanger has been named as secretary of state for rural development as part of Prime Minister Mark Carney's announcement of his new federal cabinet.

Belanger, who represents the Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River riding, is the sole Liberal MP from Saskatchewan.

"We actually have a voice now, somebody that will listen and speak for us," said Rebecca Sylvestre, one of Belanger's constituents from Birch Narrows Dene Nation. "I was so happy to hear that he got elected, because he's not gonna leave us in the dark."

Sylvestre said on Tuesday that she's known Belanger for many years and that he personally played a role in helping her get through difficult experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before he ran federally, Belanger served as the MLA for Athabasca from 1995 to 2021. Initially elected as a Liberal, he switched to the Saskatchewan NDP in 1998. Before entering provincial politics he was the mayor of Île-à-la-Crosse from 1988 to 1994.

Sylvestre runs Turnor Lake and Birth Narrows Community Food Centre and said she received a letter from Belanger thanking her for her community advocacy when he was an MLA.

"I never got that from anybody else."

Now that Belanger holds the secretary of state role, Sylvestre said she's most interested in him helping solve issues of access to health care that have been affecting rural communities.

"Our emergency centres are shut down because there's no nurses, there's no doctors. So where do we have to go? We have to travel hours, ambulance travel hours to come and get our people," she said.

Carney's 2nd cabinet

Carney named 28 cabinet ministers and 10 secretaries of state on Tuesday. Thirteen members of the cabinet are newly elected MPs, as are nine of the secretaries of state.

Belanger is one of those new MPs. He defeated Conservative candidate Jim Lemaigre in the federal election on April 28. The Desnethé—Missinippi—Churchill River riding had previously been held by Conservative MP Gary Vidal, who beat Belanger in the 2021 federal election.

The secretaries will be members of the privy council and have been selected to deal with "key issues" within the federal government.

Bobby Cameron, chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, said he knows Belanger personally and is satisfied with the appointment. Like Sylvestre, he said the Indigenous and northern representation is important.

The biggest priorities Cameron wants to see tackled are treaty rights in rural areas, improving child welfare and health care services, and an on-reserve police force that several First Nations have been advocating for.

"He sees where development is needed within our communities in northern Saskatchewan," Cameron said. "He sees it, he's lived there, he's experienced it, he understands fully where improvement needs to happen."

What does a secretary of state do?

Secretary of state roles within the federal government have been used intermittently over the past 30 years. They have sometimes been called junior ministers. They have not been official positions since 2008.

They are not part of the cabinet, but may be invited to cabinet or cabinet committee meetings when matters related to their responsibilities are being discussed or if their expertise is needed.

"My instinct is that this is a way to ensure that there's somebody who can focus on questions speaking to rural development and rural Canadians, and somebody who ministers can go to and bring into the discussion when issues important to those regions come up," said Daniel Westlake, who teaches politics at the University of Saskatchewan.

As for how that will play out under Carney, Westlake said the public need to wait and see what his style of governing is.

"Cabinet is a little bit of a black box, in that different prime ministers have different ideas about how cabinet should be organized and what the different roles in cabinet mean, and how much influence they have."

Westlake says the appointment of a Saskatchewan representative as a secretary of state is the "minimum you would expect" when it comes to regional representation.

"I don't think it's necessarily what many Saskatchewan voters would have wanted," he said.

"They wanted a full cabinet minister. But when you have a prime minister that wants a more slimmed-down cabinet, there's difficult choices and challenges to make sure there's somebody from all the regions."