After Foreign Minister's decline and fall, could Health Minister Tony Clement be the replacement?

Maxime Bernier's rather abrupt departure from Cabinet on Monday -- he resigned, he was fired, or he was forced to resign, depending on whom you ask -- has created a new problem for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, besides dealing with the unpleasant fallout from l'affaire "Mad Max."

Mr Harper must now decide how to round out his Cabinet.

In the interim, he has appointed David Emerson, the Minister of International Trade, to fill in for Mr Bernier as Minister of Foreign Affairs. But Mr Emerson, who defected to the Conservatives after he was elected as a Liberal in 2006, is widely considered unlikely to be able to win another election in his riding (The Campaign to De-Elect David Emerson may be a bad sign, for instance). So there's now plenty of talk about a forthcoming Cabinet shuffle.

The Globe and Mail reports that the current rumours have three serious contenders for Mr Bernier's Foreign Affairs job: Mr Harper could keep David Emerson in the position until the next election, or he may consider Industry Minister Jim Prentice or Health Minister Tony Clement.

The Globe and Mail also got word of another possible scenario: Mr Clement may leave the Health Ministry to take over Mr Emerson's International Trade job, and then be moved to Foreign Affairs after the next election.

Would our Health Minister make a good Foreign Minister? According to The Globe and Mail:

Mr. Clement is perceived as both hardworking and loyal. He has also been willing to take a back seat to the Prime Minister at major announcements - a trait that could come in handy in the Foreign Affairs job.

His French is imperfect but passable. And he has had some exposure to the international stage when he dealt with the SARS crisis as Ontario health minister.

CTV News has a different take. Mr Emerson will stay on in Foreign Affairs for the moment, their report says, and Mr Clement may compete with Citizenship and Immigration Minister Diane Finley for a shot at International Trade.

According to Reuters, Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg is also under consideration for the Foreign Affairs post, so it's certainly no sure thing that Mr Clement will be moved out of Health.

No word from anyone yet, it seems, on potential replacements for the Health Minister.

I wonder if Mr Clement might be itching for a move. When he and I spoke at his office in Ottawa in January for this article that appeared in the National Review of Medicine in February 2008, he sounded somewhat ambivalent about his long experience as provincial and then federal Health Minister.

SAM SOLOMON: It must be tough trying to get all the different provincial health ministers on the same page -- does it ever feel like you're herding cats when you have to do intergovernmental work?

TONY CLEMENT: No, not really. You know, we're a fraternity -- which is not to say it's not a sorority as well -- but in a sense everyone who's a health minister usually has a very difficult, complex portfolio that has been the frequent graveyard of political aspirations in the past, so we have common cause and common experiences so we treat each other with a lot of mutual respect and a lot of mutual empathy, I guess is the way to put it. We always have pretty open discussions but at the end of the day we are all there for the same reason: we want better healthcare for people in Canada.

Any theories on who might be likely to replace Mr Clement if he is switched out of the Health Ministry? I have some ideas, but I'll wait for the moment to share them. (Though I will say that when I met Jim Prentice a few months back at a lecture he delivered at the Montreal Neurological Institute, I was impressed with his ability to say a lot without saying anything at all -- a trait that I imagine comes in very handy at United Nations meetings and other such foreign policy gatherings.)


Photo: Ashley Fraser, National Review of Medicine

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