Carney appoints new health minister, AI chief

OTTAWA – Newly elected prime minister Mark Carney has named his cabinet, and Marjorie Michel (pictured left), a Montreal member of parliament has been appointed as Minister of Health. Interestingly, the prime minister has created a new role, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation, and has moved Toronto MP Evan Solomon (pictured right) – a former journalist – into the portfolio.

Marjorie Michel is a Haitian-Canadian politician who has been the member of parliament for Papineau since 2025, succeeding former prime minister Justin Trudeau. She has a background in social and organizational psychology and holds a master’s degree in Social and Organizational Psychology from the University of Louvain in Belgium. Michel is also a former student of the Sainte Rose de Lima Institution in Haiti. She has been active in politics since the early 2000s.

Michel was director of Parliamentary Affairs for Employment and Social Development Canada and former political attaché to Haitian MP Emmanuel Dubourg. She was General Coordinator of the Annual General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1995, a position for which she received a distinction from the government of the United States of America. In 2009, Michel was appointed the head of the Ministry on the Status and Rights of Women (MCFDF).

Michel became Deputy Chief of Staff in the office of Justin Trudeau in 2021 becoming the first black person to hold the position. She was named the Liberal Party candidate for Papineau and was elected in the 2025 Canadian federal election to replace Justin Trudeau.

Former CBC Power and Politics host Evan Solomon takes up a new role: minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation. This is the first time Canada has had a dedicated minister to oversee AI, underscoring the importance the Carney government attaches to this emerging technology.

Solomon is a friend of Carney and recently worked with prominent Liberal organizer and Trudeau friend Gerry Butts at the consultancy firm Eurasia Group.

While the specific mandates for the various cabinet ministers have not yet been released, Solomon’s to-do list will likely include at least three key items: re-igniting Canada’s technology sector, ushering in updated framework policies to deal with a wide range of digital issues, including finding the tricky balance between economic growth and security and privacy concerns, and improving the federal government’s own efforts to make better use of digital technology.

Cabinet veteran Mélanie Joly is Carney’s new industry minister, moving from foreign affairs, and will likely also play a major role in digital and innovation issues. Carney’s new industry minister, moving from foreign affairs, and will likely also play a major role in digital and innovation issues.

During the election campaign, Carney emphasized the economic potential of AI and promised to invest in AI training, adoption and commercialization.

His party’s platform promised to move fast on building data centres, introduce a tax credit to incentivize AI adoption by small and medium-sized businesses, and push to expand programs at Canada’s AI institutes to drive AI commercialization. The platform also vowed to keep Canadian intellectual property in the country.

Critics have been saying for years that, despite Canada’s strength in artificial intelligence research, the country has been slow to commercialize the technology and has struggled to retain intellectual property.