Mark Carney's health minister says she's got serious work to do: 'I'm not here to be a star'

In truth, she had no idea.

Yes, the prime minister had called her to offer the health portfolio.

But, as Michel recalls it, he also asked her to explore one particular issue: looking into a campaign pledge about starting a funding program for in vitro fertilization.

There was speculation at the time that Carney would be appointing secretaries of state to oversee more specific files. That, combined with Michel’s astonishment at receiving the coveted call, led to some confusion in the mind of the freshly elected MP.

Was she going to become the next federal health minister?

Or would she be the secretary of state tasked with championing the creation of embryos in laboratory dishes?

“You don’t ask the prime minister questions,” Michel said in her Montreal constituency office in August, reliving the 2025 incident with some amusement.

“He was very clear, but it was also me. A lot of people are expecting that call, but I was not.”

It was hardly the first time the 63-year-old found herself somewhere she hadn’t thought she’d be.

The daughter of a Haitian prime minister, she was more interested in using her degree in social and organizational psychology than in actively entering Canada’s political arena. As a volunteer for the Quebec and federal Liberals, she hesitated about accepting an offer to work for the provincial party. And as deputy chief of staff to Justin Trudeau — and, for one week, to Carney — she was bewildered when both men wanted her to succeed Trudeau as the member of Parliament for Papineau.

“I never felt the need to run,” Michel said. “If you are asking me what I preferred, it was simpler to be a staffer.” 

Shortly after winning the seat, so convinced was Michel that she would not receive a cabinet post that her sister had to persuade her to take her phone off silent mode on the day Carney made the rounds.

She was, in the end, sworn in as Canada’s health minister.

Now, she sits at a cabinet table chaired by a prime minister who has both preserved and undone the legacy of the predecessor she faithfully served.

“If you look at the history of the Liberal party, depending on who is the leader, you will go to the centre, a little bit right, left. That’s the reality,” Michel said.

And it is the party to which Michel is most devoted — not necessarily the person at its helm.

Trudeau, she said, was the right leader for his time; energized by inclusivity and the social safety net, he was Canada’s answer to Obama-era progressivism across the border.

But by September 2024, she knew his time was up.

The Liberals lost a byelection in a Montreal stronghold, and days later, then-transport minister Pablo Rodriguez left the party to enter provincial politics.

“Oh my God,” Michel said, dropping her head into her hands as she recalled the turbulent time. “I think for me that was the moment that I knew we couldn’t do anything more.”

In her view, Trudeau held on for the remainder of the year because he “didn’t want to leave the country in hands … he couldn’t accept.”

Enter Mark Carney.

“Prime Minister Carney is an economist, with a vision more centred than Prime Minister Trudeau,” Michel said. “Look at what is happening everywhere. It’s a different map.”

She hears a lot about Carney in places like Papineau, the central Montreal riding that is one of the smallest yet most culturally diverse pockets of the country.

She also hears about him in Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, the Quebec riding the Liberals seized from the Conservatives in a byelection this week.

“When you talk to even regular citizens, they say, ‘I feel safe.’ People feel like (Carney) is protecting them,” she said.

Michel, a relentless organizer in Quebec, told the Star two weeks before the byelection that she thought her party would win.

She spent her free time in the riding, while the party’s Quebec MPs wrangled their families into taking summer vacations there to boost their local presence.

Philip Proulx, a former staffer and adviser in Trudeau’s office, got to know Michel during her years organizing for the provincial Liberals.

She is “very respected” on Parliament Hill, said Proulx, noting that she was nicknamed “mama” because of her penchant for checking in on her staff.

“She always gave you the best advice possible. Sometimes very direct advice, almost like a motherly love … you’re like, ‘Oh, that was kind of harsh,’ and you walk away like, ‘Yeah, but she’s kind of right,’” Proulx said.

Michel is aware of her reputation as someone who doesn’t suffer fools, and says Carney, who reportedly possesses a similar disposition, can take it in stride.

“If I see a danger or if I see an opportunity that they don’t see, I will say it. Prime Minister Carney knows me — not a lot, but he knows that when I have something to say, I will raise my hand around the cabinet table,” Michel said. “When I have a meeting with him on a different topic, I give my view. And I will tell you honestly, I feel respected.”

It’s all earned, said Proulx: “She is someone who’s lived through a lot.”

Michel’s grandfather was killed under Haiti’s Duvalier dictatorship, and she rarely talked about politics growing up because her family was “not well-liked” by the regime. When Jean-Bertrand Aristide, considered Haiti’s first democratically elected president, first came to power in 1991, her father, Smarck Michel, entered political life. A military coup that year prompted her to leave Haiti for France; she came back in 1994, when Aristide returned to power and her father served as his prime minister for a year. 

By 2000, with the political climate deteriorating, Michel fled Haiti with her two daughters and settled in Montreal.

But Smarck Michel, a man with “a very strong social conscience,” had instilled in his three children a golden rule: use your privilege for good.

It’s not always the easiest job.

“We’ve met with Marjorie Michel. We think she’s a capable minister, knowledgeable about the file, and we’ve had very frank and honest discussions with her. We think she wants to be the guardian of medicare. But does Prime Minister Carney?” said Steven Staples, the national director of policy with the Canadian Health Coalition.

Yes, insists Michel, rebuffing perceptions that Carney is so preoccupied with dousing economic flames that he’s left health care by the wayside. 

She cited the task force Carney launched earlier this year aimed at boosting Canada’s domestic pharmaceutical capacity and improving access to medicines amid supply chain uncertainty.

She also mentioned a controversial Alberta law allowing doctors to work in both the public and private systems, an issue for which Michel has faced heat for not addressing fears that the practice may violate the Canada Health Act.

In her interview with the Star, she said she is “very concerned” about the law and has penalties she can apply if the province doesn’t tweak it. 

And what of pharmacare, and the universal, single-payer vision the Trudeau Liberals had hoped to see realized in every province and territory?

“It was (done) under the previous government, and it was something that we signed with the NDP, I would say, to stay in power,” Michel said in her unvarnished way. 

(Carney has yet to expand the program beyond the four agreements struck by the Trudeau government.)

“There’s still conversations,” Michel said. “Some provinces are not interested in what we are offering. Others are.”

She knows that for someone considered to be outspoken, there are criticisms that she hasn’t said or done enough to defend her file.

“I just want people to understand: For me, being a minister and the minister of health at this time, it’s a very, very serious job. I’m not here to be a star,” Michel said. “I know what is right to do, but you need to bring people there.”

That takes time, and opening up dialogue.

There used to be a security wall in the foyer of Michel’s constituency office, a relic of its previous occupant.

It’s gone now.

“I don’t need it,” she said.