Then-National Defence Minister Bill Blair speaks at a news conference in Ottawa in December, 2024.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Former Liberal cabinet minister Bill Blair has resigned as a member of Parliament and will become Canada’s next high commissioner to the United Kingdom.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office announced the appointment Monday as well as that of Nathalie Drouin, a long-time senior public servant who will be Canada’s next ambassador to France and Monaco.
“With their extensive careers in public service, Mr. Blair and Ms. Drouin have the proven expertise, judgement, and leadership to deepen Canada’s relationships with two of our closest and most reliable partners,” Mr. Carney said in a statement.
The appointments will be effective this spring. Mr. Blair, who was the MP for Scarborough Southwest, said in an e-mail that he resigned his seat and it became effective Monday afternoon.
Just last month, Mr. Blair’s former cabinet colleague, Chrystia Freeland, resigned her seat for the Toronto riding of University-Rosedale.
The Liberal Party announced Saturday that Danielle Martin, a family physician, will be the candidate for that by-election, the date of which has not yet been announced.
The two by-elections will be closely watched, as Mr. Carney is now two seats short of a majority government. The two resignations mean the House of Commons will have 341 members of Parliament until the by-elections are over, with the Liberals holding 169 of those seats.
Mr. Blair, a former Toronto police chief, was first elected in October, 2015. He was named to cabinet in 2018 as the minister for border security and organized crime reduction, and went on to hold a number of portfolios, including public safety, emergency preparedness, and national defence. He was shuffled out of cabinet in May.
He was the minister of public safety and emergency preparedness during the April, 2020, Nova Scotia mass shooting, in which a gunman killed 22 people.
He was also the minister of emergency preparedness during the 2022 protests against vaccine mandates and pandemic-related restrictions, which the government ended with the Emergencies Act.
Mr. Blair defended the invocation of the Emergencies Act at a public inquiry in November, 2022, saying it was necessary, most notably to deal with the border blockades.
He also said it was needed because “existing authorities had been exhausted and proven to be inadequate,” according to a summary of an earlier interview he had with inquiry lawyers at the time.
Ms. Drouin is deputy clerk of the Privy Council and the national security and intelligence adviser to Mr. Carney — a role she also held under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
She was the deputy minister of justice and deputy attorney-general during the 2019 SNC-Lavalin affair. Ms. Drouin was also Mr. Trudeau’s national security adviser when the the government faced questions about foreign interference, prompted by a series of reports from The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Blair replaces former Liberal minister Ralph Goodale, who was the high commissioner in Britain from 2021 to 2025, while Ms. Drouin replaces former Liberal leader and minister Stéphane Dion, who left the ambassador role in France in December.