Do we like Mélanie Joly?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record with real moves for LGBTQ+ communities and no harm found, but the research on climate and trans-specific issues came back thin.
Joly is a Montreal Liberal who has been in cabinet since the Trudeau years. She was Heritage Minister in 2017, Tourism Minister by 2019 and Foreign Minister by 2022, and she's now Industry Minister under Mark Carney. That's a long run of big jobs, which tells you the party trusts her to handle whatever lands on her desk.
Her messiest stoush came in 2017, when NDP leader Tom Mulcair challenged her account of whether she'd discussed Madeleine Meilleur becoming Official Languages Commissioner. Joly denied that any such discussion took place. Nothing I read shows a court or ethics finding against her. The Trudeau affair rumours online come from junk content sites with no sourcing, which is tabloid territory at best.
On the harm test, her record reads well. In 2022 she had Russia's ambassador summoned after the Russian embassy in Ottawa posted anti-LGBTQ+ messages, including one aimed at then Sports Minister Pascale St-Onge, and Joly called it an attack on Canadian values. In 2019, as Tourism Minister, she was thanked by Pride Toronto for federal funding that also reached Pride events in Montreal and Vancouver. I found no harmful words of her own and no worrying company, but I also found little on her climate record or on trans-specific policy, so that's a gap.
Her recent work is mostly about tariffs and defence. In February 2026 she launched the $6.6-billion defence industrial strategy and said “I understand the impatience”, but she wouldn't commit to publishing specific progress targets. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre said it adds another layer of bureaucracy. In May she announced a $1-billion loan program for steel, aluminum and copper firms hit by US tariffs, which Conservative MP Raquel Dancho called a “band-aid solution”.
Nothing new has surfaced lately beyond the day job. In October 2025 she pitched Canada's reputation for stability to foreign investors, and in November she shot down reports that she wanted to be ambassador to France, saying “absolutely not”. The pattern is a minister who stays on message and doesn't pick fights she doesn't have to.
The good stuff is practical rather than flashy. The Pride funding she oversaw in 2019 helped festivals in big cities and in rural and northern communities. The tariff loans are aimed at keeping workers employed in hard-hit industries. It's not a saint's résumé, but it's real help for real people.