Chief Strategy Officer Marci Surkes spoke to iPolitics about the upcoming Cabinet meeting, taking place Aug. 25-27.

“For many members of cabinet, this retreat probably can’t happen soon enough,” said Marci Surkes, the chief strategy officer at Compass Rose and a former staffer in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration. “It’s been an eventful summer, to say the least, for the governing party, and I know from ministers with whom I’ve spoken in recent days, they’re very keen to get everyone together and back on the same page.”

According to Surkes, who helped organized cabinet retreats during her time as director of policy and cabinet affairs in the Prime Minister’s Office(PMO), the cabinet retreat provides a good opportunity for a reset.

“Cabinet retreats are your opportunity to bring everybody back together and make sure that they understand the direction in which they are rowing and why,” she told iPolitics. “In the weekly cabinet meeting, it’s three hours in and out, you’ve got a heavy agenda, and everyone’s distracted trying to get to question period.”

“But the beauty of an effective retreat is people can park everything else for whatever the duration of time is, and just be real with one another and, frankly, lean on each other.”

The most recent retreat, held in Montreal this past January, focused on three overarching themes: affordability, housing, and Canada-U.S. relations, with subject matter experts available to brief the government on each respective issue.

The upcoming event’s agenda will likely look similar to the previous retreat, said Surkes, as the core issues really haven’t changed in recent months.

“If I had a window into the world of planning, I would expect the themes you saw in the winter won’t be terribly different from this summer,” she said. “On the domestic front, affordability and housing, either lumped together or as standalone pieces, are going to be critical to the government’s domestic policy agenda in the immediate term.”

“And naturally, watching what happened in the U.S., with the big pivot and shift in the election… that was unimaginable and unforeseeable when the cabinet last met to discuss this issue in January, [it] will likely be a topic for conversation.”