Yeeesh, what a shambles this Liberal government finds itself in with a minister who ought to be its most stalwart.
Bill Morneau, the finance minister, plucked from Bay Street to assuage the business community that doubted Justin Trudeau’s bona fides, is now more liability than asset.
Asset is an operative word in Morneau’s world. As you likely heard or read, he seemed to have forgotten he had a French villa in his financial declarations as he entered office – we should all have that kind of memory lapse.
Now it has come to light he has not put his assets in a blind trust or seemingly divested them.
This comes as a personal layer on the political mess he created when he proposed ham-fisted small business tax changes. In short order the proposal has mobilized an armada of antagonists, the very people the Trudeau government wish to champion.
Morneau would not be the first politician to tell people to do as he says and not as he does, but when you come to power promising something different, this certainly is not the difference you promised.
The video is now circulating across social media of the hearty hilarity of Trudeau’s shielding of his aide-de-finance Monday when the two appeared at a news conference to tout impending small business tax reductions.
The announcement – a clear form of damage control on the wider tax plan, out of sync with the budget process that typically provides this information in the spring – was subsumed by repeatedly unanswered questions about Morneau’s propriety.
Morneau, normally an accessible discussant, was the Minister of Silence all of a sudden. Trudeau even tried to make it seem a privilege for reporters to gain access to the prime minister.
Today, hardly.
But if the prime minister won’t answer questions about his minister, it makes no difference if the minister himself won’t. The blind trust and French villa stories are the flavour of the moment. Sorry, but an eventual tax cut is not prime-cut meat for the journalists today.
Problem is, Morneau’s is not a perceived conflict but a real one. The decisions he makes and guides can have an impact on his holdings in Morneau Shepell, the human resources and administration firm his father founded. Today Morneau’s shares would be worth $43.3 million.
We haven’t been helped by the Ethics Commissioner’s office, which can’t quite say how it’s working with Morneau to mitigate his problems – only to say it is satisfied he’s working through them.
But if he has not divested them, even if he is not a director he knows how they are managed – if they are not in a blind bind – then he operates from a position of self-dealing. There is nothing confusing about that.
High-net-worth individuals know how to steer their ships clear of the shoals, and Morneau would have long ago worked out ways to mitigate any impact of policy on his practices. But in holding the key job, he also has the keys to the vehicle, and in this and other financial respects he has to be so clearly beyond reproach.
He’s stuck.
The opposition Conservatives have waited for this opening. They suspected all along that the stylistic premise of the Trudeau government would prevail over substance, particularly in the governance capacity of so many rookies. But I doubt they suspected that the most prominent of the minister would be so prominently problematic.
Those of us senior enough can remember the troubles of Allan MacEachen when he was finance minister under Justin’s father and how many backtracks he made with a controversial series of measures in dire economic times. He was eventually shuffled into another portfolio but the deep mess stuck to the last chapter of the Trudeau government.
The younger Trudeau now has a difficult decision to make on his prone and prostrate minister. I suspect the over-under on his shuffle must be in the weeks, not months or years.
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
