THE INCENTIVES SKEW AGAINST SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS PEOPLE GOING INTO POLITICS.

people in the House of Commons and fewer lawyers, doing business in Canada wouldn’t require nearly so many lawyers.

But the incentives are skewed against successful (though not unsuccessful) business people going into politics. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, when you ain’t got nothin’, you ain’t got nothin’ to put in a blind trust. But if you do have a pile, we insist you hand it over to managers who won’t consult you on or even inform you of their decisions. Ultimately, it seems, we want them to sell their pile and put it all into ETFs. If it’s a pile you built yourself, or grew by 20-fold, the cost of letting go will be emotional as well as financial.

A blind trust is fine if your assets are already diverse, but if your main asset is Morneau Shepell or, in the case of former finance minister and prime minister Paul Martin, Canada Steamship Lines, you’ve got to be pretty obtuse not to realize the big thing under the tarp in the corner is your elephant. After first operating under a supervisory agreement, Martin eventually succumbed to political pressure and sold CSL to his sons. But was a lawyer present whenever he talked with them on the phone or read the business section or surfed the web (even if the web was primitive in those days)?

If a minister recuses himself from decisions involving his company, or his former company that his family members still own, does that solve things? Do the people who will instead make the decisions have a continuing relationship with the minister? Are they deputy ministers or indeed other ministers who, come next budget cycle, will want things from him? Almost certainly, yes. If you were delegated by the current U.S. president to oversee all the tax and regulatory decisions with a potential impact on Trump Inc., would you not suppose the president would be taking note of what you did?

If divestment is too big a sacrifice and recusal is a bit of a fraud, that leaves aggressive transparency, which is in fact the policy we should adopt. We don’t want ministers running their businesses out of their parliamentary office: if they’re working for us we want their full attention. But if they still have identifiable and identified business interests, we can decide for ourselves whether their policies tilt unduly in favour of their businesses. If enough voters decide they do, they’ll face consequences, as it appears Bill Morneau likely will.

We don’t want the Commons door to be an eye of the needle everybody but successful business people can get through. NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau in the House of Commons.