Save Parliament’s millionaires

Observing the agonies of Finance Minister Bill Morneau last week I kept thinking of Ruth Ellen Brosseau. She was the young Ottawa bartender and assistant bar manager who was elected MP for the Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinongé in the NDP Orange Wave — despite spending part of the 2011 campaign on vacation in Vegas.

Nothing against Ms. Brosseau — who was re-elected in 2015, is by all accounts a conscientious MP and is now NDP critic for agriculture and agri-food — but Parliament was almost certainly a big step up for her: in salary, in perks, in status and maybe even in job security, given the traditional volatility of the bar business.

For Morneau, Parliament was almost equally certainly a big step down in everything except, as finance minister, prestige and power. He gave up being head of his family’s HR services company, which when he left for politics employed 20 times more people than when he took over. As all recent news reports have stressed, his personal wealth is substantial and largely tied up in Morneau Shepell.

Do we want successful business leaders in Parliament or do we want bartenders and assistant bar managers? It’s a false dilemma. There are 338 seats in the House of Commons. We want, first and foremost, whomever electors choose. But beyond that we want all kinds of people. The 2011 national household survey registered 238,050 persons working in food and beverages services, including 180,610 servers, 35,525 bartenders and 21,915 maîtres d’hôtel and hosts/hostesses. In my experience, they know a lot about real life, and that could improve lots of legislation.

But we want successful business people, too. For this year’s centenary of the income tax, I went back and read the debates in which then finance minister Sir William Thomas White shepherded the income tax bill through the Commons. He had been one of the country’s most successful businessmen, a managing director of the National Trust Company. Reading his discussion of the bill’s various provisions — and ministers discussed details in those days — it’s clear he knew his brief and what it meant for the country. If we had more business