Government styled by Dorian Gray
Justin Trudeau is very much the face of this government, and why not? He is the Liberal franchise, and they know it. Other prime ministers might have preferred to ration their public appearances, for fear of overexposure. Not this one. He is everywhere, on every magazine cover, in every news cycle, opening this and announcing that, offering here a hug and there a Cook’s tour of quantum mechanics. Occasionally he even shows up in Parliament.
But while Trudeau, dimpled of smile and tousled of hair, seems the embodiment of eternal youth, his rapidly aging government is the portrait in the attic, on which all the lines and pockmarks of ethical decay are visited. The face on television may bespeak a commitment to idealism and honesty, transparency and fairness, but the government behind it has already amassed a record of cynicism, deception, secrecy and cronyism that for most governments would take years.
Take, as a current example, the Saudi arms deal. That the Liberals are willing to sell $15 billion worth of gun-mounted armoured vehicles to one of the world’s most repressive regimes may be put down to the exigencies of state: the Saudis are, after all, our allies, at least in the Middle Eastern sense of the word. That they did so in apparent violation of federal law may be dismissed as a matter of interpretation. Perhaps, as the government says, it would have been too costly to cancel the deal. Perhaps it would have been better never to have signed it.
But what is beyond dispute is that the decision to allow the deal to go ahead, including issuing the export permits without which it could not proceed, was entirely the Liberals’ doing. Yet until last week’s revelation of the minister of Global Affairs’ recent decision to sign off on the permits, the Liberals had insisted the contract the Conservatives had bequeathed them was a fait accompli. This was generally understood to mean the export permits had already been issued.
In fairness, the Liberals never said they would cancel the deal, not even during the last election. That would distinguish this bit of dishonesty from the many things the Liberals did promise to do, or not to do, on which they have since reneged: the 25,000 Syrian refugees who were to have been admitted by December, the F35s that were to have been ruled out of the bidding on a new fighter jet contract; the “combat mission” against ISIL that was to have been ended, not redefined; and of course the litany of broken promises in the budget, from the $10-billion ceiling on the deficit to the balanced budget by 2020 to the small business tax cut to the new health accord with the provinces (health spending is now projected to rise by less than it would have under the terms set out by the Harper government) and beyond.
Mind you, counting the number of broken promises in the budget depends in part on being able to decipher what’s in it. But as a number of commentators have noted, the budget sets new standards for opacity. The “fudge factor” built into revenue projections overstates the annual deficit by as much as $6 billion, twice as much as under the previous government. The failure to break out spending projections beyond two years, while nevertheless forecasting declining deficits over five, was likewise unprecedented. As for the claimed deficit of $5.4 billion in the last fiscal year under the Conservatives, notwithstanding a surplus of $4.3 billion after the first 10 months, that has now been comprehensively debunked by the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
But these are within the ordinary limits, you may say, of political chicanery. Less so is Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould’s involvement in a private $500-a-plate fundraiser at a downtown Toronto law firm, whose invitees (the government has yet to disclose who they were) were pitched on the promise of special access to the minister. That the minister should have been so foolish as to attend, given the recent uproar over these sorts of pay-to-play events at the provincial level, may be put down to carelessness; that she should have done so, given the conflictof-interest controversies she has encountered previously in her brief time in office — notably her husband’s efforts to lobby the government of which she is a part — suggests something more like recklessness.
But the defences she and other Liberals have offered for her conduct — that she was just there as the MP for Vancouver-Granville, that so long as the rules did not expressly prohibit it there was no ethical issue, that opposition criticism was motivated by racism or sexism — are more redolent of a culture. And indeed the scent of money and expediency surrounds this government. Lobbyist activity, according to the Commissioner of Lobbying, is at an all-time high: nearly 3,000 communications in the month of February alone. Lobbyists with Liberal connections, from Don Boudria to David Pratt to former Trudeau campaign manager Louis-Alexandre Lanthier, feature prominently in the Hill Times’s annual Top 100 Lobbyists rankings, in what the magazine calls the biggest power shift among federal lobbyists since Jean Chrétien won power in 1993.
It won’t show up in the polls just yet: the public are still too enchanted with the face on the television. But away from the cameras the Liberals are building up a deficit of trust and ethics to match the fiscal deficit. It has been just six months since they were elected.