A tale of two Bills reveals experience is crucial

This is a story about two Liberal Bills. That’s Bills as in politicians, not legislation.

This story of two Bills is about the tortoise and the hare. Both were star candidates, recruited to run for Justin Trudeau in Toronto in 2015. Both expected to be sworn in as cabinet ministers once elected.

One, Bill Blair, was left out of cabinet. He must have been disappointed. The other, Bill Morneau, was put in charge of the most powerful department in the government — finance.

He would have been ecstatic, and was portrayed as the rising star of the new government. How quickly things can change in politics.

It’s also a lesson that experience matters. Not everything new is always better. Especially when it comes to politics.

At the halfway mark of the Trudeau government’s four-year election mandate, Bill Blair is now a rising star and Bill Morneau is mired in conflict and controversy. Indeed, he’s in a fight to salvage his political career.

By contrast, Blair has handled one of the most difficult, multijurisdictional government policy files in a generation — the legalization of marijuana — and exceeded expectations.

Blair served 30 years as a Toronto police officer, including a stint as an undercover cop in the drug squad. He went on to become the chief of police for 10 years, before seeking public office.

Blair’s decades of working in the public service, within government, provided him with the tools to deal with regulatory bodies, provincial governments and stakeholders as the head of the federal-provincial task force on the legalization of cannabis.

Thus, what could have been a political disaster, the pot legalization file, has gone relatively smoothly — as smoothly as anything goes when the provinces are being told what to do by the federal government.

Blair has used his political instincts to avoid disasters and his experience working with politicians to get results for Trudeau on a very difficult file. The opposite is true for Morneau. The federal finance minister is the second most powerful and influential politician in the country, the allimportant political lieutenant of the prime minister.

He does the heavy lifting to make the government work, ensuring its priorities receive the funding they need, and, more importantly, stops bad things from happening.

Trudeau picked a rookie politician for finance minister. Indeed, Team Trudeau went out of its way to choose new and inexperienced politicians for important ministerial portfolios, ignoring Grit political veterans for the key jobs.

Every Canadian prime minister in the modern era, whether Liberal or Conservative, has chosen a veteran and battle-hardened politician to be their first finance minister.

Some commentators have written that Morneau’s errors are rookie mistakes. I disagree — they are political mistakes that could have and should have been avoided.

Morneau’s belated steps to sell his shares in his business, Morneau Shepell, and put his assets in a blind trust, are a positive development. However, it may be too little too late.

Cabinet ministers are supposed to defend the prime minister — not the other way around, which is what has happened in Morneau’s case.

In every other important job, experience matters. By contrast, in Ottawa recently, political experience cost some political veterans a chance to shine.

As Trudeau looks to retool his government for the second half of his electoral mandate, he would be wise, this time, to choose the tortoise over the hare.