Morneau hardly alone with conflicts of interest
Finance Minister Bill Morneau must feel lonely in his infamy. Most of us cannot relate to having tens of million of dollars’ worth of shares; or, if we do have them, cannot relate to having the power to regulate the very company those shares are in. To whom can he turn for sympathy, then, when pushing regulations that may have benefited him financially cost him a great deal politically?
But when compared to politicians in similar democracies recently, Morneau isn’t alone. He’s merely keeping bad company.
Western democracies have been preoccupied of late with the rise of many bad things: The rise of lawflouting separatism, the rise of Euroskepticism, the rise of white supremacy, the rise of illiberal bully boys pretending to be statesmen. Lost amidst all the horribleness rising, and perhaps heightening its appeal, is the rise of possible conflicts of interest.
According to Transparency International, in virtually every single western democracy, citizens’ perceptions of corruption rose or held steady; throughout the world, the sense that such things are getting worse increased in more countries more than it decreased.
Democracies have always had to grapple with conflicts of interest, but still haven’t learned how to do so in a wholly satisfactory way.
In the United States, the most flagrant conflicts of interest begin with the Civil War and end, as all the world must, with Donald Trump. During the war, many politicians owned plantations, implicating them in a clear conflict of interest, which is to say, they were biased in favour of owning people as slaves. Meanwhile, federal employees often moonlighted as horse and military garb salesmen.
American ethics laws tightened up to address the most industrious entrepreneurs in the public service. Today, however, the woman who lost the 45th presidency was married to a man who started a foundation that accepted donations from foreign governments. The man who beat her owes tens of millions of dollars to a German bank, and as journalist Craig Unger puts it, “owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russian” oligarchs and mobsters. He’s also indebted to whichever countries send their diplomats to stay at his hotels.
In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Theresa May was criticized when she refused to disclose the contents of a blind trust she set up not when she was home secretary, but only after becoming prime minister.
In France, one-quarter of President Emmanuel Macron’s cabinet ministers were felled by ethics scandals even as the government prepared an ethics bill; one had awarded his partner a rental contract.
In Finland, the parliamentary ombudsman received dozens of complaints against Prime Minister Juha Sipilä in 2016 when the stateowned miner contracted an engineering company owned by the prime minister’s children and uncles.
In Iceland, former prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson was discovered last year to have set up a secret company in the British Virgin Islands with his rich wife.
The list goes on, but as my mother might say to Morneau, “One friend is enough.” The minister has many!
The problem with Morneau is not that he is alone, then. It is that he looks to be part of an isolated clique: Transcendent in their wealth, power and ability to use their power to increase their wealth, his peers seem above and apart from it all, including the people they are meant to serve.
And when their élite status is compromised, it is our collective political fortunes that suffer, not merely their own. — Shannon Gormley is an Ottawa Citizen global affairs columnist and freelance journalist.