What is Bill Morneau still doing here?
The basic, greasy, hardly-even-in-dispute details of the Kielburger Affair are by now safely on the record, and seem unlikely to change significantly. Basically, friends of the prime minister got a big fat contract on the dubious premise that no one else could perform the work, some of which was itself a bit dubious. All the details we have learned since that came to light — and the government never tried to hide it — really just amount to backstory. It’s important backstory, illustrating just how deeply prominent Liberals and the Trudeau family and the Brothers Kielburger and the WE empire were immersed in the same funky bathwater. But it allows us to laugh rather than gasp at new revelations — a blessing in these troubled times.
I submit, for example, that Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s latest snafu is objectively hilarious: having to repay $41,366 to WE for family trips to Ecuador and Kenya in 2017. Morneau framed it as a surprising accounting revelation: He thought he had paid for the trips, but when he emptied out his paper bag marked “Receipts — 2017,” he was shocked not to be able to find the relevant document. D’oh!
The WE organization framed it a bit differently. “Yesterday, the Morneau-mccain family reached out to us to ask if, in fact, their trip had been complimentary,” it said in a statement on Wednesday. “We confirmed that it was.”
Yikes. The thing about that is that it’s quite illegal for government ministers to accept gifts “that might reasonably be seen to have been given to influence the public office holder in the exercise of an official power, duty or function.” (You can ask the prime minister about it.) The summer jobs/volunteering program contract was by far the largest deal the government had struck with WE, but it wasn’t the first: At least five times since 2017, the feds had contracted with WE for work described in official records as “management consulting,” “public relations services” and “other professional services not otherwise specified.” If WE were trying to exact some subtle revenge on its erstwhile Liberal buddies, it couldn’t have done any better.
To be fair to Morneau, it is entirely believable that he thought he had paid for the family trip, as he claims, or indeed that he hadn’t thought about it at all. To the extent I can imagine having as much money as he does, let alone how much he has access to from marrying into the Mccain potato fortune, I’m guessing amounts in the neighbourhood of $41,000 fairly routinely get spent — or not — without coming to his notice.
On the other hand, to the extent I can imagine being as rich as Morneau and becoming finance minister of a quite small G7 country where practically everyone who matters knows and does business with each other, I think I would take very deliberate steps to make sure I wasn’t running afoul of conflict-of-interest legislation. But alas, this seems to be the contagious blindspot of the Trudeau Liberals: How could it be a conflict of interest, when everyone involved is so virtuous and means so well?
As big as that blind spot is, it is objectively astonishing that Morneau is still finance minister. It’s amazing Morneau even survived his first attempts at getting fired — the French villa he forgot to disclose; the revelation he hadn’t put his significant assets in a blind trust; his systematic enraging of the country’s small-business community by clumsily accusing them of exploiting tax loopholes — let alone this catastrowe.
It’s not as if Trudeau trusts him to a fault, either. One of the stranger things I have ever seen this prime minister do was at a 2017 press conference in Stouffville, Ont., about an hour outside Toronto. He and Morneau set up camp at an Italian restaurant to run damage control on the finance minister’s first concerted attempts to get fired. But Trudeau seemed hell-bent on not letting Morneau talk.
“You’ve got an opportunity to chat with the prime minister,” he unctuously told a female reporter who asked a question of Morneau. (I will never forget the look of baffled revulsion on her face.) “You have to ask the question of me first, because you get the chance to talk to the prime minister,” he told the next reporter who inquired after Morneau.
Morneau eventually took the mic and didn’t make anything worse. It was a bizarre spectacle, all in all. But in hindsight, maybe it made sense Trudeau was nervous: As wealthy and privileged and well-connected as he is, compared to Morneau the prime minister is a working-class hero with mustard stains on his shirt. When it came to Trudeau’s vacation on the Aga Khan’s island, he at least had a semi-plausible claim to family friendship with the Ismaili spiritual leader. He has never had to apologize for anything quite as plutocratically ridiculous as Morneau’s $41,366 whoopsie, or his Château Oublié.
If even Trudeau can smell the oblivious privilege wafting off Morneau, it’s all the more baffling he keeps the man in charge of the national pocketbook. All Trudeau’s finance minister really needs to do is cut cheques, after all, and Morneau is not even very good at that.