Liberals fall into entitlement trap
Prime minister Stephen Harper, ardent supporter of the oilpatch, never made a major speech to sell a new pipeline during his decade at 24 Sussex that I know of. He didn’t want to be cast as a servant of Big Oil. That was a trap set by his opponents. He avoided it to the extent he could.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals, thus far, are proving less than nimble in dodging their own dead-fall trap — which is, of course, entitlement.
Indeed, in the burgeoning controversy over moving expenses for senior Prime Minister’s Office staff — a rising boil the government sought to lance Thursday evening, with partial repayments and apologies from top aides Gerald Butts and Katie Telford — they fairly thrust themselves into the pit.
The Liberals’ historical Achilles heel, after all, is profligacy. Grits are arrogant wastrels, goes the narrative. This was the storyline that won Brian Mulroney a majority in 1984 and put Harper in power in 2006. And it is the narrative Trudeau’s Liberals are now feeding, as they rack up a list of spending mini-scandals they could easily have avoided, with the application of humility and common sense.
The $200,000-plus moving expenses of Trudeau’s principal secretary, Butts, and his chief of staff, Telford, were never going to devolve into another scandal on the Mike Duffy scale. The claims were made in accordance with long-standing Treasury Board guidelines. Most were comprised of real estate fees on the sale of homes in Toronto, which is allowed under the policy. There is no indication anyone was misled, or broke any rules.
Here’s the difficulty, which none of the Liberal messaging, including the PM’s, has yet acknowledged: the optics could hardly be worse, given Liberal rhetoric about helping the average Joe and Jane, and that most of the four dozen staffers who moved to Ottawa expensed a fraction of these sums. Moreover, the Globe and Mail reports that Butts and Telford garnered substantial gains from selling their homes in Toronto’s hot real estate market.
After three days of increasingly fierce drubbings in the House of Commons, the Liberals faced the controversy. Good. But how can it be that no one thought, when it came to sign the expense cheques: “How would this look as a headline?”
Butts and Telford are quite good at what they do. Both are committed to Trudeau’s success and neither has ever struck me as self-interested. The entire Trudeau team arrived in the Langevin Block carrying copies of Dan Gardner’s 2015 book, Super-forecasting — The Art and Science of Prediction.
It’s a warning about the perils of groupthink, the institutional inability to view one’s actions from the point of view of an impartial outsider.
Why then, given all this careful preparation, has this PMO apparently not yet perceived how the growing list of spending missteps imperils its agenda? This includes: Health Minister Jane Philpott and her $1,700 limo bill; Environment Minister Catherine McKenna and her $6,600 photographer bill; and Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould billing her department for meals that should have been charged to the Liberal party.
Let’s recall this much about the Duffy affair: in early May 2013, before the story broke, the Harper government had a discernible agenda and some momentum. By late May, and for the remainder of its single majority term, it was playing defence.
The PMO’s handling of the moving-expense issue has been clumsy from the start. Rather than getting out ahead of the story, it released details piecemeal, under pressure of opposition and media queries. The effect has been to make it look shell-shocked and amateurish, rather than honest and transparent.
Liberal House Leader Bardish Chagger’s attempt Wednesday to turn a query about PMO spending into an ode to the middle class drew peals of laughter from the opposition, as well it should. Her sallies Thursday were no more persuasive. After taking stock, the PMO wisely concluded it was fighting a losing battle.
There is a further remedy here beyond the partial repayments proposed by Butts and Telford. It is not complicated. The Liberals could reimburse all staff moving expenses above a reasonable benchmark — say $20,000 — from party funds. These are still tax-subsidized to a degree, but never mind.
Then, they could impose a hard cap on future moving expenses. They could eat crow, in other words. At the same time, as I suggested previously, the government could dragoon an accountant from its ranks to put every future expense claim — whether for a meal, a bus ticket or a box of Timbits — under a microscope.
At 48 per cent support, with a host of important decisions looming, Trudeau and his advisers may believe this cut and thrust over spending is no big deal. Wrong. They should remember Duffy, and Bev Oda’s $16 glass of orange juice.
They should imagine what they’d be saying now, if positions were reversed.