Would top Liberals already be sacked in private sector?
Would there be legal cause to fire Prime Minister Trudeau, Finance Minister Morneau or Foreign Affairs Minister Freeland if they were corporate executives?
When Kinder Morgan ran into regulatory difficulties and threatened to abandon the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, rather than using its lobbying and regulatory powers to assist it, the government paid Kinder Morgan $4.5 billion of taxpayer dollars to assume the problems for itself. They dramatically overpaid. With the risk to its major asset, Kinder Morgan would have taken much less and would not have required the massive profit to off-load its difficulties. Trudeau and Morneau, who were behind the payment, failed to either appreciate or advise its stakeholders — the public — of the imminent risk of an upcoming Federal Court of Appeal hearing, which ultimately could and did render that acquisition of little value. Morneau, who blundered from early in his watch and has never found his footing, was allowed to remain in place, even after a cabinet shuffle, to handle this major brief.
It is ironic that one of the major reasons for the loss in Federal Court was the government’s failure to consult with the Aboriginal community. This, from a government that made reconciliation its motto. Even if the pipeline ultimately is built, this Federal Court loss will cause the expense of a tremendous delay. This is on top of the debacle of our ballooning deficit, Statistics Canada’s announcement of a net outflow of $10 billion from the economy in the last quarter and the government’s signature climate change policy now facing open revolt by a growing number of influential premiers.
Trudeau also announced to the world an openness to immigrants and then bungled its handling with these “welcomed” illegal immigrants jumping the queue and overtaxing resources, particularly in Quebec and Ontario. This followed his illfated trip to India, to which he had not been officially invited, where he pranced around in historic costume and had a former terrorist attend official functions, all to the embarrassment of Canadians.
What is his curriculum vitae, let alone his apparent skill, that would allow him to deal as an equal with Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron or Narendra Modi?
Much of Canada’s current difficulties also result from the weakness of its Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who cried during earlier European negotiations — a sign of weakness to many of her negotiating partners.
She came to Parliament from a position with Reuters, in which she spent millions, took two years and her project was ultimately abandoned.
Auditioning for the job currently held by our PM, she decided to virtue signal for domestic consumption without regard for its predictable impact.
The slightest familiarity with Arab cultural traditions would have also informed Freeland that tweeting a demand that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman free activists is itself a sign of disrespect and that her demand for immediate change would, in the Saudi climate, beget precisely what occurred. MBS is notoriously hypersensitive, especially to perceived interference in his domestic affairs by outsiders. One need only look at his short-term house arrest of Lebanon’s PM Saad Hariri, or his actions respecting Quatar and Yemen. Any knowledgeable player would be aware that, after already pushing through the farthest-reaching civil liberty domestic reforms in decades, he was contending with domestic criticism for already going too far, not only from the other Crown princes still in power but from those princes who were detained under his watch.
And her blundering approach to foreign affairs resulted in Canada becoming a bystander to the U.S.-Mexico NAFTA negotiations, from which she was deliberately excluded, when Trump’s instincts and domestic pressure would have had our NAFTA agreement sewn up long ago. Given our historic advantages relative to Mexico, Canada’s treaty with the U.S. should have been negotiated first if they were not negotiated together. Canada’s bargaining power is now dramatically reduced, and the deal we will end up with will likely be a worse one; Trump tweeted he would not make a deal with Canada unless it measurably improved the U.S. position relative to NAFTA.
With international trade relations becoming increasingly critical, Freeland should not have been entrusted with this critical brief, particularly after word seeped out that she was not liked by her U.S. counterpart. Trudeau did not make her task easy. After the Group of Seven meeting in Charlevoix, Que., Trudeau, who apparently had been quite polite to Trump during those meetings, attacked him immediately upon his departure, causing an angry and predictable response from the thin-skinned U.S. president.
But would any of this be cause for dismissal of any of them had they been Canadian corporate executives?
Probably not. Cause for discharge based on competence is almost impossible to establish and generally requires, at the least, advance warnings of dismissal. Usually it also requires the setting of standards that have to be achieved, requiring training as necessary and a time frame in which to improve. Those requirements are relaxed somewhat for the chief executive officer and the most senior executives since there is no one to warn them (other than the board), mistakes can be particularly costly and they are expected to know better without the necessity of warnings. But even at that, it is a difficult test for employers to meet.
But legal cause or not, if this trio had been senior executives in any major Canadian corporation, could you imagine that they would be permitted to remain in their positions this long?