Minister of middle-class anxiety needed?
FORGOTTEN THE
MINISTRY MAY BE,
BUT GONE, I DON’T THINK
SO. — REX MURPHY
Before we get into serious stuff here, a shout out — as the better DJS say — to the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity. For some of the Post’s readership there may need to be an introduction. The holder of this office is the Ottawa-vanier MP, Mona Fortier. Or so we presume, since her decided absence from the headlines, and only sparse presence in the Liberal government’s daily avalanche of tweets furiously heralding wondrous accomplishments, have left her name and status vague.
Forgotten the ministry may be, but gone, I don’t think so.
There are other, extrinsic reasons this portfolio is not top-ofmind with the general public. There have been many other, more absorbing topics summoning the attention of the press and forcing the most benign of ministerial positions to the back pages of the papers, and in many cases, out of them altogether.
The government has a lot of things on what we may generously call its mind. Think back and recall those entrepreneurial brothers named Kielburger. They and the story of their interactions with the Trudeau family soaked up a whole lake of attention some months ago. Between frustrated inquiries on the deal the Kielburgers’ WE Charity (briefly) had with the government, attempts to shut down parliamentary committees seeking clarity on the subject, and the inexplicably turtle-slow, snail-powered exertions of the ethics commissioner to deliver a verdict on the affair, it’s understandable M-M-C-P (a convenient acronym) did not crowd the headlines.
Then, too, there were other distractions, such as the emptying of parliamentary operations, Parliament being either closed altogether or put in the phantom zone of Zoomland. It’s hard to send your telegram when the telegraph office is mostly shut down.
Then there are the straightup embarrassments, such as the saga of sexual misconduct in our otherwise so highly regarded military. Or the soaring, cloud-kissing, all-records-breaking, first-intwo-years budget — a document of such largesse and monstrous financial incontinence that it has hypnotized all who dared read even bits of it.
How can the whisper of such a docile and tranquil portfolio as M-M-C-P’S contend with these hurricanes of financial, (alleged) sexual misconduct and conflict-of-interest news? Not a chance.
The budget alone, combined with the gluttonous expenditures that preceded it — debt and deficit shooting upwards with the speed and threat of a heat-seeking missile
— might suggest a minister to manage middle-class anxiety might be more psychologically appropriate for our time.
A more basic reason may be that it remains unclear exactly what M-M-C-P’S ministry is supposed to be doing, or who its actual clientele are. Minister Fortier herself recognized the difficulty with the category “middle class,” noting that “Canada has no official statistical measure of what constitutes the middle class.” Which has to present some difficulty with being the minister of it. Not to mention her potential customers.
She also declared, “There’s no unique definition for middle class.” From which we must conclude there is a set of non-unique definitions, different from and at variance with each other. But since a definition is itself defined as “a concise explanation of the meaning of a word or phrase or symbol,” or “an exact statement or description of the nature, scope, or meaning of something” or, finally, “sharp demarcation of outlines or limits,” a set of nonunique definitions is sort of a cat that barks, or a fish that takes ballet lessons.
However, all is not or was not lost. Minister Fortier was definitive that her ministry held as its priority “to grow the economy” — a familiar agricultural metaphor from the government of Justin Trudeau, which likes to image the economy as a green field that it fertilizes with bounteous outlays of public money and a seemingly genetically-modified understanding that “budgets balance themselves.” Or, even more luminously, the pledge from Mr. Trudeau’s early campaign days to grow Canada’s economy “from the heart outwards.”
Which had very many middle-class hearts, and hearts from other classes, too, beating with somewhat troubling rapidity, even to medical alarm. Perhaps when this great COVID siege comes to an end, we could check in on the middle class again. Or whatever fragment of it still exists by that time. The numbers will be greatly down, and the remnants of it will have at least the virtue of being defined as “those in small and medium businesses who weren’t wiped out.”
UNCLEAR EXACTLY WHAT M-M-C-P’S MINISTRY IS SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.