Let Morneau be the test of Liberal principles

It would have been inconceivable not long ago to contemplate Finance Minister Bill Morneau — a smart, accomplished and evidently decent man — being laid quite this low in so short a time. And almost as hard to contemplate that he would have done most of the damage to himself.

Consider the events of just the last couple of weeks. The Liberals have not only begun what increasingly looks like a panicky retreat from their widely unpopular tax reform proposals, they have also retreated in a way that makes the tax issues they initially sought to address even worse. Their recently-announced tax cut for small businesses will encourage even more Canadians to incorporate, further distort the tax system, and create a disincentive for small businesses to grow past a certain size. Morneau has also been embarrassed by revelations that his ministry spent more than $200,000 on marketing costs to develop the cover page of the last federal budget. (For reference, that’s roughly 300 times more than what the Tories spent on their last budget cover.) to prevent public office holders from using their positions to advance their private interests, or to even appear to do so.

To call this disappointing is an understatement. Morneau, a well-respected business leader recruited as a star Liberal candidate for the 2015 election, was expected to be a major figure in the Trudeau government. It’s true that Morneau was a political rookie, but he’s also an accomplished, intelligent man. Now, he has not only botched the rollout of a major tax reform plan, but has also revealed a staggering degree of hypocrisy and naïveté. He has belatedly taken steps to address these issues by promising to sell his Morneau Shepell shares, but has still seemed frustrated with the scrutiny he’s come under.

These compounding failures led this week to a remarkable sight: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — a selfprofessed advocate of “government by cabinet” — insisting on fielding questions explicitly put to Morneau at a press conference about tax changes that fall squarely under Morneau’s mandate. The prime minister tried to pass it off as charming, but no one bought it. Trudeau’s grin could not hide the truth: he was throwing himself between an inquiring press and his embattled minister.

If the prime minister has lost faith in Morneau, we can only assume the political cost of firing him is all that’s keeping him right now in the finance portfolio. That’s a grim prospect.

The former corporate executive was always a strange choice to lead the Liberals’ campaign for fairness for the middle class, given his enormous wealth (much of it derived from family and marriage into the billionaire McCain family). Morneau, a man so rich he loses track of how many villas he owns, and who carefully structured his vast share holdings to remain technically compliant with ethics rules, was to lead a crusade for the middle class by targeting the alleged greed of those rich enough to engage in accounting games — meaning, as it turned out, doctors and small business owners who use incorporation rules to help save for their retirements.

Being wealthy is nothing to be ashamed of, and should not disqualify anyone from any office, but someone in the government ought to have better anticipated the conflict of interest and optics problems Morneau now faces.

It’s shocking to be here, only two years into the mandate of this government. How the prime minister chooses to proceed from here will reveal a lot about how seriously he takes his commitment to holding his ministers to the highest standards.