In defence of a great Albertan

Ain Edmonton colleague told me the other day that I should write a column about Finance Minister Bill Morneau — basically, because no columnist should pass up a chance to face wash some politician for ineptitude or deviousness. This struck me as a strong argument. But my response was that I would never dream of treating a public-spirited Alberta taxpayer like Morneau in such a manner. The man has no personal connection of which I am aware to my province, except through a numbered company that presumably exists to exploit some dimension of the famous Alberta (tax) Advantage. What better endorsement of Alberta could there be?

Dispassionately, from afar, he has singled us out to receive the wispy off-gassings of his income from real estate. Perhaps they could as easily have drifted off to the Cayman Islands, but allowing that to happen would not be the patriotic thing. Who knows what Alberta back roads the minister has unknowingly paved, as if with his own toil-hardened hands? What furnaces he has kept running in Alberta schools like the shabby, drafty one in which I learned to spell and figure?

I daub at a proud tear thinking about such selflessness. Albertans, as we are very fond of reminding you, give so much to Confederation. So rarely are we witness to such an example of Confederation giving back.

The truth is that, for all I know, Bill Morneau may have — almost certainly has — contributed more to the treasury of Alberta than I ever did as a slothful Alberta native who has never lived anywhere else. As a matter of plain logic, this makes him more Albertan than me.

And once you realize this, you are in a natural frame of mind to ask: is it any wonder that Morneau has come under such attack from the Laurentian establishment? From Diefenbaker to Harper, Westerners have always been found to cut awkward, ill-fitting figures in federal power. One grows up in the West accepting the paranoid view of this history: our most talented people don’t come from the right families, don’t belong to the right clubs, didn’t go to the right schools.

So perhaps the revelation that will undo Bill Morneau is not his use of bogus corporations to meet the technical requirements of a job while denouncing the use of bogus corporations to avoid tax. Perhaps it is simply that a vexed Canada voted out government by a cadre of Albertans, and has now learned, to its natural rage and discomfort, that the power pivot of Finance has remained in the hands of a literally paid-up quasi-Albertan! A mucknosed Western mole!

Morneau may survive the immediate crisis concerning his methods of compliance with ministerial ethics rules: the taint of being an offshore Albertan will surely not be so easy to elude in the long run. Prime Minister Trudeau, to his credit, has signalled a determination to hang onto his indispensable crypto-Westerner.

It is not hard to see the tactical reasons for this if you look around at the obvious alternatives available to the PM for the finance post. (You will probably find yourself saying “Nope” out loud a few times in a row.) And a Morneau resignation would represent a sort of irretrievable loss of virginity for Trudeau’s government. You know how if you’re drinking beer, once you go to the can for the first time, you’ll be doing it every 15 minutes for the rest of the evening ...?

But there is also the point that Morneau might be the best-qualified finance minister in the history of the Dominion. This truth, I admit, did not quite strike home to me until I visited the website of the minister’s family firm, Morneau Shepell, in a business naïf’s effort to understand exactly what the heck it is.

The discussion of Morneau Shepell has characterized it as an enterprise devoted almost entirely to vaguely scurrilous tax avoidance. Obviously, this is an important part of what it does, but nothing of the kind is explicitly mentioned in the company’s self-description. The website talks about an “integrated approach” to human resources, employee benefits and pensions, and “absence management solutions,” which was a new one on me. (Maybe they have solutions for a prime minister who has to drop someone from cabinet?)

After trying to keep my eyes focused on the site for a while, I realized that Morneau Shepell’s hard-to-define business involves the selling of two things: math, because running a business involves some kinds of important calculations you don’t want to be doing from scratch; and compliance, i.e., knowledge related to efficient obedience of various laws and regulations. That’s about 80 per cent of what “human resources” actually involves, isn’t it? — knowing health and safety rules, human rights codes, what t’s you have to cross to get rid of someone in a lawful way.

Leaving aside the math, I take Morneau Shepell to be a sort of gang of mercenaries that exists to serve businesses in their endless polite war against the state. We all like to have successful businessmen as ministers of finance, and Bill Morneau is certainly that. But his background as an intelligencegatherer, his hard-earned knowledge of Canada’s overlapping sovereignties and their various spiderwebs — well, that is not to be foregone so easily by a national government.

An academic economist’s knowledge is surely as nothing by comparison. Does any other individual in the country know this field of battle so thoroughly? What finance minister could do more good so easily, and more painlessly, for the public treasury? Dare we part from him?