Minister exudes a quirky charm
“I thank you for your interest and your presence,” Jean-Yves Duclos told a roomful of reporters at the National Press Theatre yesterday. “I’m going to provide you with a hybrid mixture of myself.”
Duclos is the minister of families, children and social development. He is a serious academic — he ran the economics department at Laval University in Quebec City before he decided to run for Parliament in 2015.
He radiates good manners and social awkwardness in equal and abundant measure. “I’d be delighted to engage more formally with you,” he said to one reporter, which seemed to mean they could have a longer chat, one-on-one, after the news conference ended.
Perhaps some unwritten Law of Conservation of Nerdiness explains why, just as the bank economist John McCallum and the constitutionalist Stéphane Dion depart Ottawa for diplomatic posts in Beijing and Berlin, Duclos lands a more prominent speaking role in their absence.
His advertised topic was “The state of the middle class.” His political goal was to set the table for Bill Morneau’s second federal budget, two weeks hence. His message was not entirely coherent.
He had slides. “This is what I call my Three-C Slide,” he said. “The first C is for ‘Middle Class’; the second C is for ‘Trust,’ and the third C is for ‘Growth.’ ” He was saying this in French, where the words actually do start with Cs.
On Duclos’s slide, inscrutable arrows connected boxes labelled Middle Class, Trust and Growth. They were labelled “Feed,” “Support,” “Inclusive,” “Engine” and so on. Well, I feel bad about saying “and so on,” because it sounds like I expect you to be able to extrapolate the labels on the other arrows. And believe me, I don’t expect you to be able to do that at all.
Later I spent some time puzzling over this slide and a transcript of Duclos’s remarks. As far as I can tell, the inclusion of “Trust” along with “Middle Class” and “Growth” is an attempt to capture elements of group psychology that aren’t easy to measure numerically. Canadians’ “confidence towards the future is enhanced when they feel that everyone has a real and fair chance to succeed over time as growth takes place,” he said.
This helps explain how the former chair of Laval economics could give a long presentation on the middle class without defining it. (“There are Canadians that feel that they belong to the middle class for perhaps reasons beyond their level of consumption and income.”) Or how he could show a slide labelled “Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated since the 1970s,” while the curves on the slide showed wages dipped through the mid-90s and have recovered briskly since then.
Maybe there are Canadians that feel they are living in 1993 for per- haps reasons beyond their actual chronology.
But it doesn’t do to get too catty. Duclos had a point, and the government had a reason to book the press theatre for him. Recent elections have shown that a lot depends on how an electorate feels. Both the U.K.’s Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election have something to do with voters’ belief they’ve been shafted.
If the Liberals don’t make the self-defined middle class feel good, they might be in trouble. Worse, so might all of us. Even though still another of Duclos’s slides showed that the share of total income controlled by Canada’s top 1 per cent has grown more slowly than in the U.K., Sweden and the U.S., the fact that it’s growing at all could drive resentment.
So could the fact that costs for “what Canadians believe to be essentials,” as Duclos put it — higher education, child care, housing — have increased faster than the over- all rate of inflation.
What are the feds going to do about it? For that matter, what have they done so far? Duclos was short on details. I expected a summary of the impact of Liberal measures to date on the indicators Duclos chose. No such luck.
As for what’s coming in the budget, he offered only hints. Living standards are determined by capital (“or infrastructure”), labour and innovation, he said. There’ll be something on all three in the budget. And that was all he said.
The PMO had advertised Duclos’s presentation as a crushing rebuttal to all critics. It sure wasn’t that. But I hope we hear more from this shy economist. First, because he’ll surely refine his delivery with practice (and after a fairly urgent edit of his slide deck). Second, because he likes to explain things, a rare enough instinct in any government. Paul Wells is a national affairs writer. His column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.