Susan Delacourt
Would-be politicians, take note: Never do business with friends (in fact, try not to have too many of them),
Everything anyone needs to know about friends and politics was captured before the cameras on Thursday when Premier Doug Ford explained how he had to let down his “buddies” who want to golf during the now-extended lockdown.
“I talk to my buddies. I know what happens,” Ford said. “They pick up another buddy, two or three, they go out, go golfing. … Then after golf, they go back, they have a few pops. That’s the problem.”
It’s not golf, in other words. It’s the friends you make along the way. Substitute “politics” for golf, and this is the code of conduct for anyone in elected office in these pandemic times: friends are your enemy.
As it happens, Canada’s ethics commissioner was telling Justin Trudeau something very similar this very same day, in a good-news, bad-news ruling for the federal Liberals.
Trudeau escaped yet another ethical slap on the wrist on Thursday because commissioner Mario Dion was persuaded that the prime minister wasn’t really friends with the Kielburger brothers who run the WE Charity.
Bill Morneau did not fare as well. The former finance minister was to be the main culprit in last year’s furor over WE and the grant it almost received to run a pandemic-relief program for students.
Morneau, unlike Trudeau, made the mistake of mixing business with genuine friendship, Dion ruled. That may be fine on the golf course, but not so great when you’re helping to run a government.
The federal ethics boss also said in his ruling on Morneau that the whole definition of friendship in politics might need to be broadened in future. Not just close friends, Dion suggests for the new definition, but “relationships where personal and professional interactions become intertwined to such an extent that it becomes difficult to draw the line between the two.”
It sounds like common sense on one level — keep your personal and professional life strictly separate. That is, until you try it at home. While not many Canadians have the ability to enrich their friends from the public purse, there are also few people who have managed to keep personal and professional interactions in two entirely separate bubbles, pandemic or not.
The logical extension, of course, would be for politicians to have no “buddies” whatsoever, though that could be an impediment to actually getting elected. Friendships and networks can get you into office; they’re just extremely awkward once you get there. Just ask Ford and Trudeau; not so long ago, they seemed to be buddies too, until third-wave politics hit.
Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole may well be mulling over this conundrum, or he should be. In the hours after the ethics ruling on Thursday, O’Toole took to the podium to promise that Conservatives would introduce a much more strict regime to keep friendships out of politics.
“It’s time to clean up the mess in Ottawa with a new anticorruption law that will ensure Liberals like Justin Trudeau can’t reward their insider friends,” the Conservatives said in a statement.
It is true that Trudeau won’t be able to reward his friends if O’Toole becomes prime minister, but are the Conservative leader’s current friends aware that they will become a liability if their pal gets into office? Is O’Toole being careful now to make sure that personal and professional associations are being kept non-intertwined? That if you donate to the Conservatives, for instance, you probably are disqualified from doing business with a future O’Toole government?
None of this is meant to excuse real conflict in politics or even the blurred personal-professional lines that got Morneau and the Kielburgers in trouble.
But it is worth asking whether the ever-expanding version of “corruption,” as it is now casually called in politics, has reached an unattainable degree of abstraction in the real world of humans and their relationships? Note to future political recruiters: the perfect candidate is someone who has done well in business but made no troublesome friends along the way; a person who knows how to take donations from supporters but not their calls.
COVID-19 has put a lot of distance between people and their friends over the past 14 months. Many have brought their work into their home, but not their friends, which come to think of it, could be good training for would-be politicians out there. You haven’t seen your friends in a year? Have you thought about running for office?
Ford may be losing a few “buddies” with his decision to keep the golf courses closed and deny them the chance to gather for a few pops until at least June 2. But Ford was going to lose them anyway. Friends and power do not mix.