With all due respect to the MPs who spent many mortifying minutes last week batting the idea back and forth across the House of Commons, I don’t think Justin Trudeau’s public undermining of his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, just days before she is to deliver a fiscal update, is about her being a woman — or about Trudeau being a “fake feminist.” I think it’s more about a prime minister, and his retinue, who believe that communications and celebrity (of a sort) are nine-tenths of politics.
No question, for a man who as recently as Tuesday evening described himself as “a proud feminist,” Trudeau has treated notable female ministers appallingly: firing Canada’s first Indigenous justice minister, Jody Wilson Raybould, for not intervening on SNC Lavalin’s behalf in its Libyan-related legal troubles; firing highly regarded health minister Jane Philpott for supporting Wilson Raybould; lumbering Maryam Monsef with an electoral-reform file on which he had no intention of following through.
And no question, he seems to have (or to have had) much more time for perennial liabilities like Bill Blair, Harjit Sajjan, Marco Mendicino, Steven Guilbeault … hmm. Do you know what, maybe there is something about strong women he can’t stand.
Still, that wouldn’t explain Trudeau’s strange obsession with luring former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor Mark Carney into the Liberal fold — to replace Freeland, reports suggest, despite Carney not being an elected MP. And despite the rather delicate matter of Brookfield Asset Management, of which Carney is chair, trying to set up a $50-billion investment fund using Canadian pensioners’ money. (It also wouldn’t explain the always-fireable Mélanie Joly’s continued presence in Cabinet.)
Most Canadians have probably never given any thought to the notion of a cabinet minister not being an elected MP. I’m not sure that now, when many Canadians (including many Liberal voters) are sick to death of the sight and the sound of this government, is the best moment to test them — or to add yet another conflict-of-interest controversy to the pile.
The Liberals were certainly not pleased last time we had an unelected cabinet minister, when Stephen Harper appointed then senator Michael Fortier as minister of public works in 2006 to ensure Montreal had a seat at the table.
“Mr. Harper ran a campaign which emphasized accountability and ethical behaviour by parliamentarians. I have to say that I am concerned, given Mr. Harper’s past statements, he put into his cabinet a non-elected minister of public works,” interim Liberal leader Bill Graham said at the time. “This portfolio is vital to the functioning of the federal government … is responsible for all government purchasing and contracting and, therefore, spends billions of taxpayers’ dollars per year.”
That concern would have gone double, presumably, had Harper appointed Fortier as finance minister. And as a senator Fortier was, at least, a parliamentarian. And he didn’t have that $50-billion toilet seat hanging around his neck. And that was Harper’s first cabinet; he had some capital to burn among his supporters, and he spent it making his ministry geographically representative. Trudeau has no extra political capital left. His line of credit is maxed out, and the bank is calling several times a day.
For months we’ve heard reports suggesting the Prime Minister’s Office is concerned Freeland lacks the “ability to communicate the government’s economic message.” The PMO has precisely zero standing to be judging bad communications, but they’re right: Freeland isn’t a good communicator. Carney, on the other hand, has a reputation as a master communicator.
But let’s take a look at who has bestowed that reputation upon him: Paul Martin, who was prime minister while Carney was associate deputy finance minister; former Treasury Board president Scott Brison, who’s a personal friend of Carney’s; left-wing economist Armine Yalnizyan, of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives; Scotiabank economist Derek Holt; former National Post columnist Andrew Coyne (though he also dubbed Carney “a master of jargon”) … you take my point. It’s a fairly elite audience, and all these reviews concern Carney’s performance as governor of a central bank … not as a minister of the Crown.
Carney’s attempts at communicating his regular-bloke bona fides have thus far included a photo of him wearing his hometown Edmonton Oilers jersey and holding a can of Budweiser as if it were an obscure local delicacy.
It has been said so many times by now, but as terrible as Trudeau’s Liberals are at communicating, communicating is not even close to their main problem. Housing, immigration, out-of-control spending, Trudeau’s refusal to resign, his caucus’s refusal to make him resign — those are among their main problems, and there is no communicating them away.
Notably absent from this whole conversation has been what exactly Carney would do differently than Freeland as finance minister, or indeed, any indication that he would have more freedom from the PMO to act on his preferences than Freeland has now. If Carney is really willing to donate his body to this lost cause, I can see why Trudeau and Co. would want to take a chance on him. But it’s easy to imagine it ending in nothing but further woe.
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