Bill Morneau's resignation highlights why Canada is in trouble

Bloomberg News editor Stephen Wicary tweeted two examples of his colleagues’ work Monday evening: one about former finance minister Bill Morneau’s   decision to quit politics in order to take a run at a job in Paris, and another one about how immigration plunged 64 per cent in the second quarter.

The Morneau bombshell will have received more clicks, but the smart money was trading on the immigration news.

Canada is in trouble. Not in the way that the United States and China are in trouble, and certainly not in the way that countries such as Lebanon and Zimbabwe are in trouble. Australia isn’t the only lucky country out there. We’ve had a pretty good run, too. If only we could just cash our chips in and buy a little house on the beach.

As a fan of the Edmonton Oilers, I know something about how abysmal management can destroy promising rookies. Morneau had everything you’d want in a finance minister: fancy degrees, good manners, some business success and a social conscience to match his bank account. Donald Trump, who likes his cabinet members to be camera-ready, would have hired him on the spot.

But what Morneau didn’t have was a political power base of his own. Like the rest of the girls and boys on Justin Trudeau’s bus in 2015, Morneau owed the prime minister everything he had in politics. He had some influence, but nothing like what Paul Martin had under Jean Chrétien, or what Jim Flaherty had in Stephen Harper’s governments.

Chrétien and Harper knew they would be weaker without their finance ministers. Trudeau had no such worry, which is why Ottawa in 2020 has more in common with the court of Louis XIV than the raucous, cabinet-driven democracies that delivered important structural change in the 1980s and 1990s. Morneau might have been the most impressive specimen in the aviary, but he was still a parrot.

· 'I've done my best': Morneau resigns as finance minister, MP following clash with PM over COVID policies, WE scandal

I was in India when Trudeau won the 2015 election, and haven’t been based in Ottawa since 2010, so I can’t offer much in the way of gossip. But I do know that Morneau was gearing up to re-establish Finance’s independence from the Prime Minister’s Office. He made a conscious decision to play it safe during Trudeau’s first term, giving him time to learn the game. He wanted the second mandate to be different, worthy of mention alongside the accomplishments of Martin and Flaherty. It looks like he tried. Morneau chose Tiff Macklem to lead the Bank of Canada even though members of the PMO wanted Carolyn Wilkins, the senior deputy governor, to get the job.

But something went wrong during the COVID-19 rescue.

Martin led the slaying of the budget deficit in the mid-1990s, and Flaherty wore the white hat as head of Canada’s fire brigade during the Great Recession. Morneau was handed no such opportunity: the prime minister was the daily face of the crisis response, even though it was clear that Morneau and his team at Finance were doing most of the work, at least on the economics of it all.

Then, out of nowhere, Bloomberg reported last week that Trudeau was taking advice from Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor. Rumours quickly spread to the pages of mainstream newspapers that the prime minister was losing confidence in his finance minister.

It was clear where all of this was headed. On Aug. 17 at about 7:30 p.m. Ottawa time, in the middle of the worst crisis since the Second World War, Morneau, who said he got into politics to make a difference for common folk, announced he had resigned to run for secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Paris-based think-tank that counts a few dozen rich countries such as the U.S. and Germany as its members.

“Liberals are more lethal to Liberals than are any competing partisans,” Gerald Butts, the prime minister’s former principal adviser, tweeted . “Canadians have little patience for this stuff in the best of times, and these are not those. Friendly advice to former colleagues: knock it off, unless you miss losing.”

Morneau’s resignation came with the usual speculation about how the dollar would react and what might happen to bond yields. These are worries from a time when the finance minister mattered. After Flaherty resigned in 2014, Harper replaced him with Joe Oliver, who had little impact. Morneau was just another front-bench minister.

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Global Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne and Treasury Board President Jean-Yves Duclos are being circulated as possible successors. Unless Trudeau loosens the reins, who cares?

This government, with one voice, has been talking to us like we’re all children for five years now. The ministers all sound and act the same. At least Morneau, a little older than most of his counterparts and possessing some real-life experience, stood out as different. Now, traders can be certain that Canada is being run by a hive mind that responds to Trudeau and his tight circle of advisers.

And that’s just one of the reasons Canada is in trouble. The trade wars with the Trump administration exposed our world-beating economy as rather fragile. Business investment evaporated with the price of oil, while a surge in immigration pushed the economy to full employment and buttressed the housing market.

Nothing wrong with the latter. Immigration is one thing the Trudeau government got right. But now the COVID-19 crisis has killed that economic engine, along with so many others. It’s going to take an exceptional policy response to get out of this. And yet we are led by a government that dislikes debate and an opposition whose finance critic retweets an account named “Margaret Thatcher,” the former British prime minister who died in 2013, which is about when most of the world realized that her ideas about how to run an economy were rubbish.

This is the group that will lead the recovery phase of the COVID-19 crisis. It’s unheroic, and Morneau’s resignation guarantees he will be remembered as a mediocre finance minister, but you can see why he gave up on the lot of them.

•Email: kcarmichael@postmedia.com | CarmichaelKevin