Morneau's third budget is his chance to prove he deserves his job
It's a good time to be finance minister, but Morneau badly needs to turn the page on 2017
Today, Bill Morneau presents his third budget as finance minister. That's no small feat on its own.
For the finance minister, the last six months of 2017 were an ordeal — a prolonged stretch of self-inflicted wounds and critical scorn that culminated in November with Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer making a great show of demanding his resignation.
Morneau declined to take the opposition leader's advice and, eventually, the pack moved on to other outrages (summer jobs, the Aga Khan, etc).
But now, after a quiet couple of months, Morneau rises this afternoon to deliver his third budget — and make his case for the right to deliver a fourth.
"To put it mildly, the finance minister and the government have a lot of credibility riding on the 2018 budget, perhaps even more than the 2019 budget," Scott Clark and Peter DeVries, two former officials in the Finance Department, wrote earlier this year.
It should be a good time to be Morneau
The finance minister should be sitting pretty right now.
The Canadian economy created 432,000 new jobs in 2017. Even after a negative report for January, the national unemployment rate is just 5.9 per cent.
Last fall, the International Monetary Fund projected that Canada would lead the G7 in economic growth for 2017 and run second in 2018.
The Canada child benefit, the centrepiece of Morneau's first budget in 2016, has been credited with helping to spur some of that economic growth. Shortly after that first budget, Morneau successfully negotiated an expansion of the Canada Pension Plan. And after some early trouble, he also may have landed on a set of durable reforms to clean up the system for taxing private corporations.
And with the government still prioritizing spending over balancing the budget, Morneau needn't worry too much about imposing the sort of unpopular budget cuts that restraint requires.
So, things could be worse.
And yet, things are maybe not as good as they should be.
The tax reform kerfuffle
What began as a discussion paper on "tax fairness" last summer turned into a spectacular mess for the government. In the hands of Pierre Poilievre, Morneau's primary opposition tormentor, the Finance Department's proposals were presented as nothing short of an attack on the neighbourhood pizza shop.
That opposition line segued into questions about Morneau's handling of his own substantial assets, including a villa in France — an inconvenient fact that emerged because he'd forgotten to disclose its corporate ownership to the ethics commissioner.
To extricate himself from this trouble, the finance minister sold his stake in his family's human resources business and donated millions to charity. Still looming over Morneau is an ethics commissioner's investigation into whether it was a conflict of interest for him to table pension legislation in 2016.
But being rich is not Morneau's only point of vulnerability.
Follow CBC's budget coverage today
The CBC's Hannah Thibedeau takes your questions ahead of today's federal budget at 1 p.m. ET at Facebook.com/CBCPolitics live from Parliament Hill. Live coverage continues at 3 p.m. ET on CBC News Network and cbcnews.ca with a pre-budget special hosted by Rosemary Barton, and our budget specials on CBC Television, cbcnews.ca, Twitter and CBC Radio One at 4 p.m. ET. Find more programming details here.
His abilities as a finance minister aside, Morneau is not a particularly dynamic performer in public. He is amiable and professional, but cautious. His words don't lend themselves to lengthy think pieces. Opposite Poilievre — a creature of Parliament Hill and an aggressive debater who was first elected in 2004 at the age of 24 — Morneau might never win the day in question period.
Maybe QP performances seem like a poor standard by which to measure a finance minister's worth, but such is politics. And a winning afternoon in the House might help to convince the press gallery that you know what you're doing.
A chance to turn the page
Speculating on a cabinet minister's political future is usually a fool's errand; official opposition members and columnists aren't necessarily the best judges of a minister's competence. But Liberals surely must be hoping that Morneau's 2018 runs smoother than his 2017 did.
The budget should at least give Morneau a few new things to talk about. A focus on gender, for instance, could lend itself to public discussions of interesting new ideas for mixing social policy and economics.
At the very least, Morneau must still be hoping to salvage something from last summer's proposed tax reforms. Draft legislation to deal with passive investment income is expected to be included in the new budget and will, no doubt, be closely scrutinized for any untoward impact on pizzerias.
But even if Morneau does win a measure of victory on taxes, his job isn't likely to get any easier. The strong economic performance of 2017 is not expected to last (January's job numbers were dismal). NAFTA still hangs in the balance. And tax changes in the United States might yet demand a response from Ottawa.
All the while, the finance minister is carrying the political weight of a deficit and the burden of proving the usefulness of an increasing number of high-minded Liberal concepts: an infrastructure bank, superclusters and now gender-based analysis.
The rarefied office of finance minister
The Conservatives seemed particularly keen to damage Morneau last fall, no doubt for the obvious reason. Finance ministers are politically more important than, say, agriculture ministers (with all due respect to agriculture ministers).
And in recent decades, Morneau's position has been defined in part by its stability.
In the last 55 years, just 18 men (and they have all been men) have occupied the office — fewer than the number of individuals who have occupied any other major portfolio.
Just seven of those ministers made it as far as three budgets. And only five got to table four or more: Jim Flaherty, Paul Martin, Michael Wilson, John Turner and Edgar Benson. (Benson, Pierre Trudeau's first finance minister, was shuffled aside after a bruising battle over tax reform).
So even if Morneau does not bestride the political world like a colossus, he is on the verge of making history.
So forget dynamism. After the mess of 2017, steady competence might be Morneau's best argument for keeping his job and presenting a crucial election-year budget in 2019.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
