Has the Clock Run Out on Bill Morneau?

With Mark Carney hovering in the wings is the writing on the wall for Trudeau finance minister, Bill "Job Churn" Morneau?

There have been  a few reports of friction between the prime minister and Morneau over Canada's burgeoning deficit.

Morneau has always been true to his class. He was definitely born with a silver spoon, becoming chairman of the company his dad founded, Canada's largest HR firm, Morneau Schepell. He also served as the chairman of the right-leaning C.D. Howe Institute. All of that seemed to come shining through when, as finmin, Morneau told Canadians they had better get used to a future of "job churn" in the gig economy. It was a true "let them eat cake" moment.

For what it's worth (and that's not much), Trudeau has denied the tension claims and says he has full confidence in his finance minister.

Morneau's resistance to expensive environmental initiatives reflects his roots in Bay Street, Toronto's financial center, and a view held among right-leaning Liberals that deficits are out of control.

"The idea of greening the economy just by spending money on every project you have in front of you is not really serious," said a fifth source sympathetic to Morneau's position. 

Possible budget measures range from investments to help provinces reduce their carbon footprint, boosting research into clean technology and encouraging the construction of efficient buildings. 

"Morneau has been saying: 'We need to get a grip'. And that isn't always popular," said one of the three sources familiar with the matter.

Much as I like Mark Carney, is he the person to formulate a vision for Canada's economy in the 21st century?

Carney graduated from Harvard in 1988 with a bachelor's degree with high honours in economics, before postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford at St Peter's College and Nuffield College, where he received masters and doctoral degrees in the same field in 1993 and 1995, respectively.

His academic credentials are sterling. His grasp of  the economic impacts of climate change is excellent. He has repeatedly addressed the "Carbon Bubble" that imperils countries such as our own. That's a lot to expect of any one individual. But what about that other nemesis that confronts us, inequality?

It turns out that Carney is very much alive to the threat posed by inequality. Here are a few headlines from Carney's tenure as governor of the Bank of England.

"Mark Carney warns of the dangers of growing inequality." (2014)

Inequality is “demonstratively” growing and risks undermining the basic social contract of fairness, Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, said on Tuesday. 

Weighing into the growing political debate on inequality, Mr Carney highlighted “disturbing evidence” of declining social mobility in advanced economies, as well as increasing strains between generations and doubts about whether today’s social programmes could be afforded for futures generations. 

These issues struck at the heart of a “basic social contract comprised of relative equality of outcomes; equality of opportunity; and fairness across generations”, Mr Carney argued.

"Mark Carney: we must tackle isolation and detachment caused by globalisation." (2016)

“From the rising spectre of global terrorism to intensifying geopolitical tensions and financial crises, for too long, for too many people, the world seems to be getting riskier,” he said in a lecture to Liverpool John Moores University.

Carney acknowledged in his speech that voters deserved a more honest appraisal from economists when it came to the real impact of changes such as globalisation and the automation of jobs. 

“The fundamental challenge is that, alongside its great benefits, every technological revolution mercilessly destroys jobs and livelihoods – and therefore identities – well before new ones emerge,” he said. 

He noted the rise in living standards around the world in recent decades and said technological progress had lifted more than 1 billion people out of poverty. But he recognised those advances had not been felt equally. 

“Despite such immense progress many citizens in advanced economies are facing heightened uncertainty, lamenting a loss of control and losing trust in the system. To them, measures of aggregate progress bear little relation to their own experience. Rather than a new golden era, globalisation is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities,” he said.

The main focus of his last speech of an eventful year, was inequality and he described current times as “the first lost decade since the 1860s”.

That's pretty progressive talk for a party that jettisoned progressive thinking in its drive to become today's "Conservative-Lites."

We are embarked on an era in which political decision-making usually fails us. The Covid-19 pandemic taught us that medical issues are best left to medical professionals. Our abject failure on the greatest threat facing the future of Canada, climate change, strongly suggests that is far too important to be entrusted to the grindstones of partisan politics. Why should mapping out a vision for Canada's economic future be left to political whimsy?

The hard fact is that we don't have leaders today of the stature of Pierre Trudeau, Mike Pearson, Wilfred Laurier or Louis St. Laurent. No, today we get the like of Andrew Scheer, Quisling Peter MacKay and the well-intentioned but feckless and less than always forthright Justin Trudeau.