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The "ethical mire" that Bill Morneau has been plagued by is looking a bit threadbare, and yet every day, new attempts to keep this issue going are made.  The evidence of any wrongdoing is a further reach with every passing article, and we are now at the point where some journalistic outlets are inventing parliamentary procedure out of whole cloth in order to try and incriminate Morneau.  But how much longer than this realistically be sustained?

And make no mistake, the allegations get increasingly outrageous with each passing day.  This week, it's progressed to very carefully worded allegations that Morneau had engaged in insider trading with the suggestion that he sold Morneau Shepell shares a week before he announced tax changes that caused the stock market to drop by five percent, thus saving himself some $50,000.  Now, I say carefully worded because Pierre Polievre never did utter the words "insider trading," but just asked some very specific questions that linked a to b to c in such a way that that was the obvious insinuation, at which point the Conservatives flooded social media with lamentations that Morneau wouldn't answer the question (never mind that it was an obvious trap).  Poilievre also carefully timed his appearance in the Foyer afterward, waiting for most reporters to have left and when he had only a couple of minutes before needing to return to the chamber for a vote, so that he could carefully avoid spelling out his allegations (insisting that he wasn't going to speculate, never mind that it's exactly what he's doing) even when pressed by reporters.

Last week, the outrage was over this outsized concern that Morneau didn't consult the Ethics Commissioner before he tabled Bill C-27, which affects pensions in federally-regulated sectors.  Never mind that the news outlet invented this particular requirement the Ethics Commissioner not only never vets bills, but having her do so would violate both cabinet secrecy, and parliamentary privilege.  There's also the fact that when government bills are tabled, they're done so on behalf of cabinet as a whole, while the minister sponsors it as the minister for the reason that they have to answer for it on behalf of the department that the legislation affects not as an individual or out of personal interest.  If the minister were shuffled out of the portfolio, the new minister would be the new sponsor as the minister, not the individual.  And yet, the opposition who knows very well these parliamentary norms went on tirades for days as though Morneau not clearing the bill with the Commissioner was somehow this great violation of ethical norms.

These norms do not exist.  The procedure they are demanding is outside of parliamentary precedent.  The concerns around Bill C-27 themselves are largely overblown, since they don't solely benefit Morneau Shepell, nor do they demand any federally regulated business change their existing pension plan to a targeted benefit plan it merely gives then an option to do so (and as Morneau said in Question Period last week, it's not about existing defined benefit plans, but giving those private sector companies that don't have plans an option to create one for employees).  Of course, the fact that certain unions have tried to make this connection with Bill C-27 and Morneau's previous work on targeted benefit plans at Morneau Shepell as a way of discrediting a bill that they don't like doesn't make the allegations of a conflict of interest credible, but that doesn't stop either media outlets nor the opposition from framing these allegations in the most disingenuous way possible.

Even more dubious allegations come out daily, with constant attempts to link government contracts with Morneau Shepell many of them predating Morneau's election in 2015 as being somehow improper, never mind the legitimate procurement processes that go into establishing these contracts in the first place, but we're at the point where all anyone is doing is throwing things at the wall and hoping that something, anything sticks.

And this is really the part that is getting concerning about all of this is that nobody especially media outlets are stopping to think critically about each fresh allegation because there seems to be an interest in drawing blood and possibly taking down a minister of the Crown.  When presented with yet new allegations, we're not running them though a bullshit filter to say "hey, this doesn't really pass a smell test," while we're uncritically repeating every single utterance by critics that "this doesn't pass the smell test" as though each of those utterances had merit to them.  The vast majority of them don't, but that doesn't seem to get anyone to stop and think about it.  Each demand that the Ethics Commissioner investigate something is being treated as a major scandal, even though it's almost certain that there's nothing to find, or even that Mary Dawson will do anything more than her usual trick of reading her mandate and enabling legislation so narrowly that nothing falls under it (but that has as much to do with the legislation that MPs created and refuse to change, never mind how many times she asks them to do so).

With increasingly disingenuous and mendacious questions being asked day after day in QP, we should ask ourselves when is it time to take a step back from trying to constantly manufacture outrage over Morneau in the hopes of mortally wounding him?  The work of accountability is no longer getting done, as actual, real problems that the government should be addressing are falling to the wayside.  We had an Auditor General's report last week where virtually none of it was raised in QP, and the only chapter that was addressed was done so in a way to tie into yet another of the disingenuous questions around the Liberal Party's chief fundraiser.  How long can this particular farce carry on?  This outrage has been running on fumes for weeks now, and it's reliant on fiction to keep it going.  How is this any way to run a democracy?

Photo Credit: Jeff Burney Loonie Politics

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