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As Chrystia Freeland was named finance minister this week, the first woman to hold the position at the federal level, immediately the credentialism started to come out of the woodwork.  She had no experience on Bay Street how could she be qualified?  She has no financial or business education!  And then one of the most weirdly specific criticisms also reared its head as well she's never had to make payroll.  Now, Freeland isn't the only one who's faced this very specific critique, as it was deployed against Justin Trudeau as well back in 2015, however, it's a very odd skill that has apparently been fetishized in certain pundit circles.

To an extent, it would seem that this particular notion stems from the pervasive notion about trying to run government like a business something that doesn't actually translate because governments don't have "bottom lines," and cannot function with the same incentives, nor are the skillsets required to run most businesses applicable to government most especially a small business.  Different parties in governments in several Western countries have been trying this since the late 1970s, and nobody has really made it successful because the two concepts are fairly antithetical.  That said, not all businesses are that efficient either hell, in Canada we have a productivity problem because of it.

Another aspect of this fairly specific notion about "making payroll" may also speak to a certain amount of signalling to small business and their lobbyists in this country, who exert an outsized amount of influence on policy-making in this country, but often in contradictory ways.  For example, these lobbyists simultaneously agitate for tax simplification while at the same time demanding more complicated exceptions, loopholes and special rates that do the very opposite of simplification, and you can rest assured that if a royal commission on tax simplification recommended that all business taxes be equalized across the board because preferential treatment for small business has been proved to be a barrier to growth in this country that these same lobbies would be baying for blood.  Nevertheless, governments of all stripes pander to this lobby, and the current Liberal government wounded itself when they put through changes to personal corporations that were being used to shield wealth, but Bill Morneau's inability to communicate what he was doing or to fend off the baseless attacks on the changes wounded both the government and him personally as finance minister, from which he never did recover.

Part of this signalling to the small business lobby with "making payroll" has to do with conceptualizing the demands of these operators, particularly around the ability to figure out cashflow and liquidity, and making choices about ensuring people can keep their jobs or whether people need to be let go lest said business not be able to pay their rent.  There is an assumption about the seriousness of life-changing decisions around jobs and livelihoods that is being projected onto ministers of the Crown, but it's one that doesn't really bear out in reality.

A small business owner may understand sales and running a small organization, but that skillset doesn't actually translate to being a minister (or prime minister, as the same criticism was applied to Trudeau).  A small business owner doesn't even really need to have a grasp of macro-economics, because it's rarely going to be needed for what they are doing.  Sure, a small business owner may need to have his or her fingers in all the pies because they are juggling a lot of decisions, but that has nothing to do with how a government department operates.  When you look at the finance department, it's not a small organization there are thousands of people, and the minister is in no way able to micro-manage all of the decisions being made on a daily basis.

The role of a minister is about management and accountability.  He or she is making high-level decisions only, usually after careful consultation with his or her bureaucrats and Cabinet colleagues, and then he or she needs to be accountable to Parliament for those decisions.  Sure, the minister may get to take the plaudits if things go well, but they all need to take the blame if things go wrong, but it's unlikely to sink the department if there's a screw-up, unlike a small business.  Consequences differ for a reason, and it's why you can't treat a government like it's a business.  It's partly why successful business people rarely make good politicians the skills are rarely directly transferrable.  To add to that, small business owners tend to be solely focused on their businesses with a very narrow perspective, and they don't think about policy.  You can't run a government department like that, where policy is one of your primary functions.  You need a broader perspective, especially in the present day where it has become abundantly clear that the narrow experiences of yore, dominated by middle-aged straight white men, are simply not working for enough people in the population.

There is an added bait-and-switch element to the fetish of "making payroll," because when you start drilling down into what is meant, its adherents start swapping in corporate or Bay Street experience, which is not about small businesses or "making payroll," and ignores that some professionals like doctors and lawyers also essentially run small businesses in this country and need to make their own payrolls.  Of course, Bay Street experience didn't help Morneau, who wasn't responsive to their needs as much as he wasn't to those of small business owners, particularly when it came to communication.

While we can't ignore that much of the credentialism wielded at Freeland is sexist (if not misogynistic) at its very core, that someone who hasn't "made payroll" shouldn't be a minister of the Crown is patently absurd.  It may not even be applicable to Freeland, who as an editor with major media outlets would have been responsible for budgets and staffing, and the livelihoods of those who worked for her.  But to simply lean on this particular shorthand without thinking through what bar it's actually setting does nobody any favours especially those who are trying to weigh in on the suitability of a minister.

Photo Credit: National Post

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