Bill Morneau on euphoria of Trudeau’s 2015 victory to ‘one of the worst moments’ in his political life

Former federal finance minister Bill Morneau’s new memoir – titled Where To From Here – warns of the threats posed by our increasingly partisan political process.Kellyann Petry/The Globe and Mail

Former federal finance minister Bill Morneau sees a bright future for Canada. What he doesn’t envision is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leading the country to this promised land.

On Jan. 17, Mr. Morneau will publish a book detailing his five-year stint in cabinet, his abrupt resignation during the COVID-19 pandemic in August, 2020, and his prescription for an ailing Canadian economy. While the onetime Bay Street CEO focuses his memoir – titled Where To From Here – on the positive role government can play and the federal Liberals’ achievements, the ex-politician also takes targeted shots at both Mr. Trudeau and the team that surrounds him in the Office of the Prime Minister.

The book also warns of the threats posed by our increasingly partisan political process, with Mr. Morneau taking direct aim at the take-no-prisoners approach employed by Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, the party’s former finance critic.

Mr. Morneau’s recurring theme, backed by stories of his battles with the PMO, is that the tactics and people needed to win elections seldom yield the strategies and talent needed to run a government.

While in cabinet, Mr. Morneau said the PMO’s short-term political goals – winning that day’s headline – came to dominate long-term planning, a problem that became more acute after Gerald Butts resigned as the Prime Minister’s principal secretary in February, 2019. He pointed in the book to consistent overspending on support during the pandemic, with the size of programs recommended by the Finance Department boosted by the PMO “because the numbers sounded good.”

One such intervention, early in the pandemic, saw the PMO surprise the finance minister by increasing the amount of money available to business under the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy in an announcement that came just a few hours after Mr. Trudeau agreed to far more modest plans. Mr. Morneau said this “was one of the worst moments in my political life.”

The Prime Minister and the PMO’s spokespersons have yet to comment on Mr. Morneau’s book.

In an interview, the 60-year-old Mr. Morneau said: “Running for public office is the greatest thing I ever did in my career.” He said his motivation in writing a book on the experience included attracting other business leaders into politics to inject management experience and accountability into government. The book says those qualities are missing in the PMO.

Early in the book, Mr. Morneau highlights the euphoria that came with the Liberals’ sweeping 2015 election victory, when Mr. Trudeau’s “sharp intelligence and charisma” helped propel the party into power. “Soon after the election, I came to realize that while his performance skills were superb, his management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking,” he said.

In describing his 30-minute visit to Mr. Trudeau’s residence to tender his resignation, Mr. Morneau said in the book: “Our problem was not any clashes between us, but the absence of both a shared agenda and a working relationship.” He said the same lack of personal connection with the Prime Minister contributed to the high-profile departures of cabinet ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott.

As finance minister, Mr. Morneau’s priorities included navigating the pandemic, finding a sustainable funding approach for provincially run health care systems and weaning the economy off fossil fuels. Postpolitics, the former CEO of benefits consulting firm LifeWorks, formerly known as Morneau Shepell, wrote his memoir as part of a plan to continue working on health care and energy transition policies.

In the months prior to his departure from federal politics, both Mr. Morneau and the Prime Minister faced scathing criticism for their personal ties to the WE Charity, which won a contract early in the pandemic to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars to students. In his book, Mr. Morneau is forthcoming about what he calls his mistakes on this file. He paid back $40,000 to cover expenses from trips he and his family took with WE once he said he became aware of the costs. “Unequivocally, I should have recused myself from a decision to move forward” with WE as a pandemic partner, he wrote.

Nine months after Mr. Morneau resigned, Ethics Commissioner Mario Dion released a report that stated the former finance minister had “no opportunity” to further his own interests or those of his relatives when his department signed off on the WE contract. However, Mr. Dion said that Mr. Morneau did have a potential conflict of interest, because of the “preferential treatment” his ministerial staff gave to the charity.

In the book, Mr. Morneau used the uproar around the WE scandal to illustrate the increasingly partisan mentality of politics, at all levels. He said opposition parties used the controversy to personally attack him and the Prime Minister, who was eventually cleared of conflict by Mr. Dion.

“Like it or not, their perception was that I had either made or approved the decision to select WE, influenced by my previous involvement with them,” he said. “No serious person truly believed that I was financially influenced by these connections – it was all about politics.”

When WE announced plans to wind down its operations in Canada in the fall of 2020, Mr. Morneau said in his book: ”I felt a sense of sadness that an organization that had done so much to engage young people in community involvement had found itself in the crosshairs of partisan politics during a pandemic.”

Throughout his book, Mr. Morneau returns to the traditions of compromise and co-operation that he said have built Canada. While recognizing that politics can be bruising, he pointed to former Conservative finance critic Lisa Raitt and other members of the opposition who “played the game with a sense of decorum.”

The former finance minister wrote that this was not the case with Mr. Poilievre “who seemed to view the House of Commons not as a site for hard-nosed debating, but as a gladiatorial arena where encounters were measured by the amount of blood spilled and the number of personal insults hurled.”

Mr. Morneau said the Conservative Leader “may justify his actions and attitudes in any way he chooses, but collectively they are in conflict with almost every political value we have enjoyed as an nation for over 150 years. More to the point, they corrode the tolerant and centrist tradition behind Canada’s historic success.”