Prime Minister Mark Carney and other Canadian prime ministers should be required to divest their investment portfolios when they assume office, not just put them in a blind trust, the House of Commons ethics committee recommends in a new report.
In its report made public Thursday morning, the committee said putting assets in a blind trust isn’t good enough, recommending instead “that the Government of Canada amend the Conflict of Interest Act that, for the application of subsection 27(1) the prime minister, as a reporting public office holder, is fully divested from their controlled assets through sale, since placement in a blind trust does not constitute true divestment.”
The committee also wants the law amended to require public disclosure of “high-level holdings categories placed in a blind trust by reporting public office holders (sector/asset class, and whether the holdings are Canadian-market concentrated),” a recommendation that could shed new light on the financial interests of a number of top officials and cabinet ministers.
If you want successful people to hold office, you can’t make them divest their portfolios and take capital gains tax hits that could ostensibly cost them more than their salary and pension combined.
I know I know “boo hoo rich people” but if you think that Mark Carney is a good PM, why would you then set up a pre-requisite that repels people like him from even considering taking the position?
I don’t want “successful” people in office!
I want someone who has community building experience. Someone with non-profit experience. Someone with the interest of people not someone that has demonstrated a thorough understanding of how to acquire personal wealth.
We have financial and economic specialists to advise the PM, but we act like that’s the only fucking metric we can weigh our worth on.
I want a PM that is grateful for the opportunity to help Canadians and is humbled by the $400 000 salary as compensation, not someone that sees it as a small asset to their inflating portfolio.
Business people in public office is not a bad thing on its own. It is good to have people that understand how to grow a business and manage it. A CEO has executive experience running a large company, that is great experience for being prime minister. There are just as many corrupt people in charity/non-profit world as business. Neither is morally virtuous or immoral.
Often business people sell off their investments when they take office, either forced by law or do so voluntarily. Carney hasn’t sold anything, just put it all in a blind trust. I have zero faith in that. He is still having private meetings with top executives from Brookfield and he knows Brookfield’s holdings, so he can put public money toward projects that will personally benefit him. Ex: wind turbines, solar panels, heat pumps etc. Brookfield is heavily invested in these.
Can we go higher on the salary, sure. Let’s make it $1milion a year.
But, who do we want running the country? I’d like someone with the guts to raise the salary, but also say that they’ll willingly dis-invest and put their assets in a blind trust.
Carney’s assets are in a blind trust. He has zero visibility into what investments he holds. All he knows is the overall performance of the total.
They get a raise every year on April 1st. Ugh. Taxpayers are fools every April Fools Day. They also get huge expense accounts and properties they can use like Harrington Lake cottage. They get free travel all over the world. They don’t need a huge raise, they don’t do that much or work that hard.
That’s great, but I want someone who knows what they’re doing with the economy, and as valuable as community building is, it’s not a particular responsibility at the federal level.
It fucking should be. Running government as a business is what got the states into the fucking mess its in right now, and is also why all of our major infrastructure costs so fucking much compared to other countries.
We need a government that sees the current price gouging and foreign ownership of our resources as a bad thing, not as something that can benefit them personally.
Community building is a grassroots issue. I know a lot of community organizers who are fantastic people and good at what they do. I’m not sure they would do particularly well on the international stage.
But let’s say maybe they are great leaders and would do well as PM. Would it not be better to establish laws that take money out of the campaign landscape and level the playing field so that people like this are able to have a fighting chance? That doesn’t mean forcing them to liquidate once they’re elected. It means controlling the influence of wealth on campaigns and providing guidelines that socializes the campaign process.
If you force liquidation on the PM, you won’t solve the problem. You will just make sure that the average PM is a stooge. The guy who made his own fortune won’t bother with this shit, but the sleazy prick with nothing to lose, out the career politician with skeletons in their closet will damn well jump at the chance to gain power at the behest of anyone willing to throw money at their campaign.
You’re fixing the wrong problem. We want people with the wherewithal to become Carney-esque in the first place to run just as much as we want community organizers to have that opportunity, but placing barriers to entry to the former won’t ensure the latter gets the job.
Like I said, we have a job for that. Its called the Finance Minister. The Finance Minister should absolutely be an experienced economist laser focused on the economy. The Prime Minister should be taking the Finance Minister’s expertise into consideration, the same way they get expert advice from Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Agricultural, Industrial, Energy, and Environment Ministers.
The Prime Minister should be a leader for Canadians - the community of people that call this land our home - backed by the expert advice of their specialized ministers to best serve Canadians in all aspects of our lives. But the focus is always on them being a leader for our economy, which is a series of numbers that seeks to enrich the mean average which allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer so long as the rich can get more rich than the poor get poor. And we need someone who can temper the advise to make the average Canadian richer from the Finance Minister with the actual impact to Canadians. No community leader would ever yield “acceptable losses” to the the most vulnerable to benefit the well off.
I mean, that’s nonsense. You’re presupposing that a successful businessman or economist’s only asset is their financial knowledge. To gain the success that someone like Mark Carney has achieved takes a lot more than just financial knowledge. It takes leadership, vision, guts, tenacity, and many other qualities that would make them excellent PMs, as he has shown himself to be.
Your prejudice against financially successful people is not constructive. Just because people have leadership qualities that they have acquired through means other than financial success doesn’t mean that people who do enjoy financial success should be held away from leadership with a barrier to entry like this. It is flat out stupidity.
The article is about the idea that he should divest his assests so personally enriching himself is not a motivation for political action and your argument is that would dissuade people like him from taking office.
I’m saying people that seek power to personally enrich themselves that would be dissuaded from taking office if they couldn’t stand to profit beyond the salary are not the people I want as Prime Minister.
If you can’t see how someone refusing to divest their assets to be in a position of power could be a problem, I don’t know what to tell you, other than look south.
If the loss of assets is enough to prevent you from considering the position, I don’t want you in that position. The PM is supposed to make decisions good for Canada, not their assets in particular.
Agree. How much money and power does a 60 year old billionaire need? So what if he has to sell everything? That is how we ensure no conflicts of interest.