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Of course real poor he aint. Here's the quaint location of his villa in France. It's not that the sad federal Minister of Finance, who represents a downtown riding in Toronto  containing lots of real poor people, is much worse than other rich politicians who could not run and get elected unless they  were rich; it's just that as the minister in charge of Canada's financial affairs a neutral observer might expect from him a little more honesty and probity than is apparent in his transparent attempts to hide his conflicts of interest.
Of course, the real  problem is much bigger than Morneau, it is that there is a fundamental  contradiction between shielding one's wealth and serving the public good. In other words, to use the words of another rich man politician, the political  process is "rigged" (he knows cos he's doing the rigging). How can business people who make their money out of various forms of human distress and are appointed as candidates by mainstream political parties largely because of their wealth, honestly work for the interests of those their riches are extracted from? The answer is they can't. And in Morneau's case it is clear he doesn't.
The only way  out of this contradiction is to ensure that businesses serve the broader public good by, for instance, ensuring that the wealth  they make is shared democratically with those who contribute to making it, and this requires worker management/ownership. And the only way of doing this is to  ensure that all workers have a democratic right to determinine  how enterprise revenues get distributed. It's called worker ownership  and it's  one of the values we celebrate in our TorontotheBetter Directory. Future blogposts will explain in detail the other criteria we apply to choose the enterprises in the Directory. A better world requires better ways of creating wealth.           .       

Labels: Liberals