In better times, there likely would have been little reaction to the announcement in late March that an experienced investigator in the office of the federal Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner – who also happens to be the sister-in-law of a senior Liberal cabinet minister – would serve as interim ethics commissioner for six months.
In those better times, the opposition parties and the public would have been apt to accept Martine Richard as an honest broker who would act impartially and recuse herself from cases should the need arise.
After all, she’s done so in the past, notably in 2018 when her brother-in-law, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, was investigated and found to have broken the Conflict of Interest Act by taking part in a decision to award a fisheries licence to a group linked to his wife’s cousin.
That her original appointment to the ethics office happened a decade ago under a Conservative prime minister is also a signal that she is non-partisan. And given the number of times the ethics commissioner has busted the Liberals for violations since Ms. Richard’s hiring, there is little call to question her professionalism, or that of the broader office.
Except that these are not ordinary times, and Ms. Richard is another person, after David Johnston, whose credibility has been tainted by their association with a Liberal government known for its serial conflicts of interest.
These are the same Liberals that Mario Dion, the former ethics commissioner whose early retirement in February created the need for an interim replacement, found to be so oblivious to even the most straightforward conflicts of interest that he suggested on his way out the door that the Trudeau government send its ministers and parliamentary secretaries to his office for training.
And with good reason. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and two of his current and former senior ministers – Mr. Leblanc and Bill Morneau – have all violated the Conflict of Interest Act in an impressive variety of ways.
Lesser cabinet members have done it, too. Trade Minister Mary Ng and Housing Minister Ahmed Hussen were both caught giving lucrative government contracts to close friends and family members.
And just this year, Mr. Trudeau’s parliamentary secretary, Greg Fergus, was caught violating the act by improperly intervening on behalf of a television station seeking a broadcast licence from the CRTC.
We wrote at the time of Mr. Dion’s announced departure that he had identified the real problem: a culture in the Liberal Party that starts at the top, and in which too many caucus members are indifferent to the conflict-of-interest rules governing MPs.
That toxic culture has created a party that appears to have lost interest in basic ethics, and it is rubbing off on much of what the Liberal government touches.
That includes Mr. Johnston, a man Mr. Trudeau calls a “family friend.” His appointment last month as the government’s special rapporteur investigating foreign election interference might have gone over better had, prior to that, the Prime Minister demonstrated the faintest interest in avoiding conflicts of interest.
Instead, Mr. Trudeau himself violated the Conflict of Interest Act on two different occasions, his former finance minister did it once, two of his junior ministers were unaware that the public purse is not a bank account to be used for the benefit of best buddies and immediate family, and his parliamentary secretary missed the memo regarding his obligation not to interfere with a quasi-judicial tribunal.
And so any potential calculation that Mr. Johnston’s well-earned reputation as an honest broker would bolster the Trudeau government has backfired. It has instead had the opposite effect and indelibly tainted the credibility of the special rapporteur process.
Mr. Trudeau breaks the rules that preserve the public’s faith in the integrity of government, then he or his government appoints family friends and relatives to positions that oversee government, and he expects the public and the opposition to accept this at face value.
Like we said, maybe a prime minister who played by the rules would have the credibility to pull off the kinds of appointments Mr. Trudeau has overseen lately.
But then again, that kind of prime minister would never permit such appointments in the first place.