"Quō vādis?"

It's never a bad time to quote the Rt. Hon. John G. Diefenbaker

Yesterday’s news may not have come as a surprise to Ottawa insiders, but Durham MP Erin O’Toole’s decision to leave public life after 10 grueling years comes at a time when Canada desperately needs the very courage, commitment, intellect, life experience and thoughtful balance that has personified Mr. O’Toole’s entire political career.

My former Nesbitt Burns M&A colleague had a line that “people come and people go,” which he immediately deployed to dampen our fears when the firm’s crack Mining investment banking team left the firm one day to join a European bank in the late 1990s. If you have spent any time working on Bay Street, let alone Wall Street, you eventually come to terms with the reality that many of the people that you start working with will not be the same folks that you will be sharing a shingle with 5 or 10 years later. If you’re a client of that firm, however, you’re largely indifferent.

In the event that your favourite lawyer or financial advisor moves firms, you can always follow them to their new shop. Easy peasy.

Not so, in the case of the Canadian voter: when taxpayers lose the fulltime elected services of people such as Erin O’Toole, Rona Ambrose, Christine Elliott, Father Sean O’Sullivan, Lisa Raitt, Brad Wall, or the late Michael Wilson, to name a few, they’re gone for good.

There’s no “other firm” to ring them up at. Someone else has been reassigned their number.

That Mr. O’Toole is a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, as well as a former businessman and Bay Street lawyer, makes his departure particularly relevant at this juncture in Canadian politics. When I think about the stark challenges that Canada is currently facing, these career exposures are exactly what is needed in droves in the halls of power.

Our sailors need new Frigates but we can’t seem to get them built, our soldiers are under resourced, and our pilots are flying in jets acquired in the late 1970s by the father of the current Prime Minister. Last week’s Federal budget was sorely lacking in effective ideas that will stimulate the Canadian economy and create the kind of wage growth that is needed if we are going to maintain the standard of living that our nation has enjoyed since the end of the Second World War. Our health care system has never had more funding, and yet families will tell you that they’ve never had a harder time getting essential care for their loved ones. The Canadian government spent over $500 billion of taxpayer dollars to deal with Covid, above and beyond the great personal cost to our frontline health care workers; ask yourself how many new nursing schools we got as part of that $500B “investment.” This is pretty basic stuff.

Global threats abound, yet Canada’s voice and contributions seem smaller than at any point in our nation’s proud history. Repeat offenders are too often put back on the streets in a matter of hours — only to go on to commit a far worse crime — yet the government of the day virtue-signals by penalizing law-abiding sports shooters in lieu of actually making folks safer. Inflation is eating away at individual paycheques, and the Liberal solution is to increase the federal budget deficit so that it can redistribute even more wealth; a tactic that is more likely than not to artificially keep prices higher for longer. 10,000 Canadian exporters have been calling for a new trade conduit at the Windsor-Detroit border since the late 1990s, yet the current government is four years late on opening the Gordie Howe Bridge, an essential piece of critical infrastructrue that former Prime Minister Harper, former Minister Raitt and I got rolling back in 2014.

Despite the fact that the Grits will bring in $60 billion more in revenue than they expected, the annual deficit is projected to be over $40 billion — which means we just spent $100 billion more than planned. Not all of which went to empty Roxham Road hotels or $6,000 a night suites in the UK.

This smattering of real-life examples is meant to remind us just how challenging Canada’s political situation is, and why yesterday’s news is such a loss for voters of any stripe. For Parliament to be effective, it takes a strong team. A diverse team. An experienced team. A committed team that brings together a sufficiently broad range of perspectives that issues such as these and others stand the best chance of being resolved in the most effective manner on behalf of Canadians.

This is not to take away from anyone in the Conservative caucus; it’s a talented group of sincere, diverse and passionate leaders, drawn from across the land. The personal and professional experiences that they bring to elected office have been embraced by their local constituents, and the sacrifices that they, their families and the rest of the members of the House and Senate make put us all in their collective debt.

When I was a teenager, Father Sean would love to re-enact The Chief calling out, mid-stump speech, “Quō vādis, Where are we going?” Whenever I got frustrated about what was going on in Ottawa, it was always comforting to rely on the fact that people I admired and knew personally, such as Mr. O’Toole (and his particular collection of “life exposures”), were keeping on eye on the proverbial store.

Selfish, I know, but it’s the truth.

Given the fiscal picture outlined last week, and the absence of tangible policies to improve the Canadian economy, it’s impossible not to wonder: “Where Are We Going?”

MRM

(image: Navvy, 1950, Irving Penn)