Former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty speaks at the gas plant cancellation hearings at Queen's Park in Toronto on June 25, 2013. Photo: Peter J. Thompson/Postmedia News/Files The last time we heard from Dalton McGuinty, he was testifying before a committee of the Ontario legislature on his election-eve decision to cancel the construction of two electricity plants, at a cost, it was belatedly revealed, in excess of $1 billion. McGuinty was, as ever, unrepentant. “It’s never too late,” he admonished the committee, “to do the right thing.”
Or the wrong thing, apparently. A year and a half after his tire-screeching departure from office, the former premier has registered to lobby the government he led, on behalf of an educational software company, Desire2Learn, that benefited from millions of dollars in grants from that same government. What is more, neither McGuinty nor any of his erstwhile cabinet seatmates seem able to see why anyone would have a problem with this. Which sort of tells you why it’s a problem, and why this government has run into so many such “problems.”
For their benefit, then, if nothing else, let’s step through this. Pretend for the moment that the company never received any benefit from the government during McGuinty’s premiership, including a $4.25-million grant in 2011. It would still be wrong for McGuinty to be lobbying the government on its behalf.
Former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty (left) sits with current Premier Kathleen Wynne’s Principle Secretary Andrew Bevan. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Why? Because it is a basic principle of democratic governance that decisions should be taken in the public interest, not the private; that the benefits of government programs should be available equally to all who qualify, not reserved for the government’s friends; in short that government should be administered impartially. Governments that operate on the opposite principle are generally considered to be corrupt, and individuals who trade on their personal connections in government, real or asserted, are generally considered to be engaged in influence-peddling.
I grant that this principle is only haphazardly respected. Give a contract to your girlfriend, steer public funds to your business partner, and you will usually suffer some sort of penalty: loss of office, if not jail time. Give a job to a political supporter, on the other hand, or pour money into a riding you hope to win, and too often it is dismissed as mere patronage, even politics as usual.
Moreover, influence-peddling is notoriously hard to prove, which would account for the existence of much of the lobbying industry. I very much doubt that McGuinty ever explicitly stated that he could, on the basis of his personal connections in cabinet and the bureaucracy, affect a government decision on Desire2Learn’s behalf. But who’s kidding whom? He appointed many of them. He worked with them for many years. You think that’s of no interest to the company?
More to the point, the test as far as the public interest is concerned is not whether there was any actual understanding between them of that kind, but whether a fair-minded member of the public might reasonably wonder if there was. It is the obligation of public office-holders never to put the public in the position of having to wonder such a thing, and if McGuinty is no longer a public office-holder, his former colleagues are.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne is congratulated by then-outgoing premier Dalton McGuinty in a file photo. Frank Gunn/CANADIAN PRESS.
If McGuinty were only lobbying the Ontario government on behalf of a private company, then — any company — it would nevertheless be wrong. Likewise, even if the services for which he was hired by Desire2Learn did not include lobbying the government of Ontario — if all he had done was to accept payment, shortly after leaving office, from a company that had received a benefit from his government while he was in office — he would still be wrong to do so. Again, there is no reason to think that there was any quid pro quo involved, but neither is it so implausible that a fair-minded member of the public could not reasonably wonder if there was.
But now put the two together: lobbying the government he led, on behalf of a company that had benefited from that government’s largesse? Does no one at Queen’s Park understand how bad this looks? Put it this way. When Brian Mulroney was under fire for secretly accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars, shortly after leaving office, from Karlheinz Schreiber, who had so successfully lobbied his government on behalf of his international aerospace and arms manufacturing clients, he was careful to stipulate that his services to Schreiber did not include lobbying the government of which he had lately been the leader. Because, you know, then he’d be in real trouble.
That’s different, say McGuinty’s defenders: He has not concealed his relationship with Desire2Learn, but registered as a lobbyist. Moreover, there is nothing in the law that prohibits former ministers, or even premiers, from lobbying the government after they leave, provided they observe the prescribed one-year “cooling off” period — which McGuinty did. Both of these statements are true. McGuinty has broken no laws.
But so what? The standard we expect of public office-holders, present or former, is not merely that they should stay within the letter of the law. Rather, they are enjoined, in the language of the codes of conduct to which they are subject, to “conduct themselves at all times in a manner that would withstand the closest public scrutiny.”
As for the law, it clearly needs to be tightened (five years, as in the federal law, rather than one, would seem the proper minimum). The premise, that after 11 months a departed premier might be improperly exploiting his connections in government, but after 12 months everyone would have forgotten who he was, is absurd. If the law does not prohibit this, then in the words of that peerless moral philosopher, Mr. Bumble, “the law is a ass.”
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