I keep typing out a tweet about Morneau then erasing it cause it just doesn’t feel worthy of more commentary: it’s boring to me. Displays of exuberant wealth are incredibly boring and I am tired. We are all tired. Except this is our Minister of Finance, so it’s also dangerous.

It’s dangerous that his relationship with money is so cavalier that he thinks it is justifiable — and believable — to have forgotten about that much. It’s dangerous to the millions of Canadians who live in poverty, food insecurity, and without access to water year after year.

It is no longer interesting to me that someone can possibly access and accumulate that much wealth. It is the product of privilege, exploitation, and an inauthenticity to what it actually means to be human to get to that point. It’s incredibly boring that we reward this.

But that’s where the danger is: that we let folks like Morneau get richer, and more powerful year after year, while allowing them to control others’ access to money — while they’ve done nothing to prove they know anything about it at all.

You don’t know money or economics until you are standing in a grocery store compromising on the quality and quantity of the fruit your children will eat that week because you don’t have enough. That’s interesting to me: how THAT person survives. And how we can lift them up.

Obviously it is newsworthy that a federal minister is a crook, but is it surprising? Interesting? Will he continue on with his privileged life regardless of the outcome? While millions of Canadians struggle? Can we keep talking about them instead?