Some of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s staff have a nickname for him: “Bruce Wayne.”

It’s a term of endearment. Wayne, Batman’s alter ego, is an ultra-wealthy industrialist who dons a cape and uses his skills, intellect and brawn to fight for the underdog.

Similarly, Morneau, a highly educated and wildly successful entrepreneur, left his business in 2015 and entered politics, he says, because he wants to champion the vulnerable — particularly middle-class Canadians with financial worries.

But Batman is often misunderstood and maligned by his public. Lately, Bill Morneau feels the same way.

In a summer and fall he’d probably rather forget, the former head of pension management firm Morneau Shepell repeatedly courted controversy.

It began when tax reforms he proposed in July sparked a backlash by coalition of doctors, lawyers, farmers and small-business owners, beyond anything Morneau and the Liberal government anticipated.

He fanned the flames when he suggested the changes were needed because small businesses were sitting on billions in “dead money” instead of reinvesting. Critics accused him of painting small-business owners as tax cheats. To quell the uproar, including from Liberal backbenches, Morneau’s most contentious tax proposal was softened, and the small-business tax rate was slashed.

Meanwhile, Morneau was bruised by revelations he hadn’t placed a large number of his Morneau Shepell shares in a blind trust, as he said he would when elected. He was criticized for belatedly telling the federal ethics commissioner about a corporation he owns that in turn owns a family villa in France.

He’s been accused of being misleading, lacking transparency over his personal finances and trying to close loopholes for small businesses while benefiting from loopholes himself.

Critics say the controversies have hurt the Liberal party’s standing among voters and provided ample ammunition for the Opposition in Ottawa.

“As minister, he always does the right thing after he’s been caught doing the opposite,” says Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre.

“I asked him for about a month straight (recently) whether he a) owned shares and b) had them in a blind trust, and he just flatly refused to answer,” the finance critic said in an interview.

Morneau says he’s done absolutely nothing improper or unethical and didn’t get into politics to line his pockets.

“I obviously left a very lucrative career and did that because I thought that this was the most important work I could possibly do,” he says.

He announced Oct. 19 that he’ll be putting all his assets in a blind trust and selling his Morneau Shepell shares, worth just over $20 million.

As controversies swirled, Morneau, 55, sat down with the Star for a series of exclusive interviews, the first in-depth ones he has given about his public and personal life. He says he wants Canadians to get to know him and see what he’s trying to accomplish.

Morneau says the loudest critics, including Opposition MPs, are a “subset” that’s waging a “tactical campaign” to derail his goal of tax fairness.

He says his work at Morneau Shepell on pensions and employee benefits exposed him to the widening gap between rich and poor, and how stressed out many middle-class Canadians are over their future.

Meanwhile, Morneau’s defenders say they’re dumbfounded anyone is even questioning his ethics.

“If there’s one thing that has really made me mad in all this is that Bill is pure in terms of his ethics and his integrity,” says his closest friend, Michael Denham, 53, president and CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada, an arm’s-length Crown corporation.

“It’s one thing to be attacked on policy.That’s fair game . . . But to be attacked so salaciously on character is what’s been eating away at me,” adds Denham, who’s known Morneau since they were students at the London School of Economics in the late ’80s.

Morneau’s daughter Clare, 18, says it’s “a little infuriating to see what’s been focused on.”

It’s a sunny Wednesday afternoon in October, and Bill Morneau arrives at his constituency office on Parliament St., in his Toronto Centre riding, to meet a reporter.

He sits at a table with his wife, Nancy McCain, 56. On the phone is his daughter Clare, who calls in from Yale University, where she’s in her first year.

At six foot three and 180 pounds, Morneau is a fitness buff who enjoys a number of athletic pursuits including running and squash. Though earnest in his political views, he doesn’t always take himself seriously.

For instance Morneau, who loves watching movies with his wife and kids, admits to getting teary-eyed during parts of the 1998 comedy The Parent Trap, starring Lindsay Lohan.

“I feel very fortunate,” says his wife, Nancy McCain, who has neatly trimmed short blond hair and a small frame. “He’s a wonderful husband and a great partner to have children with. He doesn’t lose sight of the important things in our lives.”

They have four children — Grace, 21, Henry, 20, Clare, 18, and Edward, 15 — and they present as an average couple.

But make no mistake, Bill Morneau and Nancy McCain are enormously wealthy.

His net worth doesn’t qualify him as a billionaire, but he has assets in the tens of millions. His wife is an heir to the multibillion-dollar McCain french-fry empire. She is active in Toronto’s arts scene, including as chair of the Arts Access Fund, a charity that provides arts experiences to youth.

Nancy has a trust, and Morneau is the named trustee. Between them, their family homes and cottages fit the descriptions of “estates” and “compounds.”

The couple lives in Toronto with their four children near Bayview and Moore Aves., in the tony Bennington Heights neighbourhood.

Aside from being in charge of the finance department and $300 billion in revenues, Morneau’s responsibilities include preparing the federal budget and overseeing the Bank of Canada, the Royal Canadian Mint, and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, along with tariffs and financial regulations.

He travels extensively, meeting his political counterparts abroad through G7 and G20 meetings, and gatherings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. He and his wife recently attended the wedding of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

Morneau’s story began in Toronto, in much humbler surroundings.

Morneau was born William Francis Morneau at what is now St. Joseph’s Health Centre in 1962, the first child of Helen, now 79, and William Francis “Frank” Morneau Sr., now 77.

At the time, Helen was an ER nurse in the hospital. She stopped working after Morneau was born, then had four more children, all girls, in “pretty rapid succession,” her son says.

When Morneau was 4 his father launched W.F. Morneau and Associates in Toronto, specializing in insurance, and consulting work related to employee health benefits.

The firm grew. And the tight-knit clan began enjoying life’s comforts.

When Morneau was in Grade 3, they moved from Rexdale to a larger home in Don Mills. From when he was an infant, his parents took the family every summer to Georgian Bay, where they later bought a cottage.

Frank bought a boat — a 27-footer, then larger ones over time for the family of seven — and they would take two-week summer trips on the water.

“I remember as a young boy going around Georgian Bay and other lakes in a boat, Morneau says. “It was very formative — part of how you develop really close family relationships.”

Morneau describes a warm family home. One incident stands out for him, when he attended Senator O’Connor College School, a Catholic high school in Toronto.

It was Grade 10 or so, and he faced a likely suspension over a highly inappropriate comment — Morneau won’t say what it was — to a teacher in theatre arts class, a Christian Brother.

The teacher kicked him out of the room and sent him home to tell his parents what happened.

“When you’re that age you feel like the world is closing in,” Morneau says. “Obviously what I did was quite stupid. So I think she probably identified that I was in the wrong,” but realized she needed to be supportive. He apologized “profusely” to the teacher and returned to class.

Morneau also recalls lively conversations around the family dinner table. His parents took the family to their Catholic church every Sunday, and there were deep discussions with his father about liberation theology, a Christian viewpoint that the church should play a key civic role in helping the poor and oppressed.

“I remember having teachers pushing (their) views of what was right or wrong: was capitalism OK or was it having bad results in other countries. Then I come home to a father who is a businessman — you can imagine the debates that would hit the table.”

Frank’s business acumen would soon rub off on his son.

At 17, Morneau and a friend started a business servicing swimming pools for homeowners, mostly in Don Mills. Frank loaned his son $1,500 for Morneau’s half to launch the business.

Morneau ran the business for four years, helping pay a good part of his university tuition.

Though his father was ambitious, his parents weren’t pushy about his education and career choices, Morneau recalls. Two years into his bachelor’s degree in political science and economics at Western in the 1980s, Morneau was in a rut. He took a year off to study humanities in France at the University of Grenoble.

He loved being immersed in the language — which helps in his current job — and there was a fringe benefit: a brief fling with a young Frenchwoman.

Morneau came back to Canada refreshed and more academically engaged.

He completed his degree at Western then went to the London School of Economics, earning a Master of Science. A few years afterward he got his MBA at INSEAD, in France, a leading graduate business school. In between his two master’s degrees, he worked briefly in the U.K. for Lloyds of London, and at the Chicago branch of his father’s company.

He joined Morneau and Associates full time in 1990, and two years later, at age 30, was made president; his father became chairman. The company had $20 million a year in revenues at the time.

Two years afterward another partnership began. He met Nancy McCain.

“Our first date was June 1, 1994,” he says smiling proudly.

Their blind date was set up by her aunt and a friend. Nancy was living in New York, where she had completed a master’s in arts administration at NYU. Morneau was doing business in the city with his father’s firm.

They had dinner at a SoHo restaurant and stayed until closing time. They married a year later in Toronto at St. James Cathedral, and had their first child, Henry, in April 1997.

During this period Morneau worked closely with his father. Morneau became CEO in 1997, when in a major takeover, the firm bought Sobeco from Ernst & Young.

Sobeco was a storied firm that helped Quebec launch its pension plan. The acquisition doubled the number of Morneau employees to nearly 600 and widened its footprint in Canada as a manager of pension plans.

By 2005, when Morneau took the firm public, it had a few thousand employees.

The company later purchased Shepell-fgi, a major provider of employee assistance plans, and became Morneau Shepell. The firm, headquartered on Don Mills Rd., now employs about 4,000 people in North America. Its shares are traded on the TSX, with a market capitalization of about $1 billion. (The Star’s employee assistance plan is provided by Morneau Shepell).

Frank Morneau remains a board member.

The son says the firm’s success was “about having a long-term approach to doing business” in terms of relationships with clients, employees and investors. His close ties with his dad also helped, he says.

“Our offices were right across the hall from each other and we were in each other’s office 50 times a day,” Morneau recalls.

“We disagreed as often or more than we agreed, but my sense was the synthesis of our points of view led to really good decisions.”

But Morneau began to see changes happening with workplace pensions: a big shift from defined benefit pension plans — where employers assume more investment risk — to defined contribution plans, where employees assume more risk because they decide how their contributions are invested.

Morneau says he understood that the changes benefited employers like startup owners who didn’t expect workers to be at the same company their entire careers. But the shift meant “a much greater level of vulnerability for the employee over the long term.”

Through the benefits side of Morneau Shepell, he noticed that employee benefit plans were getting costlier, making hospitalizations, prescription meds, and dental and eye care harder for workers to afford.

And through the employee assistance side, he saw the number of people with mental health issues more than double in 2009-14. These details were uncovered in a review by Morneau Shepell involving its clients’ employees, average people struggling emotionally with money concerns, Morneau says.

In the meantime, Morneau was giving back to the community.

He volunteered at Covenant House, a shelter and crisis support service for homeless youth in Toronto, first as a board member. He was chair from 1997 to 2000. He joined the board of St. Michael’s Hospital and later became chair. Then he joined the board of the hospital’s foundation, its fundraising arm.

“Bill has always had an interest in that area, the less advantaged,” says Alayne Metrick, the foundation’s executive director.

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“When he moved to the foundation he was one of the people I could always count on. He was a humble guy, not a guy out looking for glory. That’s not Bill Morneau. He just quietly gets down to the job and helps you out.”

In 2010 Morneau was involved with the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and began work to set up a high school for girls that later opened in a refugee camp in Kenya.

He and his wife got the idea to sponsor a girl from a camp. That didn’t happen, but later they were able to sponsor and become guardians for Grace Acan of Uganda. She came to live with the family seven years ago at age 14.

Grace established her place in her new home fairly early, McCain recalls. Two weeks after she moved into their house, Grace called McCain and Morneau Mom and Dad.

“She is very much part of our family, in a way we had no way of anticipating,” McCain says. “When Grace started to gang up on me with our other kids, I knew we were making progress,” she adds, laughing. Morneau calls the sponsorship “one of the best things in our lives.”

Through all these experiences and his work at his company, Morneau says he began thinking seriously about helping people on a broader scale: “What’s the biggest way I can have an impact?”

The idea of a run for office came up in talks with his friend Gerald Butts, a political adviser to Justin Trudeau, who was Liberal leader. Butts later introduced them.

McCain says she worried about that leap.

“I was very concerned,” she says. “I knew it would be challenging and a big change to our lives. I was nervous about the public aspect because we’re quite private people.” She says she knew if Morneau went to Ottawa, the family wouldn’t move because the kids were in school in Toronto.

But she also believed in her husband’s ability to make a political impact, and ultimately was OK with the move.

Morneau began vying for the Liberal nomination in the newly configured Toronto Centre riding in 2014, which includes high-needs communities like St. James Town and Regent Park. He knew the area through his work at Covenant House and St. Mike’s.

Barbara Hall, a former Toronto mayor, former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission and a resident in the riding who once represented the area as a city councillor, remembers getting a call “out of the blue” from Morneau, who she didn’t know personally, as he sought the nomination.

“I was impressed from the beginning by his seriousness,” Hall says, “and with his being motivated by what he had learned through his work (at Morneau Shepell) about the broadening gap between the rich and the poor, and the harm he saw being done to people who were losing their jobs.

“He was very clear that he wanted to bring this knowledge and experience from business to working on those issues across the country. It’s probably the strongest expression of public service that I’ve ever heard from a potential politician.”

After Morneau won the nomination, Hall agreed to help his campaign. He won the seat in the October 2015 federal election, handily defeating the NDP’s Linda McQuaig, and was named finance minister.

In 2014, he had earned a bit more than $1 million in salary and benefits at his company, according to papers filed with securities regulators. As a minister his salary was $247,500.

Morneau got off to quick start. Prime Minister Trudeau had swept to power on a platform aimed at helping the lower and middle classes, and forcing higher-income earners to pay more taxes.

Their plans quickly exceeded the deficits they had projected during the campaign. But by January 2016, the Liberal government made good on its income-tax promises, dropping the rate for those in the middle-income bracket from 22 per cent to 20.5 per cent and handing high-income earners — above $200,000 — a four-percentage-point rate increase, to 33 per cent.

The Liberals did away with the Universal Child Care benefit and income splitting for two-parent households. A new Canada Child Benefit, a monthly tax-free benefit for children up to 17, was brought in. The monthly “baby bonus” parents got for their children was dumped for the upper-middle-class and high-income earners. The Canada Child Benefit helped lift nearly 300,000 Canadian children out of poverty, the government says.

When Morneau introduced reforms in July that included a plan to close tax loopholes for wealthy business owners who “sprinkle” their earnings from their private corporations to relatives, there was more than a sprinkling of outrage. The changes were part of a review of tax spending by Ottawa.

He argued tax breaks should help businesses invest and grow, not help well-off Canadians avoid their fair share.

“Of course people would rather keep the system the way it is if it’s providing them with personal advantage,” Morneau said in July.

The proposed small-business tax changes included a plan to curtail the ability to use private corporations for “passive investments” and lower the ability of business owners to turn a corporation’s regular income into lower-taxed capital gains.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where there are two classes of Canadians: one class that can incorporate, another class that can’t,” Morneau said at the time.

But a coalition of lawyers, doctors and small-business owners formed to fight the change, which they argued would among other things stifle their companies’ growth. The Conservatives backed their views. Both called the reforms a “tax grab.”

“What Minister Morneau is proposing is not solving a tax-avoidance problem — it’s solving a revenue-shortfall problem,” Poilievre said at the time.

Morneau got an earful at public consultations on the reforms. One meeting in September in Oakville turned particularly nasty with farmers, lawyers and physicians shouting and hissing at him.

Looking exasperated at times, Morneau told the crowd he and his department had looked carefully at the tax system and concluded “some of the dynamics” are unfair.

Some days, he took flak from friends who stood to take a tax hit. “When you do something like this you realize who are your friends and who aren’t,” he said in an interview.

Morneau and the Liberals eventually backed down, promising instead to introduce a “reasonableness” test requiring family members of business owners to show they make a “meaningful contribution” to the company. A tax cut for small business was also announced.

It was a gruelling lesson for the politician. And then, in October, his problems turned personal.

First came a news report that he hadn’t informed Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson in a timely manner about a corporation he and Nancy own in France, which in turn owns the family’s villa there. He had informed the commissioner about the villa, but not the corporation until September of this year, after reporters asked.

“The way you do it (in France) is through a corporation, which means I pay my taxes in Canada, not in France,” he says, calling the matter an “administrative oversight.” He paid a $200 fine.

A news report a few days later revealed Morneau had a million shares in Morneau Shepell, worth just over $20 million, and hadn’t placed them in a blind trust — as he initially said he would in 2015 when he entered government. Canadians also learned he had the shares in numbered companies in Alberta.

Regarding blind trusts, Morneau said he was following advice from Dawson. She admitted to telling him that since the shares were controlled by a private company, not directly by Morneau, he didn’t need to place them in a blind trust. (In 2013 Dawson proposed that that loophole in Canada’s conflict-of-interest law be closed.)

Morneau had set up a conflict-of-interest screen, where officials in Ottawa remove him from government meetings so that he’s not involved in talks or decisions related to Morneau Shepell. But it didn’t insulate him from criticism.

The optics of the blind-trust situation were bad, as his ministerial authority affects a wide swath of business operations in Canada.

Amid the public outcry over his finances he decided to sell the Morneau Shepell shares and put his assets in a blind trust. (Trudeau has a blind trust for his assets.)

Morneau also announced he was donating more than $5 million to charity, money earned from the shares since he took office. He’s also donating the dividends on those shares.

“It was a case of saying I want to immunize myself from any of this discussion” about my personal finances, Morneau says. “Because what I came (to office) to do wasn’t about me. It was about making an impact on the country.”

Andrew Stark, a professor of management at U of T and an expert in political and business ethics, says problems and questions still surround Morneau and his finances.

If the explanation was Morneau was never in a conflict because his shares were held indirectly, Stark asks, why the conflict-of-interest screen?

“And if they did pose a conflict of interest, the screen was always going to be very inadequate given so many things he (does) in office would have affected, and did in fact affect, those interests. These are tougher questions that go unaddressed.”

Now, the ethics commissioner is looking into his involvement in tabling Bill C-27, a pension reform bill that the Opposition claims could benefit Morneau Shepell.

And Morneau has been roundly criticized for taking part in discussions around Ottawa’s decision to provide a $372.5-million loan to Bombardier’s C Series and Global 7000 programs. Morneau Shepell administers some of Bombardier’s pension plans.

“He receives benefit from the decisions he’s making,” NDP MP and finance critic Nathan Cullen said recently. “He’s involved in conversations that he should not be involved in.”

The original decision not to put his assets in a blind trust had nothing to do with self-enrichment, Morneau says. He declined to speak on the record in detail about decisions on his finances, except to say they were made based on advice from lawyers and tax experts before he got into politics.

And he called suggestions he would benefit from the Bombardier discussions “absurd” because the last time he spoke to anyone at Morneau about dealings there was 2015, when the company had 20,000 clients. As a result, when he sat in on the government discussions he didn’t know if Bombardier was even still a client of Morneau Shepell — “I would have no way of knowing that.”

Either way, he’d guess Bombardier makes up a tiny fraction of Morneau’s revenue, perhaps 0.1 per cent.

The federal finance minister isn’t the first to get into hot water over private interests.

Paul Martin, the longtime Liberal finance minister under Jean Chrétien, drew criticism because he owned Canada Steamship Lines while in office in the 1990s.

The shipping company was being operated through a “blind management agreement” Martin signed, but he got regular updates on the company while minister. Opposition MPs accused him of having a conflict of interest given the impact his authority over pension, taxation and other areas could have on the company.

Martin transferred ownership of CSL to his sons in 2003 before he became prime minister.

Despite the wave of negative headlines these past months, Morneau is confident this latest storm will pass.

But he knows there will always be people who will continue to malign him in his role as finance minister.

“I know people focus on these personal attacks. But I see them as the price of doing the work that’s going to make a difference to Canadians.”

Bruce Wayne isn’t giving up his quest.