Minister of Finance Bill Morneau leaves the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Dec. 8, 2015. iPolitics/Matthew Usherwood

"But even before that uproar last summer, Morneau had been rebuffing the CFIB’s requests for a meeting — and he certainly hasn’t been available since."

It’s bad when the Finance Minister’s officials are accused of bullying an interest group.

But the Canadian Federation of Independent Business says it can think of one thing worse: the cold shoulder.

And that’s precisely the frosty situation the CFIB says it has now with Bill Morneau, the first finance minister to refuse to meet with the organization in the nearly half-century since it was founded.

“We’ve been around for 46 years and we’ve had many, many heated moments with governments of all political stripes,” CFIB president and CEO Dan Kelly said in an interview on Tuesday. “Some have been incredibly angry with us, but we’ve never had a minister of finance, not federally, not provincially, refuse to meet with us.”

This is indeed extraordinary — especially for Justin Trudeau’s government, which came to office in 2015 promising to build more bridges with Canadians than the notoriously thin-skinned Stephen Harper government. The freeze-out also raises renewed questions about whether the federal Liberals are as fond of consultation as they claim to be — let alone being open to criticism.

Morneau was seriously offside with the CFIB in the summer of 2017 with his proposed tax changes for small business — reforms that were eventually rolled back in the face of a massive outcry from doctors, farmers and entrepreneurs all over Canada.

But even before that uproar last summer, Morneau had been rebuffing the CFIB’s requests for a meeting — and he certainly hasn’t been available since.

Kelly argues that the ministerial boycott of CFIB quite possibly made government-small-business relations worse than they needed to be.

“One of the reasons why the proposed tax changes went over like a lead balloon was that there was no consultation, no discussion with us prior to announcing this,” Kelly said.

Morneau’s office rejects suggestions that CFIB isn’t in the loop with the minister. When I asked Morneau’s communications director, Dan Lauzon, about what Kelly was telling me, here was his reply:

“The minister’s office meets regularly with the CFIB and there is a good working relationship there,” Lauzon said in an email. “We have an open-door policy when it comes to meeting with stakeholders – and that involves engaging both the minister and his staff. That’s in contrast to the kind of closed-door policies people may have gotten used to after 10 years of Harper Conservatives.”

Kelly says that door is far less open than it was before the Liberals came to office in late 2015.

The CFIB is the largest small-business group in the country, with more than 110,000 members and a history of high-profile advocacy on everything from the goods and services tax to temporary foreign workers since it was established in the 1970s.

It’s a non-partisan organization but a political one — keen to offer governments of all stripes advice on how to deal with business issues.

“We could still have had areas of disagreement but we could have guided the minister away from some of the awful rhetoric that was used when this was announced (during the 2017 tax-reform controversy) and some of the really out-of-touch proposals that were part of the original package,” Kelly said.

Morneau’s dealings with interest groups are already in the headlines this week with reports that his officials were aggressive and hostile with representatives of an insurance-industry group. Conservatives are filing a complaint over allegedly “thuggish” behaviour from Morneau’s office in the wake of these reports.

Normand Lafrenière, president of the Canadian Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, told The Globe and Mail that Morneau’s office even warned the group not to meet with MPs and senators. The warning reportedly came from a senior policy adviser to Morneau, Ian Foucher.

Kelly says that the CFIB has ongoing contact with ministerial aides — including Faucher — and the CFIB’s senior economist, Ted Mallett, is part of an advisory group that consults with the minister before the budget each year. But this is a far more limited contact than CFIB had with any of Morneau’s predecessors, Liberal or Conservative.

The CFIB was rigorously opposed to the Harper government’s changes to the temporary foreign workers’ program, Kelly points out for example, but it was never shut out of meetings with Harper’s finance ministers, Jim Flaherty and Joe Oliver. Brian Mulroney wasn’t all that pleased either when CFIB campaigned against the introduction of the goods and services tax either in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kelly said. but his finance ministers also met with the organization.

“This is new, to have a government that is so afraid of criticism that it won’t meet with us,” Kelly said.

Though tax reform has faded out of the headlines and much of the outright fury of 2017 has died down, Kelly says that a lot of bad feelings linger — and that Morneau’s inaccessibility isn’t helping to dispel the dismal state of relations between the government and small business.

“In my 24 years anyway, I haven’t seen this degree of anger with a government,” Kelly said. “And it’s not just about the substance of the policy …. But the way that this was handled, the tone the government used has added fuel to the fire.”

He’s baffled why Morneau wouldn’t want to build some bridges with this constituency — many of whom represent the middle class, or, in the parlance of the Trudeau government, “those working hard to join the middle class.”

Kelly fears that Morneau is only meeting with those who praise or agree with him and his government — a rather limited view of ministerial outreach.

“It seems like this government deeply misunderstands what consultation is all about and we’ve seen this in other sets of policies – electoral reform, for instance,” Kelly said. “They are so convinced of the rightness of their position, they are quite shocked when someone says there needs to be a change made.”

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