Innovating ourselves in circles
Stop me before I do economic policy again
It’s probably healthy to notice your own involuntary reactions. For instance, when I see a newspaper story that begins, “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has injected some fresh brainpower into his office…” I notice I now say “Uh-oh.”
The latest arrival is Sean Mullin, who’s a “special advisor for economic affairs” at the Prime Minister’s Office. Before that he ran a think tank. Created it, in fact: the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, a “non-partisan public policy think-tank” that draws many of its non-partisans from the former Liberal provincial governments of Dalton McGuinty, where Mullin was an economic policy advisor from 2007-2011, and Kathleen Wynne, for whom Mullin’s successor Kareem Bardeesy was deputy principal secretary. This guy worked in the Wynne government too.
And Brookfield as a whole was created when this guy, Sheldon Levy, was president of what we are now pleased to call Toronto Metropolitan University. Levy then became deputy minister of advanced education under Wynne. And four years ago he became an unpaid volunteer special advisor to small-business minister Mary Ng. In turn, Ng used to be executive director to Levy when Levy was running the University Later to be Named Toronto Metropolitan. Because time is a flat circle.
Actual paragraph from the Globe story about Levy working for Ng:
When asked why Ottawa needed yet another voice telling it what to do to help scale-ups, Ms. Ng said: “It’s less about telling us what to do … it really is being there on the ground … working with a handful of companies who are ready to grow and should be scaling and maybe they aren’t, so [finding out] why not.”
I should say in all honesty that I assume all of these people are nice people. I believe I’ve met only Bardeesy. He seemed charming and serious (and he’s been running TMU’s Leadership Lab, and will run a new shop created by a merger with Brookfield). Anyone who thinks it’s easy to launch a think tank is welcome to try. My goal here isn’t to make random accusations of cronyism. For that, I’m sure some Conservative MPs from the Government Operations committee can help you. They’re serving accusations of cronyism off the back of a truck these days. I’m more interested in why bad policy happens to good people. And why wave after wave of fresh brainpower crashes onto the beaches of Ottawa without seeming to produce measurable change.