New world man

It's no fun heckling an optimist. But Michael Sabia's in the news again, so duty calls

I see it’s time for my biennial Michael Sabia column. He is a personable and engaging man with a country-wide fan club that is impressively immune to evidence. He will be Mark Carney’s new Clerk of the Privy Council, responsible for pushing the PM’s ambitious agenda through the molasses of the public service. He’s quitting as Hydro-Québec CEO to come shake things up, people say. Just as he resigned as deputy minister of finance two years ago to go shake things up at Hydro.

The bureaucracy is nervous!, people say.

Good!, people say.

Lisa Raitt captures the mood.

I have been a rare Cassandra on the subject of Michael Sabia. Here’s what I wrote when he became deputy minister of finance in 2020. (“Turns out a dollar from your pocket will indeed attract more dollars—also from your pocket.”) Here’s what I wrote when he left that job to run Hydro-Québec two years ago. It’s not pleasant work. It amounts to blaming a guy for trying, a temptation best resisted. What’s worse, Sabia is a cordial fellow who answers questions thoughtfully.

But over the last decade I’ve been increasingly preoccupied, in every context, with the difference between announcements and results, and with our unhealthy national belief that announcements are all that’s needed and results aren’t even interesting. It’s hard not to notice that in the book of Sabia’s career, sentences start in upper-case letters and end in question marks. Sometimes I’m not even the only one to notice. There was this in the Globe, at the end of 2021:

Yet there he was again on Monday at a Globe conference in Toronto, saying Canada has “an ambition deficit,” and “If we keep doing things the old ways, it’s not going to work,” and “Just go forward and seize the moment.”

This is almost precisely where I came in. In 2016, as an informal advisor to a new Liberal government, Sabia said at another conference, “Here in Canada we need to think boldly. Not in typically incremental Canadian, ‘Let’s try and see what happens, and then we’ll check what the Americans are doing’ (fashion). Because that’s a waste of time. We are so far ahead of the Americans in infrastructure, in how we think about it, that it’s a joke. They’re in the rear-view mirror.”

It was bracing talk, and it led me to write a highly credulous feature story for my employer about Sabia’s big project, a Canada Infrastructure Bank. This magical thing would generate four or five dollars from institutional investors like pension funds for every federal dollar invested, driving huge, transformational projects. Soon after the CIB was created, the Parliamentary Budget Officer found that wasn’t happening.