The rounder

We pan for nuggets in Tim Hodgson's remarks, and find he's looking for cards

Tim Hodgson outside the natural resources committee, Monday. Photo: PW

You get the impression Tim Hodgson doesn’t love to tell a story.

An army brat whose father’s postings took the family to Winnipeg, Holberg, Gypsumville, Barrington Passage, he became a reserve officer and an accounting student who worked his way up to jobs at PwC and Goldman Sachs. He went to the Bank of Canada when the guy in the next cubicle at Goldman’s, Mark Carney, saw a future in Ottawa. When this year began, Hodgson was chair of the board at Hydro One, the main Ontario power utility.

This is a record of sturdy and even stellar achievement. It did not produce a champion raconteur.

Before the April election and even for some time after, observers thought Carney would stack the Liberal benches with all-stars from his Rolodex. So far Hodgson’s it. He is the minister of energy and natural resources in a government that thinks mostly about energy and natural resources, so he’s a key player.

On Monday he visited the Commons committee on natural resources, flanked by his department’s top civil servants. The nominal topic was departmental spending plans. This always means “whatever the minister wants to say, divided by whatever the committee members want to ask him.” For me it was a chance to hear a prominent member of this government who usually prefers to be less prominent.

Hodgson fielded questions from Conservative MPs, who want him to lift the 2019 West Coast tanker ban but were not in a particularly scrappy mood; from the Bloc Québécois’s funny and confident Mario Simard, who believes any conditions Hodgson and Carney put on new oil exports will be ignored and forgiven; and from Liberal MPs, whose questions were the gentlest of lobs. Hodgson answered in bursts of three or four words, separated by long pauses. He ended up delivering an argument for everything the government is doing. Here it is, more heavily edited than usual, to remove pauses, false starts, and interruptions by MPs.