PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor about Mark Carney becoming the next prime minister.
According to The Tyee, there’s a group of Tech CEOs who want a DOGE for Canada. They’ve set up an organization called Build Canada. It wants to orchestrate the rebuilding of a greater Canada, this time with the USA playing a more minor role. This is possible, and the group has some good ideas for doing it. See: https://www.buildcanada.com/memos.
Having said that, the group also has some bad ideas. For example, it wants to cut 110,000 jobs from the federal public service over four years. The Group seems to be influenced by the old saw that governments, especially our federal government, are too big, that governments can't do anything right. To quote their website: “The federal workforce has grown to an all-time high while delivering diminishing results. Let’s reform the system to deliver better services at lower costs.” If in fact it's true that our governments are a drag rather than a force for renewal then we'd better fix that. But the answer is fixing it systematically, not using the chainsaw approach such as DOGE is using in the USA.
I wrote an email to Build Canada saying essentially what I said above. No response so far.
Switching gears, there’s also a move by the federal Conservative party to use negative advertising to discredit Mark Carney, who is about to become our Prime Minister. Carney is the guy who, after getting his PhD in economics from Oxford and becoming a millionaire while working in global financial markets for Goldman Sachs for 10 years, left the private sector for a government job in the Bank of Canada. He was the major player in preparing Paul Martin’s balanced budgets. Then, when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister and appointed Jim Flaherty as his Finance Minister, Carney became Flaherty’s right hand man. Together they steered us through the financial crisis. Carney became an international star among G7 financial heavyweights. Harper appointed him in 2008 to be Governor of the Bank of Canada where his international reputation continued to grow. He was recruited to become Governor of the Bank of England in 2013, where he was asked to stay a few extra years to help the Conservative government there with managing what could have become a Brexit fiasco. Then he retired to serving on private sector boards of directors and did essentially pro bono work as the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, promoting private sector investment in achieving net-zero emissions. In my view the negative ads to discredit him are inappropriate and unpatriotic and reflect poorly on the judgement of the Conservative party.
Now Carney has become our Prime Minister. Among his most important jobs is to mobilize and orchestrate the forces needed to rebuild Canada, this time with the USA in a less strategic role. And I think he’s the right man for the job. He’s pragmatic. He deals in the realm of the possible. I’ve read his book called “Values” which expounds his thoughts on building a better world for all through foundational changes in our basically capitalist society but based on social values, not market values. He thinks straight. And he can hold his own with Trump and his advisors and right wing idealogues.
I liken Carney to the great C.D Howe, a hero of mine, the engineer who orchestrated the building of Canada’s economy the first time. About 90 years ago Howe, a truly effective businessman but not a very good politician, became a minister in Mackenzie King’s government. Under his stewardship, and starting almost from scratch, Canada produced a major fraction of the munitions and equipment (ships, airplanes, airfields, tanks, training institutions, etc., and even the food) - used by Canadians and Brits and other Commonwealth countries in their WWII operations, and also supplied a major fraction of the materials used by Americans in their prodigious war effort. In doing so Canada was transformed from a farm economy to and industrial economy and a significant military power that punched ‘way above its weight. And the financial methods Howe used to underwrite all this were innovative and produced good long-term yield. With most of our male workforce off to war, we Canadians did this using the both the men remaining at home and huge numbers of women. While it depends on how you measure productivity, it is my view that, on a per capita basis, Canada out produced all other nations. All we needed was good leadership.
See: https://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/205/301/ic/cdc/heirloom_series/volume5/218-221.htm
It gives me comfort that Carney is not an ideologue who thinks that governments do nothing right. One of my favourite economists, Mariana Mazzucato, has conducted extensive research and written a few books on how governments can and must play key roles in orchestrating and financing innovation and economic growth. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Mazzucato Mark Carney understands well Mazzucato’s school of thought.
I’m currently reading the economist Joseph Stiglitz’s latest book “The Road To Freedom: Economics and the Good Society” in which he dissects and analyzes the issues underlying our concepts of freedom and explains to us what the term really means. The book proposes definitions of freedom that are a far cry from the shallow concepts espoused by the likes of the Truckers’ Convoy. Stiglitz spells out how fundamental changes in our economic systems are needed to enhance our freedoms and our economic well-being, and to arrest the trend since WWII of fattening the rich while most of the not so lucky become poorer. The so-called free markets approach won’t do it. Carney is fully conversant with Stiglitz’s thinking and will incorporate the best parts of it in his program to restructure the Canadian economy. He needs our support, our enthusiastic cooperation, not petty politicians biting at his ankles.
Thomas K Crawford
Fonthill