You can imagine that former prime minister Stephen Harper might be shaking his head somewhere, watching his non-partisan appointee for Bank of Canada governor move in to take up his new role. And you can imagine that all prime ministers will do what they can to keep the same thing from ever happening again.
No matter what happens in the days and weeks ahead, that will be one of Mark Carney’s greatest legacies.
Indeed, it might be Carney’s greatest legacy of all. If he calls an election right away, and loses, he could be the shortest-serving prime minister in the country’s history. He will have been the placeholder PM, full of ideas about greening the economy and standing up to the U.S. without the time to even begin that work.
The high price of Carney’s bid for power? The politicization of the office of central bank governor, and perhaps other classically non-partisan posts. We’ll be paying that one for a long time, and it’s not likely we’ll be better off for it.
Carney is the first of nine Bank of Canada governors to run in politics. His predecessors all went on to become Order of Canada recipients, honourary degree holders, corporate executives, university administrators — even commentators who give scathing reviews of federal budgets. They continued to participate in the life afforded to former public servants of high rank, but wisely stopped short of running for election.
Now, part of this is a factor of age: Carney was on the younger end of central bankers at 43; it’s not unheard of, but more common have been governors in their 50s. Now done with the bank, he’s got plenty of time left to direct policy from the top of the executive branch.
The luxury we received in exchange for their self-restraint was a history of governments that could afford to make politically grey appointments to key unelected roles. They didn’t necessarily need political allies; they could select for competency; they perhaps didn’t need to conduct as extensive political vetting of appointees because it wasn’t as necessary.
Some jobs within the government were too critical for their holders to ever tarnish their purity by running in an election.
Carney was appointed to his post by Harper in 2008, two years after Harper started his term. We’ll never know to what extent his cabinet hummed and hawed over casting choice, but there must have been some suspicions: Carney’s father had been a federal Liberal candidate in 1980, and apples don’t fall far from trees. Nevertheless, the appointment went through, and with great fanfare. Carney became Canada’s “rockstar banker” hired to “save the world” with a notably higher profile than past governors.
But by 2012, cracks in the nonpartisan wall started to grow: the central banker was being floated as a potential alternative to Justin Trudeau; Carney stayed at the cottage of Nova Scotia Liberal MP Scott Brison to be courted by Liberals for the leadership role (last month, he told us that the Conservatives also tried to bring him in as finance minister, which, if true, would also have been a mistake).
Well, all of those suspicions turned out to be well-founded. Carney ran for Liberal leader, largely by touting his performance record for the job that Harper gave him, and succeeded. On Sunday during his acceptance speech, he seemed to admit a longtime allegiance in his admiration for Jean Chrétien, former prime minister from 1993 to 2003:
“You inspired my family to become Liberals, including my father to run as a Liberal candidate in Alberta in the 1980s, and myself to continue your tradition of fiscal responsibility, social justice and international leadership.”
Carney probably won’t get the ire he deserves for politicizing the central bank to the degree he did. Indeed, if the world was just, you would have seen it happen already. After all, when Pierre Poilievre, as the Conservative party’s leadership contender in 2022, said he would fire current Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem, he received a mountainofcriticism for inappropriately politicizing the office — even though it’s within the right of Parliament to fire the governor by way of legislative change, and even though a precedent for doing so has already been set.
Carney hasn’t received anywhere near the same reception, though his offences against central banking are far greater. Indeed, if you didn’t think it was wrong for Poilievre to consider the firing of a central banker to be a valid course of action before, you should now, given that it’s joined the list of resumé-building jobs one can expect to precede a political stint.
From now on, every prime minister will have to consider whether his or her top pick for central bank governor will use the job as a springboard to run for office; every Bank of Canada governor with slight political aspirations will have to consider whether his or her calls to raise or lower interest rates will tarnish his or her public standing. It doesn’t matter that Carney is no longer in the role; the fact that he once held it is enough. The same understanding is what keeps former Supreme Court of Canada justices from running for public office (for now …).
There will be no unbreaking the seal. Partisanship will have to colour hiring choices, at least at the central bank, at least in a subtle fashion, going forward. That’s just the way it is.
National Post