Questions for Carney, whose ascension represents the ultimate victory for a public servant

Our federal leadership comes from the nation’s ruling public sector class

Mark Carney is the latest manifestation of a Liberal preference for putting public servants in the nation’s most powerful positions.

That’s certainly been the case, for example, at the formidable Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). It always seemed to me that entities such as it were intended to be overseen by a board of appointees to ensure people from outside government were vetting decisions from within.

Yet the past two CRTC chairs, now supplemented with a vice chair, came straight from the public service.

One of the reasons for this is the insistence that people holding these positions be bilingual. That reduces the potential pool of qualified applicants to 18 per cent - if that - of the population because that’s the percentage of Canadians who can carry on a conversation in French or English.

If a governing party decides that having women in leadership positions is a priority (as the current one did until it came time to humiliate its female candidates and select another straight, white, middle aged man as Liberal Party leader and prime minister) the number is closer to 9 per cent.

Given that the population of people who can move comfortably between both official languages is overwhelmingly centred in Ottawa and Montreal, that’s the pool - or the priesthood, if you prefer - from which most of the federal public service leadership can be recruited.

Being a CRTC appointee is a sweet gig for a public servant. While they serve, they are granted leave from their jobs, can continue to build their pensions and, when their term ends, they simply return to their previous positions and resume their careers.

From the point of view of those in government, appointing public servants has another upside. The culture from which those folks - and they are certainly not without their talents - is one that involves a quasi-military adherence to direction from whichever minister it is that they report to. This gives the government much more confidence that while these agencies are technically independent, their leadership will do what its told.

And so, instead of having people from “the real world” overseeing regulatory decisions developed by public servants, you end up with people deeply embedded in the Ottawa/Gatineau public service worldview vetting the recommendations of other people deeply embedded in the Ottawa/Gatineau view of the world.

Incoming prime minister Carney fits nicely into this trend. We will now have a famous public servant in charge of the public service, which will sleep easier knowing one of its own is in charge.

I am hoping that in the days ahead, we will get some answers about how this came to be and who our new leader is as a person, things we normally learn through the course of an individual’s standing for public office. That’s never been the case for Carney who, despite being unelected, was getting exclusive briefings from cabinet ministers to prep him for the job.

So, this is what I want our media to ask him.

• Did you accept Justin Trudeau’s offer in December to become finance minister? If no, why not?

• If yes, why did you then renege on the deal or was the offer withdrawn?

• Did you and Chrystia Freeland speak on the weekend before she resigned?

• Who else did you speak with?

• Why did you not tell the truth about not being part of the decision of the Brookfield Asset Management board to move its headquarters to Montreal?

• Why did you not divest yourself of all your outside associations prior to campaigning to replace Trudeau and why did you claim that you did?

• Will your spouse continue to work with the Eurasia Group while you are Prime Minister?

• During your campaign to be Prime Minister, you banned media of which you did not approve from your events. Will you continue this practice?

• How will you conduct your affairs to assure the public they are not influenced by your personal financial holdings and what are they?

• Who approved the briefings you - but not your rivals - were receiving from within Trudeau’s cabinet?

I wanted journalists to get answers to these questions but they never did. I don’t expect they ever will, but surely the public has a right to know.

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Watch for my media column in TheHub.ca tomorrow, March 11 and don’t forget to take in The Full Press podcast coming up March 13 with Harrison Lowman, Tara Henley and myself.

(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald and a former vice chair of the CRTC)