theatre

Saturday May 2, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday May 2, 2020

Tiff Macklem to lead the Bank of Canada

Finance Minister Bill Morneau has appointed Tiff Macklem, the former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, to take over the top job at the central bank as it navigates the uncertainty of a pandemic-driven recession.

February 11, 2009

Macklem is currently the dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, but had spent decades with the Bank of Canada before starting that appointment. 

Macklem began his career at the bank in 1984. He was widely expected to win the contest for bank governor in 2013, but was beaten out by Stephen Poloz, who was then CEO of Export Development Canada.

Poloz’s term ends June 2. 

The transition to new leadership comes as millions of Canadians have signed up for government aid and companies big and small are relying on federally backed wage subsidies to weather the COVID-19 pandemic.

During Friday’s announcement, Morneau said he’s confident Macklem’s expertise in financial markets will help the central bank navigate an economic crisis never before seen in Canada.

Coronavirus cartoons

“The bank has to be humble about what it doesn’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know about this disease. There’s a lot that medical experts don’t know about this disease,” Macklem said during his unveiling in Ottawa.

“But the Bank of Canada has tremendous analytic economic financial capacity to analyze what’s going on in the economy, and the important role for the Bank of Canada is to provide Canadians with as much information as it can honestly provide as to what is happening and what the recovery could look like, recognizing that we’re probably going to have to look at more than one scenario.”

In the past months, Poloz and Morneau have appeared at several joint news conferences to show a co-ordinated approach on monetary and fiscal policy to deal with the economic fallout of the pandemic and global oil shocks.

Morneau has announced more than $250 billion in direct financial aid, credit support and tax deferrals to help offset the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. (CBC) 

 

Thursday June 21, 2012

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Thursday June 21, 2012

Hudak got off too easy during budget crisis

As Ontario teetered on the brink of its second election in less than a year, attention was squarely focused on the public spat between Dalton McGuinty and Andrea Horwath.

But to understand why the province’s minority legislature is still very much on borrowed time, even after a summer campaign appears to have been narrowly avoided, there’s no getting past the role of the party leader who actively avoided the spotlight during the past week.

For all that Mr. McGuinty’s Liberals and Ms. Horwath’s New Democrats have at various points been guilty of bluster and false bravado and overplaying their respective hands, it’s Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives who are most responsible for this legislature’s dysfunction.

Faced with a $15-billion deficit, Mr. McGuinty has decided that he needs to adopt a relatively fiscally conservative agenda. That should leave him looking to find common ground with the right-of-centre Tories. But because they’ve shown very little interest in engaging, he instead has to keep tilting left to appease the NDP. And the more that becomes obvious to the New Democrats, the more they keep pushing him away from what he wants to do, and toward impasses.

This situation began to play itself out around the tabling of Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s budget this spring. Although the Tories now insist otherwise, it was obvious to most anyone around Queen’s Park that they had no intention of voting for it, no matter what was in it. That meant the Liberals had to table a document the NDP could conceivably be willing to support, then add various concessions – most notably a tax increase on the highest income earners – in order to get the budget motion passed in April. (Source: Globe & Mail)